Happy birthday

a chocolate birthday cake

Today, is the 21st anniversary of starting this blog. The first article called “Online at last” is still available.

Back then I promised or hoped that some of what I put here, about IT issues, business and Computer Games (including Baldur’s Gate 2) will be interesting, innovative and useful. I also expect to just put some simple stuff up; stuff that does not warrant a web page, maybe I’ll x-ref my amazon book reviews and put up some that I don’t expect to publish elsewhere. I doubt I’ll be writing about either cooking or DIY. [It took a while but for various reasons I took up both although usually publish my thoughts and research on these topics a separate subsite. ] I am still writing about games too.

I catalogue the history of the site on my History & Aims page. It’s gone through phases, and today is mainly about politics and technology and technology regulation. The more personal stuff is currently posted to the wiki, and the technical stuff is often previewed on my linkedin blog. I usually cross post to Medium, where I can be followed, if you are a member and would like to follow me there.

Random
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Are blogs still useful?

Are blogs still useful?

In August 2009, I wrote an article questioning if blogs were losing their influence. In conversations over the last two weeks, I had reason to go back to it because I thought they were important things I’d said then which I need to check if they were still valid. If so, I thought they were worth repeating. I found the old article quite hard to read. I tried to simplify it, and clarify my proposed architecture. I have also tried to update it given the developments in the internet service provider space, both technically and commercially. It’s much harder to build a personal content graph these days; one needs to make it easy for people to find what you say! The revised article is on linkedin and medium.  …

On Musk and Twitter

On Musk and Twitter

Elon Musk has taken over twitter; I wrote a short piece on LinkedIn on the deal, its funding, and the technology. Since then some, including the FT (£) have commented on its funding, not the least the bank loans and thus collateral required. The linkedin article and this has some interesting links commenting on the deal, or at least I think so. Also I quote some sources about the fear of the world's town square being owned. For more, use the "Read More" button ...

Old Wisdom

I have over the last 24 hours installed the “Advanced Random Post” plugin and created a “Random” page which lists 7 old articles,with a short excerpt. I did this for me because I now have 14 years of content on this blog, and some of it is worth revisiting, either to show how clever I was, or how wrong I was. You can laugh, I can learn! …

Managing Compliance Software

Managing Compliance Software

I have just published on my linkedin blog a little essay on managing software used for the purpose of compliance. One key insight which one might consider is that these programs are being used because you have to not because you want to. Also society does not want businesses innovating the compliance software, we need to know it does what society requires not what the business wants. This makes the governing super strategy for these applications one of “operational efficiency”, or in Dan Remenyi’s model, a “support” system. For compliance systems it is advantageous to buy or adopt a package and to adopt the package’s optimum process; society has confidence that companies are complying with the law, and the companies share the maintenance costs and get a superior product and support. In some cases, the requirement that society has confidence that compliance is correct leads to the regulators giving companies the software or running it themselves.  …

Brands

Individual blogs, like mine, are losing their readership volume. It’s sites with a brand that are attracting writers and it’s the site brand that attracts readers; I think we need to be more collective. Of course, there’s a stunning lack of generosity in linking, acknowledging others and even in retweeting.

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Distributing ideas

The site, “If this then that” offers trigger actions as a web service. It works with objects it calls recipes and channels.

Recipes are the “if this then that” relationship, and channels define the this and that. It has a long list of pre-canned channels and recipes, but sadly NOT an output RSS/XML channel.

I have today, just created a trigger that takes my blog feed and posts it to facebook. Obviously I need to test it. This is part of the exploration on how to rebuild my personal streams which have been damaged by Facebook, Google and Twitter’s attempts to enclose our speech into their “secret gardens”.

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Help, looking for an XML widget for wordpress

It seems the big boys, i.e. google, facebook, who it now seems own friend feed and twitter are all changing their services and APIs. Friendfeed has stopped parsing twitter because of the API changes, it also seems to have stopped polling my delicious feed. My home grown mingle is still polling my bookmarks, blogs and pictures, but it’s lost my google reader news posts and you tube favourites some time ago; google turned them off as they sought to make Google+ a secret garden. My booklist site, living social, packed in a while ago. All in all, my efforts to collect my contributions on the internet into a single place are falling apart. …