Gmail invites to give away

There can’t be many people left in the world without a gmail account, but if you’re short of one we’ve got six four three invites to give away. Drop us a line if you want one…

Gmail invites going spare

I’ve got six four three gmail invites to give away - if anyone wants one, drop me a line…

A is for Meme

From Alex Halavais, this one: type each letter of the alphabet into the address bar of your browser, and watch as your life is revealed. Or not, in my case - whether it’s something to do with the way Safari caches previous sites or something else, most of these I haven’t visited for a loooong time. Strange…

a is for ABP Marine Environmental Research

b is for Binary Bonsai

c is for Company Reports Online

d is for Delia Online

e is for Ecademy

f is for Freepint

g is for Glish

h is for Hays Recruitment

i is for IGD

j is for Jeremy Zawodny

k is for Kuro5hin

l is for Lego

m is for Magnatune

n is for Neo Office

o is for Opensource CMS

p is for Punchbaby

q is for Quicktopic

r is forRackspace

s is for Scirus

t is for Timzilla

u is for UK Wire

v is for Version Tracker

w is for Wordpress

x is for X-Plane

z is for Zope

Caffeine and wifi fix

My previously-favourite hotel in Leeds, the Marriot, has joined the roll of shame and started to charge an eye-watering £7 an hour for wifi access (previously it was was free.) So rather than shell out for that and the overpriced (and quite frankly watery) coffee, I’ve decamped to Starbucks. The coffee’s better, but the wifi is slooooowww, the music’s loud enough to intrusive and the signal strength upstairs is patchy.

Is there a valid business model for a chain of coffee shops that has free wifi, no music and decent coffee?

Sometimes I wonder if Dilbert is a documentary…

…rather than a comic strip.

This morning’s strip being a case in point:

What to get your Unix geek for Christmas

Stuck for that last-minute present for the geek in your life? Look no further - simply sign up three new members to the Free Software Foundation, and Richard Stallman will record a voicemail greeting for you…

Product development by speculation

Being a relatively recent Mac convert, I don’t need much persuading that Apple know a thing or two about making innovative products. But the problem with innovative products is that they don’t stay innovative forever - so if you want to hold your position as an innovator, by definition you need to run to stay still.

But if you’re Apple, it seems that you can get a lot of your product development - or at least the off-the-wall ideas and physical design parts - done by your customers. Just sit back and monitor the speculation on the interweb, catch the better ideas and profit…

Something to bear in mind amongst the hype

It’s unfortunately easy to get a bit carried away when it comes to ‘how blogs will change the world’ - but despite some of the more effusive hyperbole, they’re a means to end rather than an end in themselves.

Here’s a blast of sanity from Doc Searls:

The same is happening with blogs. Lots of people will make money with blogs. But many more will also make money because of blogs. We’re talking about leverage here. Blogs are great levers. But jeez, is money the only measure, or the only point, of anything?

Ten Things Your Site Should Be Doing

The festive season is upon us, and it’s the time of the year when thoughts turn to lists and predictions. Over at Digital Web magazine, Nick Finck has got a list of the ten things your website should be doing:

• Offering regularly updated information (blogs, CMSs, etc.)
• Increased efficiency in news and information distribution (RSS, ATOM, etc.)
• Alternative methods of information distribution (email newsletters, RSS, del.icio.us, etc.)
• Enhanced notification and announcement systems (pings, email alerts, etc.)
• A place for your site’s users to offer feedback and input (blog comments, forums, etc.)
• Improved performance and code optimization (CSS, XHTML, etc.)
• Multiple ways to access information (multi-faceted navigation, folksonomies, etc.)
• Intelligent system to system communication (XML, SOAP, etc.)
• Collaborative communication and documentation (Wikis, blogs, etc.)
• On-demand support feedback (user-driven FAQs, click-to-chat, etc.)

Clearly not all of these are going to be appropriate to every site and business, but there’s a lot to think about here. Perhaps most significant is that all of the functionality and technology that’s suggested above is interactive - which will have implications for the time and effort that will need to go into maintaining sites. And this in turn will make the differences between proactive organisations even more pronounced - is your site going to remain static while those of your competitors are constantly updated and refined?

The first (and probably only) time I’ll make it into the NYT

The Firefox ad finally made it into the New York Times today, and my name’s in there (in tiny, weeny, really very small type). Which is the first and very likely the only time I’ll find myself in the NYT…