beatnic - just wondering

• The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors - New York Times
  “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss”
  (tags: psychology behaviour choice)

• Adobe Integrated Runtime - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Adobe Integrated Runtime, also known as Adobe AIR, codenamed and originally called Apollo,[1] is a cross-operating system runtime environment for building rich Internet applications, using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML and Ajax, that can be deployed as a
  (tags: adobe air flash flex ria web internet wikipedia)
• Microsoft Silverlight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin that allows web applications to be developed with features like animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback - features that characterize a rich internet application.
  (tags: ria web internet wikipedia microsoft silverlight)
• Google Gears - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Google Gears is beta software offered by Google to enable off-line access to services that normally only are available on-line. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to locally cache the data.
  (tags: ria google gears web internet wikipedia)

• Wikipatterns - Wiki Patterns
  Are you a maintainer, patron, bamraising, bully, overorganizer, troll or vandal? Useful collection of “patterns” of what works and what doesn’t if you want a wiki.
  (tags: wikipatterns atlassian wikis patterns)

The following from my Dad made me chuckle, especially the inscription:

As we were approaching Tate Modern from Southwark Street a couple of weeks ago we came across a curious statue in Sumner Street.

The larger than life-size grey figure wears clothes that flutter in the wind and is mounted on a plinth bearing no name but a very hard to read Latin inscription which reads: “Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur”.

Intrigued I did some researching on the internet.

The statue turns out to be animatronic. It reacts to and imitates the people around it and will create its own poses if left alone.

The inscription, as Latin scholars will already have worked out, means “Anything said in Latin sounds profound”.

Further information about the statue here

• CSS Reference
  Sitepoint’s CSS Reference is now up and running and open to the public and it looks like a must-have for web-design folk.
  (tags: webdesign design css sitepoint reference)
• Konigi | Knowledge Sharing & Competitive Research for User Experience Design
  Interesting collection of user experience design stuff from around the web.
  (tags: design web webdesign userexperience ux)
• Dragons’ Den Usability
  David Travis on how the dragons are asking the same types of questions as we do in usability field studies.
  (tags: usability design)
• See it Right accessible website - benefits for users
  Useful summary from the RNIB of how to ensure your website is as accessible - and therefore usable - as possible to as many people as possible.
  (tags: RNIB accessibility webdesign)

One of the things I find tricky with blogs is remembering to go back and check whether anyone’s followed up on any comments I’ve made.

There’s a system called coComment which is designed to help with this, but for some reason it feels like too much effort - or at least it did when I tried it - so I’ve given up with it.

For Wordpress blogs - this blog uses Wordpress - you can also subscribe to comments using an RSS reader. But again that can be a bit of a hassle to set up.

So I’ve just installed a plug-in for this blog which means that if you leave a comment you can ask to have all the following comments on that post emailed to you. Details on the plug-in are available on the Wordpress website.

I’ve seen this on one or two other blogging platforms. I think this should be available as a standard feature across all of them.

[Update: I've now tested this and it works a treat.]

Wearing my IBF hat, I’m involved in setting up and running a 24 hour online event in June this year.

It’s called IBF 24 and is being designed as an online conference focusing on intranet innovation.

Starting at 11am GMT on June 18th, the plan is to follow the sun, so there are three consecutive zones each with an eight hour timetable. This means wherever attendees are in the world they should be able to choose a zone that doesn’t require getting up in the middle of the night, unless they want to of course.

There will be live intranet demos from companies who’ve cracked people-finding and established social computing as part of their working environment. Keynote speakers will cover subjects including innovation, search, design and the future of work.

For IBF member organisations, there are 10 places available as part of the annual membership. Non-members need to pay to register.

We’re setting up a site to support the event, more on that soon.

Also we’re looking for ideas to share about how people are using the day to promote their intranet, or some aspect of it, within their company.

If you work on your company intranet this day might provide a good focus for raising awareness within your company of the intranet itself. You could host an intranet day within your company, with awards handed out for the most usable service or site.

I’ve got that song by Martha and the Vandellas in my head now. “Nowhere to run to baby, nowehere to hide…”

When I left the institution four months ago it was with the intention of “setting up on my own” as I put it. And thankfully things have got off to a very positive start, with some very interesting work and some great people.

As a friend recently put it, “You no longer belong to the organisation, you belong to the network!”

One of the things I’ve noticed pretty quickly is that when you work for yourself you simply cannot hide.

I’m not suggesting that I hid a lot when I was an employee, but there are ways of avoiding spending too long in the spotlight. And large organisations by their very nature allow layers of hierarchy and bureacracy to protect - and also hinder - their employees.

Out here you are your work. That’s it. What they see is what they get.