bloggishness

It’s coming up to Thanksgiving here in the US, and a thin layer of snow still sparkles on the ground in the winter sun. On Friday, (that’s the day after Thanksgiving for any of you not steeped in American tradition) we shall drive to Milwaukee for a spot of Christmas shopping and, in the case of the young ‘uns, some serious scoping out of items to be put on a list for Santa.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that it is again that time of year when lists are made, checked twice and, in the case of Now Public’s MostPublic Index, found to be rather wanting in the sense department. Yes, we have another meaningless ranking of the internet’s glitterati into top 20s for New York, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Vancouver and London. And yes, I’m listed on the London list, at number 11.

There was a time when I would have cared about this, especially coming from Now Public. I was one of the first people to write about Now Public, back in March 2005, and I’ve had a soft spot for them ever since, even if I never did get as involved in the community there as perhaps I would have liked. But that, I’m afraid, is not enough to make the list they’ve drawn up relevant in any way.

The list has been derived thusly:

NowPublic’s formula gauges influence and “publicness” across four categories, including:

* Online Visibility
* Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
* Interactivity and Accessibility
* The “R” Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)

But what does that actually say about someone? Nothing more than that they will readily adopt and use social tools. In some ways, it’s just the top 20 Chatty Cathys in London (guilty as charged), but in other ways it’s not even that.

What amuses me, though, is the reaction to the list. As usual, many are doing the whole “Who they hell are these people?” thing, particularly in the comments on Iain Dale’s blog. Now I wouldn’t begin to claim to know all the UK’s political bloggers, because that’s not really my bag. But Iain’s commenters are only too happy to dismiss any names they don’t recognise on the basis that they don’t recognise them, as if somehow it’s possible to know everyone on the internet including those outside of your sphere of interest and expertise.

Many people have commented on preponderance of journalists in the list - six from the BBC, four from The Guardian, and a few independents. (Two more listees are genuinely famous outside of the internets, and two of us are social media consultants.) Given this list is more about verbosity or GoogleJuice than influence or contribution to the tech community, it should be no surprise to see a lot of (tech) journalists there. For one, it’s their job to be on top of new tools so they sign up to everything going, and secondly, loquaciousness is a prerequisite for being a journalist. If you’re not good with words and happy to talk, then you’re not likely to take a job that relies on just that.

Jess McCabe notes that there’s only one woman on the list (me). Is this a function of the manner in which the list was compiled, or a reflection of the underlying dominance of men in social media? Well, it’s impossible to tell for sure from this distance, but if you look at the Los Angeles list there are nine women in the top 20, so there doesn’t seem to be an inherent bias in the list-making process.

It is, of course, disappointing to see such a male-dominated list. And many have made suggestions as to who else “should” have been on it, but unless there was bias in the list compilation process, then “should” has no part to play in the discussion. Maybe women in the UK aren’t as digitally noisy as men. Certainly there aren’t as many of them in leading positions. But that’s a discussion separate from this one - unless there’s proof that the list compilation process is inherently biased, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they’re just reflecting an existing trend.

Some people are dissociating themselves from the list, with weary sighs and more than a little perplexity. Those of us who’ve been kicking around the blogosphere since well before the invention of the podcast have seen lists like these come and go, and every single one of them was pointless.

Yet we’re all human, and there’s no shame in feeling a little fillip to see your own name listed, even if the manner by which your name was chosen seems rather arbitrary. Despite my intellectual self understanding that the list is a waste of time, my emotional self can’t help but be at least a little happy to have been named.

But ultimately, the list has done exactly what it set out to do. It’s caused a few big name bloggers (predominantly the ones listed…) to write about NowPublic, link to them, and regardless of what is said pass some traffic their way. That is all that this list - and every other that has come before - set out to do. It’s PR. Bizarre and shallow PR perhaps, but nevertheless, the aim of the list is not to teach us something about ourselves, nor to reveal something interesting about the communities of which we are a part, but to provoke us into making some sort of comment, good or bad.

Still, to save you a click, here’s the list, republished in all its daftness:

1. Rory Cellan-Jones
2. Darren Waters
3. Iain Dale
4. Paul Bradshaw
5. Erik Huggers
6. Tom Coates
7. Ewan McIntosh
8. Stephen Fry
9. Nick Robinson
10. Neil McIntosh
11. Suw Charman-Anderson
12. Alan Connor
13. Kevin Anderson
14. Andy Murray
15. Ian Betteridge
16. Robert Peston
17. Jon Kossman
18. Euan Semple
19. Jack Schofield
20. Charles Arthur

You may have noticed, if you visit the site regularly rather than read via RSS, that I have changed the theme I’m using. I recently found Thesis, by Chris Pearson, a WordPress theme that’s been designed specifically to be adapted. It’s very easy to put in a background image and to use a custom stylesheet, and there are all sorts of options that I have yet to delve into.

When CSS became the de facto way to specify the design elements of a web page, I was in the process of leaving the design side of the web, so I deliberately decided not to learn it so that I could make a clean break from that chapter of my life. It was the post-crash era, when there were plenty of designers around who actually knew lots about design, unlike me who had mainly been making it up as I went along.

Of course now I find that it would be really handy to know CSS… oh, the irony! Don’t be surprised if you visit the site one day and it all looks weird - if the weirdness remains, please email me as there’s every likelihood that I could break something and just not realise!

Meantime, I hope you like the new look, and thanks to Gep for the wonderful photo.

Much to my surprise, I managed to get myself an iPhone last week simply by walking into the Tottenham Court Road and asking them if they had any. And despite its shortcomings, I love it. What’s particularly great is the ability to download third party apps that make it even more useful and fun. Now I can read my RSS feeds on my iPhone and have the read items sync to my Mac. I can also sync my Omnifocus to do list and keep up to date with email, Twitter, and my calendar.

Really, the iPhone is like a micro Mac.

My latest addition is an app from Wordpress which will let me write entries from my phone. I’m not sure if this will result in many more posts on CnV, but I’m sure it will result in a lot more typos.

I blogged this on Strange Attractor before Kev and I went off on hols, but thought it was worth cross posting.

Lloyd Davis, Leisa Reichelt and I have been spending a lot of time plotting just lately, and the result of our machinations was the creation, at midnight in a semi-derelict Gothic mansion and with the help of a bolt of lightening, of Fruitful Seminars. The three of us will be putting on a number of day-long seminars on various Web 2.0 subjects over the next few months, starting on 27 June with my session, Making Social Tools Ubiquitous:

Many companies have heard that social tools, such as wikis and blogs, can help them improve communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation. As the best of breed tools are often open source, it is easy and cheap to experiment with pilot projects. But what do you do if you don’t get the level of engagement you’d like? And how do you progress from a small-scale pilot to widespread adoption?

This seminar, run by social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson, will take a practical look at the adoption of social tools within enterprise. During the day you will be lead through each stage of Suw’s renowned social media adoption strategy and will have the opportunity to discuss your own specific issues with the group. You will have access to one of the UK’s best known social media consultants in an intimate setting - with no more than 9 people attending - that will allow you to get the very most out of the day. By the end of the seminar you will have a clear set of next steps to take apply to your own blogs or wikis.

Perfect for CXO executives, managers, and social media practitioners who want to know how to foster widespread adoption of social tools in the enterprise. Perhaps you have already installed some blogs or wikis for internal communications and collaboration, but aren’t getting the take-up you had hoped for; or have successfully completed a pilot and want to roll-out to the rest of the company.

We’re keeping the sessions very small, with a maximum of nine people attending each one, so that everyone has the opportunity to fully take part in discussions. Sessions will be quite practical and participants will be able to really get into the nitty gritty. I think that’s something that’s really missing from conferences and the bigger workshops - you don’t get the chance to really get down and dirty with what’s relevant to you. I want people to come away from my seminar with a really clear idea of what they are going to do next, and how they are going to do it.

Registration is already open - it’s very easy to sign up and payment can be made by PayPal or cheque/bank transfer. The fee includes lunch, tea and coffee.

We also now have a Fruitful Seminars mailing list on Google that is open to anyone to join, where we’ll keep you abreast of progress and you can let us know what you’re thinking.

Kevin and I have started ourselves a new blog - Kits and Mortar. As you might have guessed from the title, it’s about building an eco- and cat-friendly house, something that Kev and I dream of. Right now, we know really very little about self-building, or even about what we want or where we want it. We’re not entirely sure what “cat-friendly design” means either, although I suspect that it’s going to involve providing our future moggies with somewhere from where they can look down upon us.

So Kits and Mortar really is going to be a voyage of discovery. If you’re into house building or cats (or both), please do pop over and have a look, or add our feed to your RSS reader.

Sorry to everyone who has left a comment here only for it not to show up - quite a lot of comments got caught in by Akismet, but the notification emails then got caught up in my Gmail spam trap, so I didn’t realise that there were so many comments awaiting moderation.

If you’ve left a comment and it’s still not shown up, please do let me know.

Oh, and I just want to say… I will delete comments that are irrelevant, blatantly plugging your site/blog/podcast/product, written in all caps with no punctuation and poor spelling, or just plain mean.

Been ages since I’ve joined in with a silly meme, so here goes. From WhatIFoundThere, the Dadaist rock band album cover meme:

Instructions:

1. The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band.
2. The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album.
3. The third picture in Flickr’s Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days any nice appropriately Creative Commons licensed photo* will be your album cover.
4. Use your graphics programme of choice to throw them together, and post the result.

Photo by studebaker2008.

The full quote was:

“We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It’s a messy business, life. It’s hard to figure–full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.”
Henry Bromel, Northern Exposure, The Big Kiss, 1991

What amuses me about this meme is that many of the resulting album covers are far better and more interesting that a lot of real ones. But we really need an Dadaist album cover builder (akin to the LOLcat builder) for the real fun to start.

* You’ll note I changed the photo source. When I looked, most of the “Most Interesting” photos on Flickr are ‘All Rights Reserved’, and as someone who champions openness and sharing online, I have to also respect the wishes of those creators - especially photographers - who do not want to share. I don’t always get it right, but I always try, so rather than just pick the third photo on the most interesting page, I found a nice Creative Commons licensed photo instead.

It’s disappointing to see that Flickr hasn’t really done much else with Creative Commons except produce a rather clunky search page. I’d like to see them do a much more refined CC search, so that one can search across CC licence types. They should also apply the ‘most interesting’ algorithm to CC photos, so that we can see the best of the open photos. I’m sure there’s a lot more imaginative stuff that could be done, but it’s a shame to see Flickr not even doing the basics.

It’s funny how you can take a look at something like Seesmic, and really not get it… until one day, someone shows you the way and suddenly, it all makes sense, it all comes together. Seesmic is about banter, chit chat, conversation. And when you get into it, and you start talking to people, (and you lose your sense of self-consciousness), suddenly, it’s the most addictive thing you’ve seen all year (and all of last year too).

I think I’ve pretty much imported all of the old posts, including the old Blog-City posts that until now had been stuck on my laptop. The formatting’s all gone to hell in a handbasket, but when I have a quiet moment one day I might start trying to fix at least some of the more recent ones. The theme is temporary - it will do until I find one that I prefer. And there are still a few additional tweaks and changes, but overall, it’s come together much faster than I had thought it would. I’ve even got it all set up in Ecto too.

Guess you had better update your RSS feeds now.

OK, so it’s time. I have to move away from Blogware at some point, and the pain may as well start now whilst I’m already too busy to blog much. I have disabled anonymous comments on old post, turned off comments on new posts, and set all other comments to “moderate all”, so that I can make sure that any comments that do get left on all posts are caputured and moved to the new blog. There will be very little activity here til I complete move over, so please accept my apologies for that. It might take a while - I’ll post here just as soon as I have things sorted.

I just noticed that the emails from Blogware informing me that a comment has gone into moderation have been caught in Gmail's spam trap, and that there is no easy way for me to look at any comment beyond the 50th most recent. I fear this means that some of you may have left comments that never appeared, and which never will appear now because they are lost somewhere in the depths of Blogware's admin system.
I'm sorry about that.
I will be moving off Blogware onto an installation of Wordpress at some point, just as soon as I can get round to it.

Today is Chocolate and Vodka's 5th birthday!
My very first post, aptly named Post Number One, was posted on Sunday 16 June 2002 at 02:07 PM BST. I feel reluctant to link to it, because it took me quite a long time to get into my stride on CnV, to find my own voice and to stop trying to be David Weinberger or Kevin Marks (who still hasn't fixed his CSS), who were my bloggy idols back then. When I read the old posts, they do sort of make me cringe a bit, but it's there in the archives, if you're really that interested.
But it's hard to believe that I've been talking shit on the web for five whole years. Wow. And people still come and read it! *shakes head in surprise*
Anyway, happy birthday Chocolate and Vodka! Here's to another five years!

It's not so fresh now, for which I apologise, but there are two episodes of Fresh Lime Soda that you might not have seen if you haven't subscribed to our RSS feed over there.
The first is a podcast on dictation, multitasking and focus.
The second is this discussion about giving presentations:

No idea when we are going to have a moment to record another one, but I suspect it will be when we're both in San Francisco later this month.

I have successfully managed to blog at least once, sometimes more than once, a day for the last seven days, as per my promise to myself. In fact, this post complete the septet. It has been fun - it's reminded me of why I started this blogging lark in the first place. Indeed, I'd say that I've enjoyed it so much that I vow now to blog every day for the next month. How's that for ambition?
What I'm less chuffed about… positive dischuffed about, as it happens… is the fact that this morning's plan to go to the gym was entirely scuppered by my awakening at some point in the middle of the night with awful stomach and back pain. I have no idea what it was, but although it was gone by morning, I lost a couple of hours sleep and just couldn't haul myself out of bed in time. Kevin had a bad night too, so we decided to skip the gym.
Turned out that was a good thing, because Kev's working on a paper for Xtech at the moment, and I'd spent a couple of hours yesterday editing it for him in Google Docs. Sadly, Google Docs has a bit of a crappy UI, and when he checked my revision it only showed him the last sentence I had typed so he thought I hadn't made many changes. When he gave me a print out of his 'new' version, I found that all my edits were missing, so I had to sit with the printout and do it the old fashioned way - with a red pen - before he left for work.
That made me late for coffee with Matt Biddulph, a situation exacerbated by my mobile phone deciding to no longer sync with my Mac. Apple have, at last, enabled native support for the Nokia E61, and have thus automatically disabled the eSeries plugin that used to make iSync work. What they didn't figure in to this was how people who were using the plugin would then sync with their Mac, given that iSync now wants to duplicate my entire calendar and address book because it doesn't recognise that the calendar on my phone is still the same as the one on my Mac. Feh. Stupid developers.
Then I spilt toothpaste down my front.
And at some point during the day I spilt something brown and unidentified onto my microfleece.
But other than that, it's been a great day. I have been working on a white paper I'm writing about citizen journalism and curation which is at that final spit and polish stage. I'm hoping to have it done by Monday, which just happens to also be my deadline.
I've spent a lot of time writing this week: blog posts, this white paper, other bits and pieces that may see the light of day sometime next spring. I have even had an idea for something else that I want to write very soon, even if I don't get round to starting it tonight. All this writing has felt good. True, I've pretty much ignored email and I'm sure there are people out there who think that I'm the most difficult person to get a hold of these days, but by George (any George you like) I've enjoyed it.
I need to write more. It makes me happy.