Howard Dean is out of the race

Says the BBC. So I guess that means it’s back to campaining as usual.

The difference between communities and networks

I’ve often thought the postings on Corante and Many2Many get a bit on the pseudish side, but this is a rather good definition of the difference between online communities and social networks.

More Sumantra Ghoshal notes

Here’s some more notes that I made during the Sumantra Ghoshal lecture last week. I still haven’t found looked for the reference, but he attributed it to Rosemary Stewart (Stuart?) during the lecture itself…

Overcoming traps of overwhelming demands

* develop an explicit personal agenda, then start to link up short/medium/longterm goals
* slow down: reduce, prioritise, organise demands
* structure contact time
* manage expectations
* conciously build social networks

Balls

I have no idea what this is, but it kept me amused for all of 10 minutes…

Lindash

Every so often you hear about companies that have a collective corporate sense of humour failure, sue or otherwise attempt to intimidate the little guy, and end up with massive amounts of PR egg all over their faces.

The flip side to that is the little guys who have the presence of mind when faced with the writs and supenas (supeonas? supeanas? who knows? who cares?) to maintain a sense of humour and basically take the piss out whoever it is who is suing them.

This seems like one of those little guys - the big bad ogre of Redmond seems to object to the use of ‘Lindows’ as a tradename - so rather than roll over and rename it to something (allegedly) non-infringing, instead it’s now known as Lin—s, aka Lindash. Short of explicitly saying “up yours, Gates”, the Lin—s website couldn’t make it much clearer…

The online drafting pencil museum

There’s something for everyone on the internet - this is the drafting pencil museum, dedicated to preserving knowledge about hollow sticks that hold pencil leads.

Which reminded me of the set of my dad’s old draughting tools that lived in a box of bits and pieces while I was a kid. There was something uniquely fascinating about the dividers and the compasses and the pens that you adjusted the width of by turning a tiny knurled screw. Needless to say, the fascination of tiny knurled screws to ten year-olds meant that my brother and I trashed them completely over the years. They’d probably be worth a small fortune to a collector by now.

Brickfest

Would it make me too much of a geek to state publicly that I rather like the sound of this?

Google IPO

Via Guardian Online, the CEO of Forrester Research sticks the boot into the pending will-they-won’t-they Google IPO.

Leaving aside for a moment that it was the likes of Forrester Research who were as responsible as the VC funds and MSNBC for hyping up the dot.com boom, he’s actually got a point about the fact that Google’s technology is a farily indefensible advantage:

Yes, Google’s scheme yields fantastic results. But the Web is inexorably dynamic. During the next five years, it will move from containing primarily file-based content (HTML pages) to containing more executable content (e.g., online gaming or new structure imposed by Web services such as XML). When that happens, the usefulness of link-based search will wane. Simply stated, Google is very much of the times, with no advantage in the more structured, executable Internet that lies ahead.

The usefulness of link-based searches are already adversely affected by movements in pages - Googling for ‘Chris Moyles’ pulls up a page of mine about two-thirds of the way down - but clicking through lands on an entirely different page since a minor cockup reimporting the Moveable Type database. I suppose eventually the Googlebot will sort this out when it spiders me again, but in the meantime there’s a semi-broken link polluting the results.

Having disposed of that, he opines about the IPO price:

So you get the message–I like Google. But the hype, silliness and rumored $15 billion-plus market cap of the company’s impending IPO beckons. Is Google’s search good? Yes. Is the company worth tens of billions? No.

Actually, I think that’s missing the point. The IPO price of Google will be a function of what people will be prepared to pay for it - and I don’t believe that everyone has recovered from the collective loss of sanity that the last stock market boom was. The fact that there is hype and silliness and talk of $15 billion suggests that there’s still plenty of people out there prepared to bet their shirts on the next big thing.

Headphones that work

For some reason I’ve ended up with ears the wrong shape to use the majority of in-ear style headphones - I either screw them into my head hard enough that they get stuck once the blood dries out, or hold my head veeerrrrryyyy veeeeeerrrrryyy still so they don’t fall out.

Then I wandered into Dixons (oh, the shame) with a voucher that had been sitting in my pocket for ages, and found these Sony MDR-EX71SLB earbuds. I really didn’t expect them to work very well, but I was wrong - they’re bloody brilliant. Not only do they fit, but the sound quality is damn good as well - I’m no audiophile, so I can’t rant about the lush warmness of the midrange and how the upper reaches of the treble response caresses my synapses, but there’s thump and there’s tish, and they block out the background noise pretty well too.

The only minor gripes I’d have are that the rubbery sealy bits look disgusting when you pull them out of your ears because they get coated in wax - although the advantage of that is noone will ever want to borrow them, still less steal them - and because they’re effectively sealing your ear canal you’re conscious of the noise of swallowing and so at first until you get used to it.

All I need now is the iPod to go with them. I’d settle for an iRiver, but that might have to wait for a few more invoices to be settled…

The offside rule…

…explained in Flash, courtesy of the Guardian.

Now I understand…