Archive for July, 2008
Why you should work from home more often
Jul 28th
I’m lucky to have an employer with a sensible telecommuting policy – all of our staff are entitled to spend one day per week working from home. If this isn’t something your company does, this column from the Economist provides a useful summary of the reasons why they should. The benefits of telecommuting are realised [...]
Tweeting on the bus
Jul 26th
Earlier this afternoon, as I was passing Angel station on a bus, I posted to Twitter. I’ve subsequently discovered my ‘tweet’ turning up at this site – Tweets on the bus. The concept is simple – it collects Twitter posts containing the term “on the bus”, and presents them all on one web page. It’s [...]
Wealth of Networks – a semi-account
Jul 25th
Yesterday I went along to the Wealth of Networks conference at Imperial College. I was only able to attend the morning sessions, but it was a valuable chance to hear the thoughts of various individuals with diverse backgrounds but a shared understanding of the power of networks (in the broader sense of the word). The [...]
Pubs, epidemiology and geo-mashups
Jul 23rd
I recommend reading this blog post from Jeffrey Veen, author of “The Art & Science of Web Design”. You may be familiar with Dr John Snow as the man who successfully traced the source of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak. A pub on Broadwick Street in Soho is named after him, and the water-pump that started [...]
Twitter in plain English
Jul 17th
After my previous post on not “getting” Twitter, I’ve spent a fair bit of time getting to grips with it and have been sucked in to a considerable extent. I’ll post more about my road-to-Damascus Twitter conversion in the next couple of days, but in the meantime I’d refer any interested readers to this video, [...]
Microupdates and me (and you)
Jul 15th
Further to my previous post about not ‘getting’ Twitter, here’s an article from the OpenObjects blog with a few examples of how this sort of thing (micro-blogging? micro-updates?) can be useful: http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2008/07/microupdates-and-you-aka-twits-in.html I especially like the Firefox anecdote. I’m starting to get the idea that it’s the ancillary geek-built tools that constitute the real value [...]
Why don’t I get Twitter?
Jul 15th
These days a lot of people like me are addicted to Twitter. Developers across the globe are coming up with interesting tools to visualise, aggregate and automatically syndicate Twitter content (or “tweets”). At conferences and speeches, audiences keep up a constant back-channel of chat using Twitter. I sporadically post to Twitter. But I don’t feel [...]
Word clouds and silver linings
Jul 14th
Recently I carried out some user testing on a late-beta website. At the end of each test session, participants were given a piece of paper listing over 100 adjectives – both positive and negative – and asked to tick the ones most applicable to the website they’d been using. As the week of testing came [...]
Online mind-mapping tools
Jul 14th
What are mind mapping tools? In short, they aim to visualise the conceptual relationships that make up the structure of thought. When used for project planning they allow you to break down the central objective into a set of smaller, inter-related items – these items can then be arranged hierarchically. The end result is an [...]
