The Brotherton organ

The large round thing in the middle that I was talking blogging about.

Blogging from the Brotherton…

…as a bit of light relief from strategic intent.

This is a room that was definitely designed by someone who had seen the reading room at the British Library - round, booklined, pillared and with the maddest art deco chandlier that’s completely wasted on the room because noone ever looks up at it. The whole room is a strange combination of green marble and a parqeut floor that’s been polished fanatically by men in brown coats for the last sixty years. And the architecture provides the echo - dropping a pencil the other side of the room causes everyone to stop and look up, which means that there’s very little talking going on - just a background hum of rustling papers and scraping chairs. (And my keyboard rattling.)

In the middle there’s a huge round desk about fifteen feet in diameter where the catalogue computers live - from the ground floor it’s quite hard to work out what it is, but from above you suddenly realise there’s a grating across the top - presumably it’s some kind of a ventilation system, but it also looks to me as if it’s where the mad organist rises up from. Either that or a huge library version of the control panel of the Tardis.

There’s also a smell about the place - it’s a strange mixture of old paper and floor polish, enhanced by the way that the air is so dry. It’s a quintesentially “library” smell - somehow as soon as you get a lungful you know that you’re in a world of dry academic literacy. It’s completely different from the other library on campus - that’s a seventies monstrosity built almost entirely out of grey concrete and formica, enhanced by 30 years-worth of discarded chewing gum embedded into the carpet.

Because of the way the shelving is distributed, whenever I’m in here I’m usually downstairs in the west building - to reach it you have to go to the front of the library, through the main dome section, out through a corridor into the west building, through the shelving area , down three flights of stairs and into the bowels of the building. The first time I saw the place I half-expected to find plans for a bypass stored in a filing cabinet with a sign saying “Beware of the leopard”. Walking down there is like stepping into a sensory deprivation tank - there’s very little outside light filtering down, so you’re completely cut off from the outside world. You can imagine small, grey wrinkled creatures that scuttle from shelf to shelf lining up the spines.

What’s up, doc?

According to this - What Blogging Archetype Are You Most Like? Find out with GAZM.org! - I’m a Doc Searles.

Hmm…

Metaphysics of blogging

Part of me says that this - Electric Venom:Blogging Thoughts and Philosophies - falls into the ‘angels on the head of a pin’ school, but the categorisation seems pretty apt.

There’s a category (or maybe a subgroup) missing, though - the “me, me, me” contingent who are in love with the sound of their own keyboards…

Shirky’s law

The one that started the debate - Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality.

Tipping point

The tipping point, and how it works with blogs.

First mover advantage in the blogosphere…

Blog marketing

It’s actually about marketing your blog, but the advice is sound for marketing anything else.

Mob-blogging

Something about this story - BBC NEWS | Technology | Mafia turns to 3G video phones - on the BBC website makes me suspicious. Either the BBC is being more than usually technically-illiterate, or someone is feeding them press releases. Using 3G phones to send pictures of the ballot papers? 3G phones? 3G? Have I mentioned 3G enough yet?

Assuming that the Italian mobile market is reasonably similar to the UK, and 3G is so far - ahem - less than successful, it seems a tad unlikely that 3G is being used for this rather than bog-standard 2.5G MMS.

Which means that either the BBC hack who wrote this piece has got hold of the phrase 3G and is using it to death because they like the sound of it, or the story originated from the PR department of Hutchison. The copious details about the rollout and breathless plans certainly lends a bit more background than was strictly necessary.

Cynic, me?

Blogging insight system?

A taxonomy of blogging insight?

Upper third = the mavens and the bloggopseuds

Middle third = the missing link between upper and lower

Lower third = the random white noise of “”what I had for breakfast today”.

Wonder which one I fit into?

Power laws and Clay Shirkey

Power laws and Clay Shirkey, or why one blog becomes the centre of gravity. Now try finding a commercial exploitation of that phenomenon…