Having a website is essential in today’s media landscape for one simple reason. You don’t exist until I can hyperlink to a website containing examples of your work and describing what you do. This is particularly true in today’s new media landscape. For the minimalist among you a facebook or myspace page is the bare minimum. For those of you that take your work seriously though a website is more efficient.
Today was the Global Action day for Burma. The event was centered around a march from the Tate Britain, via the Houses of Parliament before arriving at Trafalgar Square at which point several speeches were made. You can recognise those who were part of the protest for the red ribbons they wore and the t-shirts. I met two friends who were taking photographs, Danfung Dennis and Crina Boros. Danfung has had quite a few interesting assignments.
There was a time when you would wake up and it’s only half an hour later that the world around you would be clearly visible. In today’s web 2.0 world you wake up and twenty other people are wishing each other good morning. Many are celebrating that it’ Friday and others have pathetic status messages about 40 days of celibacy, about being overworked and all those other messages. Of course everyone has the right to their feelings and to their own experiences but as certain individuals spend more and more time online they notice these status messages and trends and get really tired.
Whilst listening to Macbreak weekly I heard about Editgrid, a web based spreadsheet that resembles many others with a difference. It’s optimised for the Iphone if you go to iphone.editgrid.com. It’s an interesting implementation which can as easily be edited online as offline. This is great for those that may need quick access to a spreadsheet without the weight of a laptop at the same time. It’s a simple to use application which doesn’t take a long time to sign up to and gives you flexibility.
In today’s Twittervox episode we had Nik Butler talking about his idea of the flatlister. The concept is based around the idea that when someone is promoting themselves and building their own persona they are a flat lister. In other words they are in charge of their own persona and their own reputation. This carries on from a topic that was discussed by Jeff Pulver when he asked whether we prefer to use our real name or a nickname.
Travel with an i pod touch is great because of what it can do. I was able to test the usability of the device on two flights between Geneva and London and found the experience to be good. Whilst I was travelling on the tube I prefered to keep it hidden so I listened to podcasts but once I got to the airport I changed tact. It’s at this point that I started to watch video programs.
Joost recently went out of private beta and anyone can join. It hasen’t changed much in the last few months in terms of look and interface and there are quite a few programs giving error messages. I’m already looking forward to what will come after Joost.
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Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience." (Facebook as of this morning) Reliability is the single most important thing for a website. If, as they suggest, facebook is down for a few hours then that is demonstrating one of the key reasons why my web presence is spread across so many different sites on the World Wide Web.
I’ve flown geneva to London so many times that I’m completely indifferent about the flight. I’m not so indifferent about the consistent flight delays that I always get. At the moment today’s delay is nothing but one hr fourty. That’s a delay that lasts longer than the flight. I wish flying was like catching the tube. Tap in, get on, tap out, get off and done. (stats for Luton Airport wifi) They should provide free wifi in airports so that we are fooled into thinkng we’re not in a boring airport.
Since I had some free time I went over to the Old Theatre of the London school of economics and what we found out from that conversation is that people don’t trust television. According to one of the chairs this was at a ratio of 4:3. This is an interesting situation since the question of trust is one that as academics we all worry about. Any student, whether a primary school child, an undergrad or a grad knows one thing.