Marketing Communications
The exam is this afternoon (1-3). As is obvious by the fact that I’m currently blogging and not frantically revising, the content should be fairly predictable and (hopefully) straight-forward. Famous last words of course, so I may well stagger out of the Sports Hall at 3pm with my brain leaking out of my ears wishing I’d taken it all a little more seriously. Time will tell.
Filed under MBA | Comment (0)10 (bad) blogging habits
I’ve probably fallen foul of at least one of the bad habits by linking to this, but here goes anyway: The 10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers
Filed under Geek | Comment (0)The aftermath…
of a particularly intensive revision session.
Plaxo To Launch Address Software To Annoy Us All (from Techdirt)
In fact, the very
next post I saw described exactly that:
I have to admit, for all the hype it’s received, I don’t understand the
point of Plaxo at all. Everything I read about it makes it seem like a 1999
overhyped, overfunded, half-baked idea. It was founded by a former Napster
founder, and the idea is to let people href="http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5911375.htm">constantly
“ping” everyone in their address book to make sure the information they
have is current. First off, even if this is a useful feature, that’s all it
is. It’s a feature. It’s not anything to build a business around. If it’s
really that useful, I’m sure the next generation of email clients will just
build it in. Second, I don’t even think it’s that useful. In fact, I think it
sounds annoying. In the months that they’ve been beta testing, I’ve received
one such Plaxo ping, and I ignored it. I don’t want to be bothered all the
time from people who I haven’t spoken to in some time, having a robot ask me
to update my contact info. Personally, if I realize I’ve fallen out of touch
with someone I want to keep up with, I send them a personal note to see how
they’re doing. An automated ping isn’t exactly the friendliest way to say
hello - and I might even consider it spam in some cases.
[Techdirt]
quite so harsh about the idea - if it sat behind the scenes and there was some
form of brokerage going on that meant I could control the process, wouldn’t
that make it somewhat more acceptable?
Highly unoriginal thoughts about mobile devices… (from Plasticbag)
They might be
unoriginal, but they’re still bloody good ideas.
Does it even have to
be a mobile-based application? My phone syncs with my desktop, so
anything that’s in my phone is also sat in a database that’s addressable from a
web client. If my contacts database could ping your contacts
database through some kind of a trackback mechanism, wouldn’t that have the same
effect?
Filed under Geek | Comment (1)Notes from a conversation with href="http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/">Dan Hill pertaining (in
particular) to address books on mobile phones. I make no claim to their
originality or their novelty. Almost certainly they’re on page six of a really
well known influential book that I almost certainly should have read by
now.Thought one: The mobile phone address book as a web of trust.
This is really trivial, but it’s also really powerful - the telephone numbers
in your mobile phone all identify actual people (however you decide to encode
the metadata of their names). The telephone number is like the unique id
number that you give a field in a database. So what does it mean if a pair of
phones have each others numbers in their address book? Doesn’t it imply a
relationship? Perhaps even a similarity? Maybe it even means that you’re more
likely than average to like each other? So if you pinged every phone that’s
got internet access (and the phone was happy for you to do this) you could
pretty easily make a social network map of pretty much everyone in the
country. This is not a new idea.Thought two Self-assembly address books. So you’ve lost your
phone and with it you’ve lost all of your numbers. So you ring up two or three
of your friends and they amend their record to your new number and you add
their numbers to your phone. Then you trigger the ‘fix my address book’
trigger and sit back and watch. Your phone pings your friends’ phones. Their
phones ping their friends’ phones. Everyone who has your old number in it is
informed of your new number, and they ping your phone and build in the
reciprocal links. And those people who appear most interconnected between the
groups of friends you’ve mentioned are also added to your phone. An instant
sense of your social network. An instant way of grabbing your local space…
This is probably not a new idea.Thought three Distributed 192. 192 was (until very recently)
the telephone number for directory enquiries in the UK. You ring it, tell them
the name and address of the person you’re looking for and they give you a
number. Brilliant. Except if you don’t have their address of course. And it
costs money and stuff. And it doesn’t work with mobiles. So what if instead of
doing that, you typed in a search term, “Coates” into your phone and got it to
ping everyone in your address book, aggregate the results and display them to
you. Wouldn’t that be easier? I don’t know whether this is a new idea or not.
I would doubt it.Thought four Collaborative work over mobile phones. So you’ve
got a web-of-trust and you have a communications medium. So basically that’s
friendster then with a rather more intensive old-skool version of instant
messaging (let’s call it “speech”). I wonder if there are people out there
working on social software for phones. Or maybe social software that doesn’t
actually have much of a human interface at all, something that’s really
collaboratively sense related. Like a cyber-pet with two buttons that you can
press - one if you really like a place and one if you really hate it. And then
that’s geocoded and shared through your web of trust (because you’re similar
to people you know). When you go into a place that everyone dislikes, your
cyberpet freaks out. And if you go to a place that everyone likes, it starts
to purr pleasantly in your pocket… I bet someone’s thought of that as
well…href="http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/05/highly_unoriginal_thoughts_about_mobile_devices.shtml#comments">Read
the comments
NewsGator 1.2 Released!
This is a
seriously impressive piece of software. Worth every penny,
which is saying something for shareware.
Filed under Geek | Comment (0)http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=593
| href="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=593">CommentsNewsGator 1.2 has been released! I
won’t duplicate the release announcements…here are the important
links:
- Blogger
- Radio Userland
- BlogX
- dotnetweblogs.com
- Movable Type (courtesy Matt
Berther)- EraBlog.NET.
Strategic Management exam
By 4 o’clock this afternoon it was all over, and not before time. I’d expected that it was going to be hard work, but then I’d also figured that I’d done a bundle of work in the last few weeks and was pretty much up to speed on the core topics, with a reasonable coverage of the rest. So although I didn’t feel like it was going to be a walk in the park, I didn’t expect to crawl out of the exam room a gibbering wreck.
Boy, was I wrong.
Actually, to be fair to examiner and examinee, the two-from-six essay section could have been a lot worse. In an ideal world the questions would have been exactly what I was looking for, but in the circumstances they weren’t too far off. So because I did one of the essay question first and then got to the multichoice, I thought that I was going OK - at least at first.
Multi-guess would have been nearer the mark. The sample paper - and the online version from the Hill and Jones website - were way off the mark in terms of the standard of questions. I reckon that I guessed - as in didn’t have a bloody clue - on about 25%. Another 25% I was down to a choice of two or three options, another quarter I’m reasonably sure that the answer was the right one, and the rest should be correct. But my brains were about leaking from my ears by the time the section was finished, and it didn’t leave me in a particularly good mood for completing the second and final essay. The detail in the questions was unbelievable - never mind read Hill and Jones, I think you would have needed to memorise the bloody thing in order to be in with a shout.
Which is all a bit of a pain, really. The exam is marked with each of the sections having equal weighting on the average - so if I’ve done as well as I figure on the written questions and screwed up the MCQ, that will drag the mark down substantially. This is one that I would really have liked to get a high mark on - not least because I’m one 70+ mark away from a distinction, but also just because of the sheer volume of work that I’ve out in over the last few weeks.
Filed under MBA | Comment (1)Soaring USA
This guy has a flying blog. I’m jealous - I haven’t been in the air for far too long…
Filed under Play | Comment (0)Fall of the Roman empire
I’ve often wondered what the last days of the Roman empire looked like, and in bleaker moments wondered if it looked something like today.
Gary Hart, who isn’t going to be the next US president, draws some parallels with then and now. One of the saner comments from an American politician that I’ve read in the last couple of years, so maybe his retirement from the race is our loss…
http://www.garyhartnews.com/hart/blog/archives/000016.php
Filed under Me | Comment (1)Combining blogging and usenet
More thinking going on about blogging, and how it relates to this whole new world that’s supposed to be out there. A post which is most definately “quick and dirty”, so expect this to get refined or revoked as time goes on…
My problem is this - there’s at least a million blogs out there that I could be reading, and some have content that I’m a) interested in; b) could find useful either now or in the future. But at the moment I’m restricted to accessing them either by serendipity of links from somewhere else; by explicit action on my part such as subscribing to an RSS feed; or by stumbling across them as the result of a search.
The beauty of weblogs is the sheer volume and variety of content - but that’s the achilles heel for me as well. The content is much less structured, and lends itself much more towards one-to-many outbound communication - I can tell the world about what I’m doing, but facilities such as trackback and comments apart, it’s not particularly easy for the world to ask me about what I’m up to.
Contrast that with Usenet. It’s the other way around here - I can ask the world, and the world can reply to me. Never mind that the signal to noise ratio is pretty ropey, and the threaded nature of the postings never really made it particularly easy to follow (are threads something that would be designed if we hadn’t got them already?) Where newsgoups do win out is when you combine a) the ease of posting and response on a one to many basis; b) the sheer volume of past content and c) the fact that you can search them pretty much at will from the Google Groups tab. But the killer fact about usenet is the inherent categorisation involved - if I want to discuss Barney The Purple Dinosaur I can read and post to alt.barny.die.die.die - it’s a self-selected walled garden of Barney-related content, which makes for inherent navigation to the right forum in a virtually hassle-free way.
So how do you combine the best of both worlds? How do you keep the richness and variety of the blogging world, and combine it with the categorisation and threading that is an inherent characteristic of Usenet?
Filed under Geek | Comment (0)