Google Reader lurches... forward?

Niall and Om both seem to like the new-look Google Reader—Om even finds it performant on Safari—but I'm finding it buggy, somewhat confusing and very slow on Safari.

Come back Shrook, all is forgiven... : (

Oooh, just saw that Shrook has gone freeware (I mislayed the reg. code I purchased ages ago). Downloading... There's life in that there desktop yet, I reckon.

UPDATE: I've just imported my subscriptions into Shrek and started using it again, and it ROCKS! The interface is simple but effective, the features actually work properly, and it runs like greased lightening. For a speed reader like me (and anyone else who reads tens of blogs daily, I imagine?), the sheer velocity of the Shrek experience is exhilarating and will surely boost my productivity many-fold.

What is interesting to me is noting that all I really want from my feed reader is the ability to track all posts from all feeds in the order they are published, and to be able to winnow out irrelevant stuff as intuitively as possible, using not machine filters (tags etc.) , which I wouldn't trust not to miss something I find interesting, but my own visual scan. The human brain is still way out ahead when it comes to assessing semantic content, and anyway, my primary (virtual) relationship as a reader is with the author, not a specific topic...

Technorati Tags: google_reader, shrook

Happiness

Andres muses about the causes of happiness:

What makes people happy? This is a difficult question, particularly when one considers that there is a growing trend in some policy circles to emphasise happiness as a goal, instead of concentrating efforts on making people richer. The BBC even broadcast a series looking at the new science of happiness.

So, if happiness is entering the realms of scientific research and policy-making, we have to determine how we can measure happiness, or even trying to determine if such thing is possible. Do you simply ask people? Organise surveys? Measure happy thoughts?

The Happy Planet Index attempts to do just that. While it doesn't measure absolute happiness, it "shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens". The top countries on the list are:

1 Vanuatu
2 Colombia
3 Costa Rica
4 Dominica
5 Panama

Vanuatu? This is a country famous for being a tax haven, hosting KaZaA and being the online pharmacy capital of the world. Internet hosting haven equals happiness? Well, maybe. Costa Rica is number three, and we are a gambling website hub.

Of course, I'm a bit depressed about these news, because while all my fellow Costa Ricans are having a happy time, I'm stuck in cold Edinburgh.

Time to emigrate, clearly. I just read a really interesting book by Jonathan Haidt called "The Happiness Hypothesis" about this very subject. It contains myriad wonderful observations and curious statistics, but one of my biggest takeaways was that happiness is about relishing the journey and not getting too fixated on the goal itself. : )

Technorati Tags: happiness

i-together site reworked

I just reworked the i-together site—it's leaner, meaner, and now with pictures (I love being able to search Creative Commons licenced Flickr photos—I always find real gems within minutes : ). Hope y'all like it.

Technorati Tags: i-together, site_relaunch

What the...?!

Meanwhile, in the world of bleeding-edge Flash web design, the mushrooms are clearly doing their job. Ooooooooh.

Technorati Tags: flash, psychadelia

Sticky memory

It's a USB memory, um... stick.

Geospatial web and the "data standards" problem

Mike Liebhold gave a great talk at Where 2.0 on the challenges and opportunities for the geo-spatial web. Summary here, but I wholeheartedly recommend listening to the podcast—Mike is a great speaker.

One point Mike keeps coming back to again and again is the difficulty of evolving effective data standards for rich and distributed geo-data exchange. Perhaps i-together's technology will be able to help here before too long...

Technorati Tags: data_standards, geodata, geospatial_web, i-together, ontologies

del.icio.us: undisputed free-tag bookmark king

No-one will catch del.icio.us for free-tag bookmarking now. The eco-system effect of myriad tagging sites, such as this one, offering import/export from/to del.icio.us features in order to lower their own barrier to entry, along with all the content sites with "add to del.icio.us" badges, is set to afford del.icio.us a massively powerful network effect lock-in.

Free-tagging has become commoditised, yet the weird logic of the web allows del.icio.us to use their first mover advantage to leverage diverse, distributed free-tag bookmarking services to provide an aggregate, gold-standard über service.

And remember, this is not just about the raw bookmark data, it's about the explicit connections users make between their accounts in del.icio.us and other services: that effect cannot be automated, only fostered through trust-based co-opetitive service ecosystems such as the one del.icio.us now sits plum in the centre of, the free-tag bookmark ecosystem.

Good for them—the first and still the best for simple, generic bookmark free-tagging.

UPDATE: just saw on B2DAY blog that del.icio.us tripled their registered userbase in the last nine months to pass the one million mark.

Technorati Tags: delicious, network_effect

i-together update

So, Jean-Louis's amazing efforts as one-man development practice have yielded a fantastic proof of concept application for i-together. Hooray! We haven't hosted the application yet, so I can only show it off to people I meet face to face, on my laptop, but it is already proving a powerful sales tool with prospective investors, along with our advanced service mockups and kick-ass (or -arse, if you are British) PowerPoint. : )

...Which brings me onto the other aspect of this update: we are making great progress towards getting funded! We were successful in getting through to the second round of the London Technology Fund's funding process (they are a government matched funding body); we've been invited to a meeting with g2i, a London Development Agency offshoot; we are in very advanced discussions with a prospective seed funding investor, who has offered us free office space in the meantime; and we are getting strong interest from all sorts of potential go-to-market channel partners. Double hooray!! : ))

We can do this, I just know we can.

Technorati Tags: g2i, i-together, investment, londontechnologyfund

Amazon: "Microsoft Zune by Apple Computer"

Classic! Does Apple's brand reach know no bounds? ; )

Technorati Tags: amazon, apple, zune

To (be) frank...

Euan Semple has just had a British Service Industry Experience (online variety):

I just tried using the Royal Mail online postage system this morning and if it wasn't for the fact that I have pre-paid I probably wouldn't use it again.

1) You have to add the address each time manually. I don't want the address added. I have a database that does that really efficiently - all I want is the stamp.

2) The choice is between printing directly onto envelopes or a label choice of A4, A5 or A6 - who the hell has A4 labels!!

3) Having selected envelope it didn't print correctly and I had to faff about for five minutes copy and pasting the image label into another programme.

Let's face it: the Royal Mail, like most other British public service institutions, has crap-ness running through its veins and coded in its genes. Why bother even to offer feedback to them when you know that the under-motivated operative you email or speak to will just discard your comments in the "not my problem and sod all reason for me to do something about this" pile?

The Citizendium

This project by Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger could prove interesting:

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects. We will avoid calling it an "encyclopedia," because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense.

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability--including the use of real names--is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

...

A "progressive fork" works like this: we will begin with all of Wikipedia's articles, so that the Citizendium will begin as, simply, a mirror of Wikipedia. Then people start making changes to articles in the Citizendium. On a very regular basis, we will refresh our copies of Wikipedia articles. If an entry in the Citizendium has never changed since being copied from Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia version has, then we upload the most recent Wikipedia article. But if the Citizendium has changed an article, then it is not refreshed. Tools will no doubt be written that will allow users to compare the differences between the Wikipedia article and the Citizendium article side-by-side. In addition, of course, people will be able to start brand new articles on topics Wikipedia has not yet covered.

Embracing and selectively re-sculpting the rich materials of Wikipedia—cunning indeed.

[via Nick Carr]

Technorati Tags: citizendium, wiki, wikipedia

Startup Review blog

I'm learning a lot from, and having many thoughts provoked by Nisan Gabbay's Startup Review blog. For instance, I didn't realise that MySpace's go to market strategy only morphed into a viral one after a good deal of more traditional "marketing".

Recommended for any tech entrepreneur.

Technorati Tags: business, startup_review, startup, VC

Spamarresting

Back from my hols, which were great in a gloriously unwired way! : )

Back on a techie note, following the example of my friend Dan Applequist, I've set up a spamarrest account to stamp out my spam problem—I had 440 of the little vermin on my return. : (

I imported my address book to pre-approve as many contacts as possible, but if you have slipped through the net I beg your tolerance of the verification process.

Life is busy enough without spam.

Technorati Tags: spam