beatnic - just wondering

• How to travel with kids | Travel | Guardian Unlimited
  (tags: travel children families holiday)
• Saga launches social website for over-50s | Technology | The Guardian
  (tags: saga socialnetworking silversurfers sagazone)
• Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial To Launch Thursday
  (tags: google opensocial)
• Business Innovation Factory | Innovation Story Studio | Euan Semple
  Euan’s talk at BIF about sowing the seeds of social computing within the BBC. It made me realise how proud I feel about my involvement in it :-)
  (tags: euansemple bif socialcomputing stories BBC)

• John Naughton: Microsoft makes Facebook a club you don’t want to join | Business | The Observer
  “Pssst … have I got a deal for you! Send me a cheque for £10 and I will sell you a 0.000001 per cent interest in NetworkerColumns Ltd, a privately held company which produces copious quantities of mildly irritating prose. I will then release a press st
  (tags: observer networker johnnaughton facebook microsoft itouch apple)

Have you noticed that on the radio very few, if any, presenters and guests say “goodbye” at the end of an interview or phone call?

More often than not they say “thank you” instead.

I was just wondering if this is conscious and deliberate.

• Facebook Takes the Microsoft Money And Runs.
  “The $240 million is a minority stake that values the company at $15 billion.”
  (tags: facebook sillymoney microsoft techcrunch)

From TechCrunch:

Facebook Takes the Microsoft Money And Runs.

The $240 million is a minority stake that values the company at $15 billion.

Uh oh…

• WordPress makes a stand for open source morality | Technology | The Guardian
  (tags: guardian opensource wordpress toread blogging)
• LearningWiki - Learning 2007 Wiki
  (tags: learning2007 masie learning wiki 2007)
• nigelpaine.com - Blog - Live Blog from Learning 2007
  Nigel Paine is blogging from Learning2007.
  (tags: learning2007 learning 2007 nigelpaine masie)
• Main Page - AskWiki
  “AskWiki, developed in partnership between AskMeNow and the Wikimedia Foundation, is a preliminary integration of a semantic search engine that seeks to provide specific answers to questions using information from Wikipedia articles.”
  (tags: wiki questions answers wikimedia wikipedia askwiki)
• Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » A Vision of Students Today
  Great 4 minute video showing how traditional “teaching methods” are way out of kilter with today’s students. HT to Nigel Paine.
  (tags: digital ethnography digitalethnography learning video vianigelpaine)
• List of English words containing Q not followed by U - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (tags: games wikipedia q notu scrabble scrabulous)

Last week it was 3700 MB or so…

That’s a mighty fine amount of free (as in lunch) online data storage.

• BBC - Programmes
  “bbc.co.uk/programmes provides information on all current TV and radio programmes across the BBC.”

  Much needed - a web page for every programme on the BBC.

  (tags: BBC programmes content web)
• Google takes Docs on the road | The Register
  (tags: google docs theregister)
• Google mobile products
  UK version
  (tags: google mobile)

According to Phil Williams on BBC Radio Five Live yesterday afternoon.

Made me laugh.

Do you stand on the right on the escalator in John Lewis or your local shopping mall?

Did “Please stand on the right” originate on the London Underground? Like Pavlov’s dog, we’ve been gradually conditioned to do this. And why is it the opposite to our roads in the UK, where we drive on the left?

One thing’s for sure wherever you are. If you’re not standing on the right there will always be someone in a rush trying to get by.

• Will mashups ever be mass market? | Technology | Guardian Unlimited
  (tags: technology mashup guardian web2.0)
• The BBC empire has grown too big. Ahead must lie much more slimming | Columnists | Guardian Unlimited
  (tags: bbc)
• Nokia N95 User Guides, Reviews, Themes & Downloads - Know Your Mobile
  (tags: mobile Nokia N95 userguide)
• BBC NEWS | Technology | When work becomes a game
  (tags: online trends worklifeblur gaming games web work)

• Get the Glass!
  Brilliantly designed 3D online board game courtesy of the California Milk Processor Board.
  (tags: game milk gettheglass). HT to Another Paul
• Home - Involve - peopleandparticipation.net
  “Welcome to People and Participation.net - your gateway to better participation.

  The site provides practical information for those working to involve people. By registering you can upload case studies, ask questions of our experts and add events.”

  (tags: confluence wiki involve peopleandparticipation participation engagement involvement)
• Intranet Innovation Awards winners for 2007
  James Robertson announces the winners. Some great looking stuff in there too.
  (tags: intranet awards innovation steptwo jamesrobertson)

I’m on the phone to a well-known supplier of outsourced services…

“Please listen carefully to the following options…”

There are 7 options, but they don’t tell you how many there are going to be.

I’m not quite sure if what I’m calling about matches any of them.

And there’s no “For all other enquiries please hold” at the end so you’re left drifting in to the abyss with Enya playing softly at you, not quite knowing what’ll happen next.

Anyway, I digress.

What caught my attention was that the sentence offering me the option to have the conversation in Welsh was in English.

• “Embedded” Web Fonts Return. Uh-oh. | Typographica
  “So, due to the professional type designer’s understandable desire to be paid for their work, most websites that will take advantage of this new technology will use free fonts. Cue the foreboding horror music.”
  (tags: fonts web typography desing)
• Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail (or any E-mail Account) Into a Social Network Hub
  (tags: google gmail socialnetworking hacks)

• Accountant
• Articled clerk of a limited company
• Assurance agent of recognised company
• Bank/building society official
• Barrister
• British Computer Society (BCS) - Professional grades which are Associate (AMBCS), Member (MBCS), Fellow (FBCS) (PN 25/2003)
• Broker
• Chairman/director of limited company
• Chemist
• Chiropodist
• Christian Science practitioner
• Commissioner of oaths
• Councillor: local or county
• Civil servant (permanent)
• Dentist
• Designated Premises Supervisors
• Director/Manager of a VAT registered Charity
• Director/Manager/Personnel Officer of a VAT registered Company
• Engineer (with professional qualifications)
• Fire service official
• Funeral director
• Insurance agent (full time) of a recognised company
• Journalist
• Justice of the Peace
• Legal secretary (members and fellows of the Institute of legal secretaries)
• Local government officer
• Manager/Personnel officer (of limited company)
• Member of Parliament
• Merchant Navy officer
• Minister of a recognised religion
• Nurse (SRN and SEN)
• Officer of the armed services (active or retired)
• Optician
• Person with honours (e.g. OBE MBE etc.)
• Personal Licensee Holders
• Photographer (professional)
• Police officer
• Post Office official
• President/Secretary of a recognised organisation
• Salvation Army officer
• Social worker
• Solicitor
• Surveyor
• Teacher, lecturer
• Trade union officer
• Travel agency (qualified)
• Valuers and auctioneers (fellow and associate members of the incorporated society)
• Warrant officers and Chief Petty Officers

This is the list of acceptable countersignatures on the Passport Service website.

• Microsoft Partners with Atlassian & NewsGator - SharePoint Goes Web 2.0
  As Euan says, “Milton Keynes gets a village feel.”

  It’s still Milton Keynes underneath though.

  (tags: enterprise intranet wikis rss web2.0 atlassian confluence microsoft newsgator)

• About - journa-list.com
  “Have you ever read an article and thought, I’d really like to know more about the journalist who wrote this?

  Maybe you want to read previous things the journalist has written, or find out more about their experience in a particular subject area, or ge

  (tags: journalists journa-list martinmoore uk journalism sources bylines)

• Intranet 2.0 roles … « Inside out
  (tags: intranet socialsoftware socialmedia socialnetworking roles)
• Google ‘dominates world search’
  (tags: google advertising search business)

• Design thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  “… design thinking is a creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas. There are no judgments in design thinking. This eliminates the fear of failure and encourages maximum input and participation. Wild ideas are welcome…”
  (tags: design designthinking wikipedia)

Yesterday I was due to make a Skype call with a friend in Denmark at 1530 CET. I needed to double-check I’d got the right time scheduled so I did a little research.

It turns out that if you want to know the time in, say, Copenhagen you can simply type “time copenhagen” in to your search engine of choice and hey presto!

• Check the time now in Copenhagen using Google
• London time using the UK version of Ask (only Google appears to offer disambiguation between London UK, London Ontario and London Arkansas)
• Current time in New York using Yahoo!

On further investigation, all three search engines also show you current weather conditions (e.g. “weather Paris“) and links to forecasts:

• Check the current weather in Paris using Ask - this will also show the current time and news headlines for Paris in a side-dish
• Current weather in Rome using Yahoo!
• Current weather in Sydney using Google

Handy.

It’s time to drag the intranet in to the twenty-first century. We need to think of the intranet as the digital workspace, or “my web at work.” As a worker I need access to all the tools and information I need to do my job. It’s becoming increasingly likely that not all of that lives inside the company firewall. And I won’t always be at my desk.

Gone are the days of the intranet being a single destination, a “website”, an online publishing - or rather broadcasting - medium for the internal communication function. Sure, there’s a place for internal comms on an intranet, just as there’s a place for payroll giving, blogs and project support tools, but it’s much more. It’s my web at work.

This new definition helps to clarify the role of the central intranet team in any organisation however large or small.

As Matt Jones once put it when discussing bbc.co.uk, “We’re not building a website, we’re building part of the web” - or words to that effect.

The role is not to lock down but to open up. To make the digital workspace as navigable as possible, and to make everything within it as findable and usable as possible.

Number 63 bus passes number 37.

If you have web apps like travel booking systems or services like discussion forums running on your intranet you already have personalisation. Whether it’s any good is down to how well it’s designed and presented and how it feels to use.

For company intranet homepages I don’t think there’s any question that personalisation will become increasingly common. The likes of Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo and even Facebook have raised people’s expectations in this area.

The risk is that companies confuse personalisation with customisation and jump on the bandwagon, rushing to provide all the latest functionality before considering what people really need.

So here are three definitions that should help when thinking about this:

Top-down content

Content that’s there because you work for Company X. Examples include share price information and company-wide announcements.

Personalised content

Content that is there because you’re you. You are in a particular role, in a particular department, at a particular level. How? Either the system knows who you are, or you’ve told it about yourself or a combination of the two.

Customised content

Content (and sometimes positioning and formatting) that you’ve chosen based on a particular set of options. You have subscribed to the latest news about design and have chosen to have the headlines appear in a list on the right hand side of the page. You’ve chosen a particular look and feel for the page.

There is absolutely no reason why the three types of content can’t share the same space. Good interaction and visual design is essential to ensure people can clearly distinguish between them.

If the content is relevant and well presented, intranet personalisation can help make the digital workspace more joined up and navigable, and it can help employees have a better understanding of their overall work environment.

See also: Gerry McGovern’s recent article Intranet personalization: does it work?

• Here’s how I established an effective record-keeping system | Business Link
  Keep my receipts. Keep my receipts. Keep my receipts.
  (tags: receipts filing startingup business admin)
• How to Quit Facebook - wikiHow
  Hilarious! Sell your shares in facebook now…
  (tags: facebook wikihow howto quit)
• Tabs, Used Right: The 13 Usability Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  “Summary: 13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.”
  (tags: jakobnielsen usability tabs designpatterns design webdesign guidelines)
• Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill? (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  “The worst kind of blah-blah has no function; it’s pure filler — platitudes, such as “Welcome to our site, we hope you will find our new and improved design helpful.” Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase. “
  (tags: jakobnielsen usability filler blahblah welcome content webwriting intro)
• Beatnik - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  “Beatnik is a media stereotype that borrowed the most superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s to present a distorted (and sometimes violent), cartoon-like misrepresentation of the real-life people and the spirituality…”
  (tags: wikipedia beatnik mediastereotype)
• [BEEP]: Processes + Patterns (EuroIA 2007 presentation)
  Patterns, patterns and more patterns.
  (tags: designpatterns patterns design process PeterBoersma presentation)
• TED | Talks | John Maeda: Simplicity patterns (video)
  John Maeda of MIT talks at TED about simplicity and how he got here.
  (tags: johnmaeda ted simplicity complecity mit design patterns)

On my Sunday run yesterday morning I suddenly caught myself turning everything I was doing in to Facebook status updates.

If you haven’t been on Facebook, status updates let you tell people in your group of friends or networks whatever you want in little SMS type messages which then appear on their Facebook pages next time they visit.

For example this morning I wrote “starting a new chapter” which was then translated to “Nic Price is starting a new chapter” on my friends’ Facebook pages.

It’s not just Facebook that has this feature. Twitter is one of a several other sites that let you do the same thing, but without inserting the word “is” in front of what you write. It’s a little like writing really really short blog posts.

So there I was… “finding this hill steeper than usual”… “wishing he’d been running more regularly recently”… when I suddenly caught myself at it. “Nic Price is thinking in status updates.”