bloggers

Work in digital, and in Cambridgeshire/Lincolnshire?

December 22, 2011 By Dan Thornton

Just a quick note to say the date has been set for the next Digital People in Peterborough meetup. It’ll be January 19th at The Brewery Tap in Peterborough, right by Peterborough train station.

Digital People in Peterborough (#DPiP) is an informal gathering of geeks, whether you’re a developer, designer, database admin, blogger, app developer. It’s a chance for freelancers to get out of the home office, and for those in large companies to chat with likeminded people. We meet around once a month in a pub setting for an informal gathering, and also arrange some more unique events (Such as a successful family BBQ and fun day last year for digital geeks with kids).

If you’re in the area, there’s the:

So there’s no excuse for not popping along and saying hello.

Note to potential sponsors: We’ve got some ideas for some very cool events over the next 12 months, so if you’d be interested in supporting or sponsoring the group in some way, please let me know.

The real power of parenting bloggers, mommy bloggers – all bloggers

April 9, 2009 By Dan Thornton

The real power of parenting and mommy bloggers isn’t their scale, the fact they’ve self-organised, or the speed with which they react.

It’s the fact that anyone looking after children at home has the motivation and energy to write entertaining content at all – it’s the perfect example of how strong the desire for connection, self-expression, self-employment and identity can be.

(If you can’t guess, I’ve spent the first day in while looking after my son while his mother went to work. He was a complete angel despite the fact he’s suffering with conjunctivitis, but I’m still exhuasted despite the fact our crowning achivement was getting dressed and out of the house early enough to get some shopping!)

Even after all this time, I’m still discovering new blogs by people in circumstances which make you amazed they find the time and energy to get in front of the computer, whether it’s looking after a child, or coping in an amazingly comedic way with Hodgkins Lymphoma (a type of cancer).

It’s why any attack which lumps together bloggers as one generic collection of amateurs is idiotic and insulting (such as this brilliant rebuttal by Danny Sullivan to a collection of newspaper idiocy, include the Editor-in-Chief of the Wall Street Journal on media bloggers). Especially when organisations such as Associated Press are sending cease-and-desist letters to their own affiliates for posting videos from their official Youtube channel.

Yours,

An exhuasted blogging dad. Who still has to tidy the house and clean the dishes to match up to what his wonderful partner achieves every day when she’s at home…

Age is no barrier to success…

April 2, 2009 By Dan Thornton

One of the blogs I subscribe to, The Blog Herald, recently carried a fairly standard story about an company acquisition. In this case, it caught my eye, because it’s Teens in Tech acquiring The Youth Bloggers Network.

The CEO of Teens in Tech is 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky, while 15-year-old Patrick DeVivo runs the Youth Bloggers Network. And they’re offering ad revenue split between publishers and host, custom domains, pro accounts, increased storage space etc.

It suddenly reminded of a quote (Thanks to @andjdavies, @neilperkin and @Rtyrie for reminded me of the source where Google failed).

It’s from the recently published and much discussed ‘Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable‘ by Mr Clay Shirky.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

The point isn’t that 14, 15 and 16 year olds are doing these things, which would suggest it’s solely the preserve of the young – the point is that there is no reason why the very young or old can’t become CEO of their own business. I talked with someone recently whose salesforce is way above the age you’d associate with internet businesses, but who is incredibly effective at what he does. It’s about the attitude, rather than skills, and the reason it’s more prevalent amongst the young is due to the access to technology, and changes in culture, which are more familiar, and not challenged by legacy practices.

Which means you’re not just going to face young rivals, but old rivals, middle-aged rivals, experienced rivals, inexperienced rivals, and your existing competitors.

And, as Mark would say, expert predictions aren’t very reliable, so the only real defence is to have a clear vision and aim on how you’re going to best use new and existing technologies and techniques, and start making yourself different right now.

A solution to the loss of trust in Twitter apps?

January 9, 2009 By Dan Thornton

The trust that many people have in Twitter has been shaken recently by three major events – but there’s one idea that could solve some of the problems.

The events have been:

A major Twitter phishing attack, which resulted in spam Direct Messages from comprimised accounts.
High profile Twitter accounts being hacked – apparently by a fairly simple brute force dictionary attack on someone with access to Twitter support tools.
Strange Display Errors – which turn out to be due to the combined forces of mass tweets from Macworld and CES.

Stopping anyone with admin access from using a password like ‘happiness’ should cure point number 2, and deadling with mass traffic is something that only Twitter itself can solve.

However, the loss of trust in applications is something that effects the whole Twitter ecosystem, as Mark Evans writes on Twitterati. And even implenting the much-requested OAuth as a technical solution doesn’t guarantee a rogue app can’t affect people. (via the MrTweet Blog)

So what’s the solution then?

It’s a simple idea – there are a lot of sites currently listing Twitter applications as soon as they become available to be the first to carry the news, and also to be a useful resource.

But what about an agreement between some of the Twitter bloggers and established app developers to implement a testing and approval procedure – a relatively simple process which could then list approved and tested applications, and allow them to display an badge of approval.

What gives bloggers the right?

The reason for pulling together reasonably prominent bloggers to implement approval is that we have something to lose if we’re not utterly honest – anyone can update the Twitter wiki with a link to a malicious application, but if 5 prominent Twitter bloggers did it, we’d all lose trust and social reputation, so it keeps us honest.

So what are the benefits?

A list of Twitter applications which are being used and monitored to ensure they work as stated
An independent approval system by people with a vested interest in keeping things honest
More authoritative testing, and a larger quantity of apps being tested than each of us stating individually which apps we use – and a safeguard in case we’re tempted to recommend something without taking a proper look because we’re busy or going on holiday that week.
And it means developers can display something to give them a trusted status without the need for a paid store (like the iPhone store), or worrying about being tarred with the same brush as malicious scammers?

So I’m throwing it open – good idea or bad? And are my fellow Twitter bloggers interested?