It’s been an interesting day for several reasons:

1. I reminded myself why I never want to work in London, after I had to suffer the discomfort of a morning train and tube ride at the peak of rush hour,
2. I went to the second Blogs and Social Media Forum at the Marriott London Grosvenor Square Hotel (more about this in a mo’),
3. I think I may have found a solution to something BritBlog related…., and
4. I’ve made some career decisions….ish.

So the main event of the day was the Blogs and Social Media forum, subtitled “The impact of social media and enterprise 2.0“. This was useful for two reasons: (1) it has given me some interesting ideas to play with at work, which could have a significant impact on both our business and my job, and (2) it helped me crystallise some thinking around BritBlog and what the right next step is.

I’m afraid I can’t really go into point 1 much at the moment - I really need to think about more about the pros and cons of what I’d like to do at work, but point 2 is quite interesting.

Those of you that have been following the BritBlog saga over the last, umm, ‘many’ months, will know that I’ve been working on lots of new ideas for the site. Alas I’ve not managed the work very well (the day job kinda interferes…), and it’s been getting quite messy and very depressing.

Anyway, today has given me some time to stand back and think about the project, and I’ve pretty much decided to scrap all of my work from the last few months. A chap called Lee Bryant from a company called Headshift was talking about a project they’ve recently done for BP/Castrol, and he made some very interesting remarks. I suppose the two that may the biggest impression with me were these:

1. Firstly, they didn’t mind so much about releasing a site to the public before it was finished. There is a theory that an unfinished project encourages members to get more involved than they would otherwise, because they feel like they are able to participate. The example given was MySpace — you know how messy it tends to look? — but it made me think of flickr also, as it was in public beta for years.

   Anyway, this made me worry less about getting things right with BritBlog straight away, and it leads me into point 2:

2. They would make frequent small changes/releases to the website, and gather feedback from users about them. This stuck a chord too: rather than getting all the new ideas out there in one mammoth go, we could release them it stages, making fairly small changes at a time. This will allow us to get the changes right each time, and will give us the room to fix problems that may arise before they get too complex. There are loads of incremental changes I can see us making to BritBlog, and tackling it in this manner makes it all feel much more achievable.

So perhaps nothing ground-breakingly new there, but I clearly needed someone to spell it out to me…

The final thing that happened today was I was able to give my career a bit of thought. This is something I’ve been putting off for a long time because it’s something I don’t really like thinking about! Anyway, although I’ve not made any concrete decisions today, I have at least had some interesting ideas. Again, I want to discuss these with other people before saying anything here about them, but perhaps the future is bright…..^*.

^*And no, that is not by any means a clue. I have absolutely no desire to work for Orange. Or at least not yet!

Tags: Blogs and Social Media Forum, britblog, careers, headshift, web20

IMG_7592, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

Picked up this rather strange plant yesterday - Syngonanthus chrysanthus ‘Mikado’.

Syngonanthus chrysanthus ‘Mikado’ comes from the family of the Eriocaulaceae and is native to Brasil.

Swiped the following from a site called Wildchicken so I’ve got it for future reference:

An elegant and unusual new tender plant, which forms a rosette of foliage from which long straight stems grow, each bearing one, creamy-gold, pin-head flower. Very much an indoor plant in the UK, it could be tried in a warm bright bathroom where it will have the humidity and warmth it needs to thrive.

Aspect
Bright but indirect light. Needs humid surroundings.

Soil
Acid compost (pH of 4-5). Well drained but kept moist at all times.

Hardiness
Tender - best grown between 19-22°C.

Maintenance
Because of its origin as a swamp plant, humidity should be kept high, at around 70% if possible. Keeping the plant in a tall, straight sided vase, or a deep shallow bowl, and spraying it regularly with filtered water will help to keep the humidity level up. Water regularly, from the bottom of the pot rather than from above, and don’t allow the compost to dry out. The best place for it would probably be a bright, warm bathroom, unless you can provide its exact requirements elsewhere.

I’ve got mine in the bathroom at the moment, but worried it gets too much sun in the morning…

More photos of Syngonanthus chrysanthus

Tags: house plant, Syngonanthus chrysanthus, mikado, photo

I’m not generally a fan of poetry, but I just heard a charming verse on the TV from John Clare’s I Am!:

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below–above the vaulted sky.

This is the last verse of three, and the least depressing!

The Blog Ranking service, Technoranki, is going to be merged back into BritBlog. With only limited time to spend on BritBlog, Technoranki, and various other projects that I’m involved with, I’ve decided to take this route so that I can focus more on BritBlog.

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Yay, I’m back online!

Got loads of mail to catch up on (can you spot the running theme here?) so please bear with me if you’re waiting for a response.

In other news, I took delivery of a brand spanking new server for BritBlog yesterday. Nice to have something new for once, and it should be a decent machine. It’s got dual processors (which are dual core xeons), and 4 GB RAM, so it should be able to cope with all the new features we’ve got in the pipeline for BritBlog. It’s going to take quite a few weeks to be built and setup, but it’s nice to know we finally have it. Sorry to anyone who has noticed all our downtime lately (on the live site)… the old server has a hardware problem by the looks of things, and there’s not a lot we can do about it.

Any other news? Well the reason for the lack of connectivity is because I’ve moved into a nice little flat all on my own, and it took a while to get the ‘phone line sorted and the internet connection. The new place is all nice and clean, and I’ve got loads of space. It’s great!

Right, better get on with work before I get hit over the head…

I’ve been offline for the last few days, and will contiue to be without internet access fora couple of weeks as I’ve just moved home… Sorry to anyone waiting for a reply to an email!

The Houses of Parliament just after sunset, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

I was rather surprised to find that someone else posted my photo to their flickr photo stream, passing it off as their own.

When prompted by someone else, the person did at least admit that they “found the photo on the web” (so that makes it alright?). Once I’d recovered a little bit from a rather odd feeling (I can’t describe how I felt — it was very odd), I emailed the person and asked them to remove the photo.

That they did, but not without saying they thought I was over reacting slightly.

The single biggest thing about flickr that annoys me is all these people constantly posting and reposting the same photo, either found from the web or pinched from another flickr user. I really don’t understand what the point of it is — how can anyone feel proud of someone else’s work?

This goes on such a lot, and there really isn’t an easy way to report it to flickr.

I know that if you put something up on the web then the chances are someone somewhere is going to download it and copy it etc., and for private use I guess I don’t have a problem with this.

But what gets on my goat is people taking something that isn’t theirs and either passing it off as their own, or even worse making money or some other benefit from it!

In this particular case, the copy of my photo got explored (quite an achievement on flickr — it means your photo is one of the most interesting at a given point in time), and I didn’t get any credit for it.

Ahh well, my sounding off is complete. Something like this makes you realise what these musicians and other artists must feel like when their music is distributed on the web for free… But that’s discussion is for another time!

Tags: flickr, annoyance, copyright, theft

I’ve been meaning to write a post titled something along the lines of “10 things you can do to improve the performance of your web application” for the last few months, but so far I’ve not had the time! There are lots of articles out there on the web that tell you in general terms what you should do, but I like to provide examples when I do these things so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for that one.

In the meantime, here’s a handy tip to reduce some of the load from your web site.

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