Easy Introduction to Git

I’ve just had an article published by Sitepoint that aims to introduce Git to people who may not have programming experience and are more comfortable using a GUI rather the command Line. “Git: Your New Best Friend“

Yes! At last someone explains the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook

The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook: The Most Egregious Sins on Social Media Sites, Exposed » techipedia | tamar weinberg

Forgetting that some individuals won’t network with you on a “personal” space like Facebook without knowing who you are, even with the proper introduction. If you’re looking to establish a professional relationship with someone, consider LinkedIn. Otherwise, consider building up a rapport with an individual before randomly adding them as your friend. Some people require face-to-face meetings before they invite you into their private lives. After all, Facebook was a tool that college students were using before it was open to the public, and some still use it as a purely personal and not a professional tool. LinkedIn is still seen as the more professional of the two.

I am one of these strange people, so please don’t try and initiate a business relationship with me on facebook. However I’d be delighted to consider a professional connection on LinkedIn

Handy Hack: Using FriendFeed to follow more than status updates from ANYONE

Now that twitter has become mainstream (Even the Australian prime minister has a microblog)  it can be useful to consolidate all of a contact’s information into one place (instead having to monitor their blog, microblog, flickr account etc etc) which is where a service life FriendFeed (ff) comes in.

On ff you create create an account that sucks in all your other feeds (blog, twitter, identi.ca, flickr, digg, slidshare and so on) into a single place. All people have to do is to subscribe to  that single account (probably via RSS or IM) and they get everything you are doing — not just your twitters. At the time of writing ff supports:

• 12seconds
• Amazon.com
• Backtype
• Blog
• brightkite.com
• delicious
• Digg
• Diigo
• Disqus
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Furl
• Gmail/Google Talk
• Goodreads
• Google Reader
• Google Shared Stuff
• identi.ca
• iLike
• Intense Debate
• Jaiku
• Joost
• Last.fm
• LibraryThing
• LinkedIn
• Ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• Mixx
• Netflix
• Netvibes
• Pandora
• Picasa Web Albums
• Plurk
• Polyvore
• Pownce
• Reddit
• Seesmic
• SlideShare
• SmugMug
• StumbleUpon
• tipjoy
• Tumblr
• Twine
• Twitter
• Upcoming
• Vimeo
• Wakoopa
• Yelp
• YouTube
• Zooomr

That’s all very well and good, but what if your network buddy does not have an account on FriendFeed? That’s were ff Imaginary friends come it. You can create an proxy account and then add the external accounts your contact posts on. All the account types listed above can be added and anything not in the list can created using the Blog type which expects an RSS or Atom feed. If you are adding a WordPress blog then make sure you follow this suggestion to get post titles to display correctly.

So currently I have 21 ‘real’ contacts on ff, but another 17 proxy contacts setup, including @stephenfry. Not only do I get his twitter posts but also notification of his wonderful blog posts, all in one place.

Social networking services — one year on

Updated Nov/08 — added link to Twitter Tips and Silk Charm post

Some of the problems of Social Networking « Alec the Geek

issues with this type of online social networking

It’s actually more than a year since I first blogged about social networking and the world of web 2.0. The web, and the practices that surround it, have moved on so I thought I update my thoughts as well. By a strange coincidence, just as I was starting this post I came across crazeegeekchick’s thoughts on how to use social networking — well worth reading before you carry on.

Generally social networking has been a huge consumer of my attention and time; and to be honest I don’t think the medium given me a very good return on my investment, except as a learning exercise.

1. LinkedIn has become an online list of business contacts. But of limited use because I can’t add my own notes to profiles. I have had some networking activity — but to be honest it has not made a huge amount of difference to my working life. I think now the number of people on the service is becoming so large anyway that it’s becoming less useful, but I hope I’m wrong
   Updated 13/Nov/08 — You can now add notes to your LinkedIn contacts
2. Facebook has become pretty pointless. I don’t have time to become a zombie and most of the other stuff I do use is not terribly useful. e.g. I just became a facebook fan of Gordon Ramsay — but so what? Nothing happens much.
3. Blogging gives me a certain amount of satisfaction and I often refer back to my old blog posts for information. I also know that a few people have found help from ramblings so I count the blog as a success. However it’s rare for me to get over 100 readers a day so it’s not a huge success
4. Lifestream (twitter, jaiku,identi.ca). This is very distracting and I need to find some way to stop keep looking at my friendfeed stream. However on the positive side it does provide me some of the support that I miss being a solo worker. It’s probably a good idea to whittle down my ‘posse’ to as few as 10 people to reduce the noise; question is which 10 — I’m generally pretty choosy who I “friend”. Problogger has a site introducing Twitter, and by extension most of the other micro blogging site, and Silkcharm also posted some suggestions
5. Geo Location (e.g. brightkite, dopplr). I am just so over that. In Australia it’s hard to use anyway because we have limited network coverage and I don’t have an iPhone. I keep thinking they a potentially huge personal security issue as well
6. I have accounts on delicious and flickr which I find useful. Delicious in particular has proved very useful professionally and personally.

As I mentioned earlier the major upside is that I now think know a lot more than the general population about this stuff — perhaps I can become a media pundit? Easier than doing real work, talking of which…

Customer 2.0 — What a great idea!

Enterprise 2.0 — What a waste of time! « Alec the Geek

If you cannot see E2 helping your organisation directly with those basic things then why bother?

Just in case everyone things I’m a grumpy old fart all the time, I thought I follow up on my dismissive put down of the all the hoopla around Enterprise 2.0 by talking about customers in this “brave new world” of Enterprise and Web 2.0.

Customers are the reason we get out of bed in the morning and they kindly pay our bills for us — so we’d better keep them happy! However, even through we may deal with them directly every day, it can be hard to understand what they want or when they are unhappy. Even worse, when they do communicate problems we often label them awkward and unreasonable.

Web 2.0 can help us overcome some of these problems:

1. Providing a varity of channels to make it easier for customers to communicate
2. Separating the consumer and supplier of the message (in time) so that customers and vendors can view the messages without letting emotional baggage get in the way
3. A larger volume of feedback should help organisations spot genuine problems and trends

In addition forums and blogs give organisations an new opportunity to engage customers with what they do and the future direction — however such new channels of open communication do not sit well with many enterprise cultures, so be prepared for some painful learning…

Enterprise 2.0 — What a waste of time!

A increasingly amount of words, and now money, is being expended on Enterprise 2.0 (E2)

E2 is an extension of some of the ideas from Web 2.0 (W2)— the concept of a network of connected people making a self sustaining community that generates ideas, information and value. In addition the ever present threat of Gen Y and Gen C employees unable to contribute to the business except in a connected web of goodness that provides inclusion, exploits the power of the group, … and all the other nice warm fuzzy words

However at the end of the day organisations need to survive by fulfilling customers needs and wants effectively. It’s often hard to see how the totally immersive nature of the W2 experience translates into value for E2.

Let’s look on the positive side first:

1. An E2 enabled organisation may be able to attract and retain better quality individuals in the gen Y workforce
2. E2 may provide better mechanisms for a team generating new ideas and hence business improvement
3. Team work may become faster and more effective because of improved communication

However reality could be a little different:

1. All that high quality talent spends all day communicating in a E2 connected world they actually don’t get much work done. Capable people are only as valuable as their deliverables and at some point rubber has to hit the road, so can they please stop twittering and do some work?
2. Everyone, both as individuals and as a team, can spend so much time navel gazing that no improvement of any value can be implemented.
3. Communication paralysis can stop decisions being made. Everyone is so busy communicating it becomes unclear what needs to be done and no one is able to cut through the chaff. It’s a great way of avoiding responsibility.
4. In certain organisations the tools of W2 may present a significant security risk.

So what is the bottom line on E2? I suspect it’s probably just a big waste of time… Remember that business value comes from three things:

1. Doing it better and faster
2. Managing the business more effectively
3. Saving costs

If you cannot see E2 helping your organisation directly with those basic things then why bother?

Can’t help but feel a little smug

Smug

BBC NEWS | Technology | Hi-tech criminals target Twitter

Only those using Microsoft Windows are vulnerable to infection from these malicious programs.

It perhaps aught to read “… and are stupid enough to download unknown material” as well?

Having fun with robots on the Intertubes

The British rail system has deployed a web based interactive robot, called Lisa, to help people with rail travel enquiries. Much innocent fun can be had if you are not busy. For example…

You asked: Are you a train spotter?
Lisa says: I’m not a Train Spotter. But I do have some guidelines for railway enthusiasts, if you’d like to take a look?

You asked: Does it include how to avoid dressing in an anorak?

Lisa says: I’m afraid my specialty is travelling by train and I cannot answer questions about clothing.

You asked: But I need to meet girls and want help on how to dress

Lisa says: If you let the Train Operating Company know you’ll need assistance in advance (ideally, 24 hours before), they can usually arrange for staff to meet you at your departure station, accompany you to the train and see you safely on board.

Alec’s “stream of consciousness” posting set-up

A long with a lot of other sad people, I have been throwing my random thoughts onto the intertubes in the belief that they are of interest to people. In order to maximise the spread of mental drivel and minimise the effort involved I have spent far more time than I should investigating and setting up (playing with) various services and feeds to spread my ‘goddness’ far and wide. Here is how it works

1. I have conversations on Jaiku
2. I use twitter to hit as many people as possible
3. Friendfeed allows me to see information from many more people than Jaiku
4. ping.fm allows me to post to Jaiku, Twitter and facebook
5. ping.fm also posts pownce, tumblre, plurk, Identi.ca and myspace but that’s probably a waste of time although I do have a limited number of followers there
6. I do not post to LinkedIn as sometimes my comments are not that professional
7. Both Jaiku and Friendfeed also receive feeds from my WordPress blog, my Flikr photos, del.ico.us book marks and my dugg stories

So I monitor friendfeed for the ‘big picture’, post to ping.fm and watch jaiku for interesting conversations.

Handy Hack: Display WordPress post title correctly in Jaiku

When displaying your WordPress blog RSS feed (e.g. http://alecthegeek.wordpress.com/feed/, as given by the RSS button on the right of this page) in another tool or website, it may be that each entry has the name of your blog where you would expect to see the post title. In that case change the feed URL to http://alecthegeek.wordpress.com/?feed=rss (…?feed=atom also works).

Tested using Jaiku, but I’m guessing this applies in other tools that consume feeds.

Update 27/Aug/08 — also works with other WordPress installations (besides than WordPress.com) and is needed by Friendfeed

Which fuckwit thought this would work?

BBC NEWS | UK | Sex offenders face website bans

Sex offenders’ e-mail addresses are to be passed to social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo to prevent them contacting children.

As a parent of two young children and someone who has worked with survivors of childhood sexual assult in the past I am 150% behind measures that will provide protection to the young. However someone needs to educate polititions on what is effective, as opposed to measures designed to chase votes and lull people into a false sense of security.

All measures such as filtering, blocking email addresses etc. can be easily circumnavigated. They only effective protection is to physically ensure the children are safe at the point of delivery (i.e. the child’s computer). In the same way I don’t let my young children wander onto the road or alone into potentially risky situations, I make sure that I know (see) what they are doing online and educate them on safe internet practices.

As you can tell naive ideas as the one outlined above annoy me intensely.

Spending far too much time…

pinging data around the intertubes.

I’m currently trying to use Jaiku, ping.fm, feedblitz and email to spray the world with news of this blog post.

Is that self-referential?

Sage advice from Tim Berners-Lee

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web creator rejects net tracking

a warning for young people about putting personal data on these sites.

“Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it’s all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.”

I’m putting this here mainly for the benefit of my son, although he is very responsible online. Hopefully it will be a useful reminder for everyone else as well, including me.

Thanks to my father for sending me the link.

How to present the modern way

Another presentation by Paul Fenwick, this time a lightning talk on Greasemonkey that was awarded best lightning talk at LAC last month. What is intresting is the presentation style, which we are starting to see a lot more at conferences. It makes a refreshing change from death by  Powerpoint

SaaS to conquer the world?

An presentation from Bob Worrall, CIO at Sun, on the the future of the IT dept predicts that significant in house application development and hosting is finished as we all integrate Software as a Service (Saas) offerings from various 3rd party vendors.

However, whilst we are seeing traction in this area, I have yet to see any significant architectural solution to handling the security and integrity of corporate and private data. Until that happens I can see that any significant adoption of SaaS across large enterprises will be a train wreck.

Wait for the first scandals as organisations and individuals lost control of their data.

Stephen Fry shows social networking as the same ‘ol, warmed over

Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » Social networking through the ages

For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago?

This was exteremly well timed. I have been thinking over the last 24 hours about shutting down my LinkedIn account. As I can be easily found using Google why do I need to maintain a separate profile?

However how can I keep my address book up to date?

Lifehack 101: Get rid of facebook

I have decided to start 2008 by cutting out the serious waste of time that is facebook. My first life hack of 2008, I hope there are many more

The continuing of rise of the Web OS in 2008?

BBC NEWS | Technology | The technology with impact 2007

the rise of web apps that are flexible, platform-neutral and accessible from anywhere I have a net connection has made my life almost pain-free

Darren Waters of the BBC explains why Web OS is his killer technology for 2008. He gives a brief personnel and lucid explanation of why he thinks they are important. Whilst the idea is not new I thought it was a nice outline of what it’s about from a user perspective.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Jack’s first foray into video publishing

Is it me, or is this really sad?

LinkedIn Web Store

LinkedIn, the social networking site for business wonks, has started a line of branded clothing.

Who would want to wear that?

LinkedIn as never been cool (or has it?)

Powered by ScribeFire.