There’s an awful lot of rubbish being spouted presently about the semantic web, classification, tagging and folksonomies - from both sides of the argument. Euan Semple works in the field for the BBC, and has come up with one of the more intelligent summaries of the situation that I’ve read:
The web works because […]

Filed under ‘reactionary old farts’:
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.

That’s the president-elect of the American Library Association, reacting to some criticism of his article in the Los Angeles Times which suggested […]

I should probably just splice in an RSS feed from 43 Folders, there’s that much good stuff there. Here’s a couple of ideas from the latest gem:

Flame yourself - Grab yourself a free email account from someplace like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail and use it your as private punching bag. Every time you’re […]

…who insist on loading their presentations with transition gizmos and sound effects:
…bear in mind that the participants who are still entertained by the twenty-fifth “ker-ching” are probably the ones that you will least want to find yourself bonding with afterwards.

(Courtesy of Beyond Crayons)

Previously I posted about a technique I use for making my passwords more difficult to guess, but easier to remember. Then today I came across a post on another blog on the same subject - a slightly more complex technique than I prefer, but a post that has sparked a huge number of […]

Courtesy of an anonymous recruiter at ITToolbox.com:

I am going to briefly discuss the major “GRIPES” that I hear from people about recruiters and I encourage readers to also discuss the TOP 3 things that they hate about recruiters as a discussion forum on the topic. Maybe we can later rank them in order as a […]

John Naughton has a well-considered rant about “the copyright industry’s crazed drive towards the propertization of everything” (his words):

Every cultural artefact that our civilisation has valued is the result of an artist’s conscious and unconscious borrowing from the works of others. Lock down the borrowing and you lock down our culture.

And he quotes from Virginia […]

LinkedIn has been around for a while now, as one of the more established social networking services - and they’ve just launched some new functionality to their existing site, LinkedIn Jobs.

On the face of it, it’s not too dissimilar to many other job boards - you see details of the role, the company, and the […]

Here’s an unashamedly Mac-centric review of a number of outliner and task manager packages - it’s a long list, and it ranges from basic stripped-down lists to some packages that I suspect the authors would have difficulty explaining.

Ted Goranson: About This Particular Outliner

For the record, my current favourite is DevonThink, which pulls together elements of […]

I don’t often read The Financial Times on a day-to-day basis, but I picked up a complimentary copy from a hotel yesterday and spotted an interesting article on the back page.

It was headlined “Accessories at the core of Apple’s plans for the iPod” (here’s a link to the article, but it will scroll behind the […]

“Thinking outside the box” is one of my least favourite cliches, so when I came across Joyce Wycoff’s “whimsical journey” (her words) to find a replacement, I thought it was worth posting.

From the 125 suggestions, these are the top 4:

There is no box

Escape the matrix

Spark the gap

Thinking past the horizon

I’m not sure that any of […]

Some pros and cons of online meetings, from Robin Good of Corante.

While conference calls are a great way of bringing together a group of geographically dispersed people, they’re often frustrating experiences, particularly if you’re using a standard desktop phone. One of the problems of using a standard desktop phone on hands-free is the sound quality - they’re usually half-duplex meaning that you can speak, […]

We’ve had some Gmail invites to give away over the last couple of weeks (sorry, all gone for now) - but if you’re new to the service, this might be of interest.

Jim Barr’s Complete Collection Of Gmail Tips is a complete collection of all the tips he’s posted on gmailtips.com It’s worth a […]

I need to start by stating that over the last few years I have become quite a fan of Seth Godin - his articles, his blog, and until recently also his books. That was until I read Purple Cow.
Am I alone, but is this book merely a case of “the kings new clothes”…
The one thing […]

I’ve lost count of the number of user accounts that I have to remember passwords for - so like most of the rest of the human race, I have a tendency to use the same password for everything. Simple to remember, which is great - but the need for a strong password is even […]

If you’re suffering from the distraction of the web when you’re meant to be doing something else, here’s a neat trick courtesy of Mark Wieczorek at MarkTAW.com:

The Internet is a vast repository of Time Wasters, and if you’re like me, the activity that signals that I’m about to lose focus is opening the web browser. […]

Spotted on Frank Patrick’s Focussed Performance Business Blog:

“Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.”
    — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A nice sentiment to remember when the temptation to get lost in the […]

Dave Pollard writes a consistently interesting (and prolific!) blog on a wide variety of subjects, mainly centering around business innovation and knowledge management. There’s so much there it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with everything that he posts, but much of what he writes is worth reading.

This article from a couple of days […]

We all have days when despite a to-do list a mile long, we’ll find any excuse not to get on with the task inhand - or indeed any task. Regardless of best intentions, it’s all too easy to put something off when a few minutes would be enough to get the job underway […]