Nick W's blog

I don't think i've overslept more than an hour in years, but today i managed to surface at 14:30! Sheesh, forgive my absence this morning folks, soon as i've sorted some stuff out i'll be around again

Hope everyone's been having fun this weekend. I've been busy struggling to put the finishing touches on a new project so please forgive my conspicuous absense :)

Now robyn is walking (started at 9.5mts he beams proudly) we've also been having fun in and around the house playing chase, and learning that not all terrain is even heh..

Possibly it's just me, but recently i've been warming to Microsoft more and more. Once an avid MS basher, I still am at heart, they're just such an easy and fun target, but Google have, at least in my mind, taken MS's long standing position of "uber-evil-corp" and MS have become the underdog.

I watch very little television, like most here I suspect. Tonight however is special... Since Sunday, i've been finally getting to see the new Dr. Who - and man, everything i heard was true!

Danny just made me laugh out loud with his reasoning as to why he also posted the MC Hammer Non Story about GOOG. What is it about blogging, and RSS that makes us news bloggers do this?

The big questions im asking myself afer checking out Ning is "is this a significant app, or is it significant only in the fact that it's kinda fun?". Maybe being kinda fun is part of the point, being able to build social apps of the Flickr or Craigslist variety

At first glance, Jimmy Wales' new project, WikiBooks, would seem to be an enormously ambitious idea: To create a free, distributable, GPL'd curriculum of text books for educators and students of all ages. It *is* ambitious, but bearing in mind that Jimmy is the geezer behind Wikipedia, that now contains nearly 3/4M articles, it's not unlikely he'll succeed.

Did you know, that the annual conference of Web2.0, the stage for consumer generated media, power to the people and general rah rah rah'ing of all things anti-coporate control costs nearly $3000 to attend?

Concerning the highly amusing tantrum that Hugh Macleod threw recently when his pimping of some wine brand got a little criticism, the BBC's Tom Coates makes what i feel is very important post about weblog marketing in general.

Here's a facinating series of articles on RSS that concludes by talking about RSS as a content api. It's a little out there, but there are some good points made on how RSS can be used for far more than the Simple Syndication it was orginally intended for.

A few days back, i read a post by David Tayor that asked "What fraction of Web pages are original content?" It's an interesting observation on aggregator sites and blogs (such as Threadwatch) and how very little of the content of "stories" is actually original.

Jesse Andrews alterted me me to an interesting, but as of yet, vapourware project called AJAXOffice. The intention is to build an entire Office suite with AJAX. What it lacks, is server space of course, if it's web based, then the filesystem should be web based also - and that's where Google or Yahoo! could theoretically come in...

P2P isn't something i use particularly often. I know how to do it, i know what apps i like, and i do occasionally want to broaden my horizons with a little digital media :) Im not so typical though, and P2P is being hailed as the only killer broadband app by Om Malik, who details a conversation he had with a uk firm that monitor web traffic patterns.

I've been trying to read an article by Jeff Jarvis called Who wants to own content? pointed out to me by Linda all day. But you know how these things go, some days are just BUSY. I finally got around to reading it, and it's a killer.

As part of our return to personal blogs at Threadwatch I wanted to start a column on an area that facinates me. Several areas actually, that could loosely be termed under the "evolving web".

Well, i've been finishing the redesign as you might have guessed :) We have 2 sponsors ready to go, and their ads are done and now im just working on the adsense (yeah, i was surprised they took me aswell heh..) - I got some nice help from a chap at G$ to setup and may have to speak again before i finally put it up..

Im hoping to do it tomorrow, but if the adsense still looks shite then i might wait till monday.

Other than that, I have been teaching Robyn (my 3mth old) the horsey game, she's now big enough to think it's very funny to sit on my knee and get bounced up and down like a mad thing - very funny indeed!

My dog Bailey who recently had an operation on her leg is now unofficially over it, she's going mental after 5wks on the lead while she recovers but it's a good sign things are on the mend and she even managed to jump over the neighbors garden fence to get a ball (with me being dragged over the fence in the process) today but no harm done. Hoping she can start out for gentle runs in a week or so...

Oh.. and i've been tentatively laying plans for new sites, not to take anything away from threadwatch but there are things that i want to write about that dont fit very well here, so im securing domains, and help where needed - if you have an idea of what might be good say so, if you want to do something on a subject of interest, talk to me!

You know the drill...

This is the weekend, free thread, tell us what you've been up to and generally waffle on about your weekend...

As infoworld reports like many others today on problems with Google's Blogger tool, the property deal they made back in February begins to make sense.

Blogger's Biz Stone said on the Blogger weblog that the reason Blogger was suffering performance issues was not down to hardware, but power. They just don't got enough juice for all dem busy blogger folks...

Meanwhile, Phil Ringnalda posted his surmise on the 30acre, $1.9 million property buy in The Dalles, Oregon

It seems logical doesn't it? And would explain the mystery of the Oregan facility that everyone was scratching their heads about last month.

Is GOOG running out of juice?

Yesterday we discussed this Wired article featuring well known Search spammer Greg Boser of Web Guerrilla. As a result of those discussions, and talks elsewhere, one thing has become very apparent: Search marketers are divided on how they define both what they do, and why they do it. This post will suggest that it might be time to look at redefining, or perhaps creating new terminology for the differing schools of thought.

Follow the title link for the full post.

If you missed seeing the short lived Google X, which was a Google interface resembling the Apple OS X desktop interface, you're in luck:

Google X Mirror

Now, i've not been very happy with Google of late, over the Autostink debacle, but sheesh, if rumours and speculation prove true, and it turns out that Apple's over zealous lawyers have been set on this, then i will gladly hand over the medal of most evil, once cool corp, to them.

What's not to like about that?