Give this man a job building a wiki September 29, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Microjobs, tools, Wiki , 9commentsI wouldn’t mind a job myself facilitating wikis for communities of practice but this is about building a new piece of wiki software, a platform if you like, and Tom knows what exactly what he wants to make:
what I really want to do is create a fork or version of MediaWiki that has all the features I’ve blogged about previously. Yes I want WYSIWYG but I want it to integrate with the wiki when it comes to making links. I want to be be able to create (orphan) pages without creating a WikiWord, saving, clicking to create the page. I want a great design(s). I want a beautifully clean syntax that I never actually use. I want a GUI editor that can interface via XML RPC. I want a super simple installation that asks me what sort of wiki this is to be, personal, shared. I want this wiki also to be a blog (or bliki). I want another million small improvements I’ve developed to do with information design, usability and IA.
In short I want to make MediaWiki for the masses and I want someone else to pay me to make it and give it away for free.
I think it would be great if somebody is willing to put up a bounty for Tom Smith to build the wiki software he’s been imagining for years. It only needs one viable project to make it worthwhile, and then after that it would be open and available for improvement and implementation on any number of others. One possible implementation could be an open community for microjobs exchange.
Vista is New Coke September 29, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : marketing, Mac , add a comment“Vista is New Coke” Nick Gogerty pronounces rather boldly:
That steaming pile known as vista is now allowing people to pay for the privilege of downgrading to XP. OEM’s are selling XP for at least 5 more months, oh and office has bad learning curve and excel can’t do math….MSFT=$20/share in 12 months.
Let’s sum it up, shall we..Vista is New Coke.
For younger readers, or those in countries untouched by the coca cola brand ( um…?) New Coke was the name of a changed formulation introduced in 1985 by The Coca-Cola Company to replace its flagship soft drink product, Coca-Cola or Coke.
Although blind tastings in the research stage had indicated a positive public reaction, the reality of the change was devastating, and new coke quickly entered marketing history as one of the all time biggest mistakes. The subsequent reintroduction of Coke’s original formula, temporarily named Coke Classic, led to a significant regaining of sales and the eventual withdrawal of New Coke competely
Bluetongue disease UK outbreak confirmed September 28, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : bluetongue disease , add a commentHopes that the dreaded blue tongue disease may have been prevented from becoming an outbreak by killing the pet highland cows in which it was originally doagnosed have been dashed by new findings that the disease is already passing between cattle and biting insects.
Previous post: what is bluetongue disease?
Today’s news:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article
Farmers were plunged into a new crisis last night after the Government confirmed that deadly bluetongue disease was circulating in cattle and insects.
Tests have shown that the virus - which has killed millions of animals in Europe - is being transmitted by native midges and may never be eradicated from the country.
Deputy chief vet Fred Landeg, declaring an official outbreak, said “a significant number of animals” would be hit.
However, he ruled out culling infected sheep and cattle and said there were no health reasons why infected animals should not be sold for meat.
Warmwell says:
It is important that farmers are not given wrong information. Some repellants for mosquitoes actually attract midges.
and that’s evidenced:
Mosquito Repellent Attracts Culicoides imicola (Diptera: Ceratopogonidae)
The bluetongue situation has been under reported internationally but there are known to be well over 20,000 cases so far, broken down into
10,348 cases in Germany yesterday
3,758, Belgium
3,500+ Netherlands
2,246 cases according to the French Agriculture Ministry
500 Luxembourg
The worry now is that with these figures, bluetongue disease may become endemic in Northern Europe as it is seasonally in Southern Europe and perpetually on the African continent.
Harvest Moon September 26, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : astronomy for beginners , 2comments 
Last night I looked up and noticed what looked to me like a full moon, but apparently it’s actually the Harvest Moon tonight, Wednesday September 26th. Harvest Moon is not just a fancy name for the full moon at around harvest time, it behaves in a special way. Throughout the year the Moon rises, on average, about 50 minutes later each day. So when you get a near full moon close to sunset, that only lasts for a day or two. Then you’re back to waiting until later in the evening before moonlight appears. This used to be very important for farmers at harvest time in the days before electric lighting, Mercedes Benz tractors and bright halogen spotlights added to the rack of headlamps. That’s because near to the autumn equinox, which came this year on Sunday Sept. 23rd, the daily difference in the time when the moon rises is only by 30 minutes each day. So you get several moonlit early evenings in a row which is just perfect for getting the harvest in. The Moon rises at about sunset tonight, and then not long afterwards for the next few evenings, as indeed did the one I noticed yesterday and the day before when it was noticeably less than full.
Now then, if you happen to be reading this in southern hemisphere, then it’s currently springtime and your full Moon behaves in exactly the opposite way. There will be an extra long time between moonrises from one evening to the next, which isn’t a particularly useful phenomenon, nor does it have a special name as far as I can gather, but no doubt you will get your autumnal Harvest Moon in March next year when we in the north are having our vernal equinox (March 20th 2008).
What is bluetongue disease? September 25, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : epidemiology, bluetongue disease, foot-and-mouth , 11commentsI’ve been kind of aware that there is another dreadful livestock disease called blue tongue or all-in-one-word bluetongue, mainly from reading the foot and mouth discussions and news. But it wasn’t until a confirmed case of bluetongue disease in the UK on the 22nd September that I sought to find out exactly what it is, how it spreads and the nature of the threat. It turns out that the spread of bluetongue to the UK has been pretty much expected, but the actual arrival of two positively diagnosed cases is another terrible blow to farmers already reeling from restrictions imposed for the ongoing foot-and-moth outbreak and the summer floods which destroyed vast areas of arable crops.
The first place to research is warmwell, the quaintly designed but timely and authoritative site by Mary Critchley. The authors must feel like Cassandra, explaining exactly what needs to be done and then watching disaster unfold as their advice goes unnoticed by those in authority. Perhaps this will begin to change as the EU begins to recommend vaccination as the method to control and eradicate foot and mouth disease. There is even a letter published in the Times Online by DR COLIN G. FINK which explains
There is a lack of understanding within the vet labs’ scientists of the mechanisms of clinical containment of viral disease.
It may be helpful to the Prime Minister’s Cobra group to read Mary Critchley’s voluntary website www.warmwell.com, to which a number of us contribute.
Warmwell is against the government policy of culling, instead advocating the use of ring vaccination as the best means to contain foot an mouth disease, and because culling does nothing to prevent the spread of bluetongue which is not contagious between cattle.
Second cow in Suffolk
Why on earth has it been culled, we wonder. On whose advice and on what grounds? ..this slaughter is not going to stop the disease. It does not spread from cow to cow and hoping that killing a Highland cow will stop other midges feeding on it and getting infected is absurd. There must be thousands of midges in the area and the fact that bluetongue has only just been noticed means the infected midges have been with us for a fortnight or more. Removing these unfortunate animals is not going to stop the problem.
Well my opinion is that removing the two cattle is not going to help spread the disease either, and since they are either going to die a lingering death or else be rendered unproductive then why take any risk at all by keeping them alive?
Bluetongue (Blue Tongue or BT) is an infectious but noncontagious, disease caused by a virus whioch is transmitted by midges feeding on the blood of infected animals. The main animals affected are sheep, goats, cattle and deer. Humans and pigs are not affected by blue tongue
Once infected, the outcome can be completely inapparent in many cases, but can also be fatal. In agriculture, Bluetongue Virus (BTV) more often infects cattle than sheep, but the symptoms in sheep are more severe. It is thought that this particular strain in Europe has had mortality rates of 30 per cent in sheep and 10 per cent in cattle. Milk yield in dairy cattle can also drop to 40 per cent and there is evidence that some animals which contracted the virus in northern Europe in the summer of 2006 have suffered impaired fertility.
Epidemiology
Bluetongue is thought to have originated in Southern Africa, where it is currently persistent infecting antelope, and other game animals. It has also been observed in Australia, the USA, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and more recently Europe. In Europe it BT has become aregular seasonal occurance in the warmer affected Mediterranean countries, but it subsides if temperatures drop. That’s because midges cannot live below 15 degrees centigrade.
Then from around October 1998 whether because of climate change or adapatation, the disease began to spread northward. In August 2006, cases of bluetongue were found in the Netherlands, then Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg resulting in millions of deaths.
Why is the disease called bluetongue?
The name, as you would probably expect, comes from one of the unfortunate symptoms which include swelling of the head and the neck, lameness, internal bleeding, and ulcers of the mouth, nose and eyes. In mild cases the symtoms can go unnoticed but in some the tongue may turn blue under pressure caused by swelling. That’s where the obvious name comes from.
best method of control
The best way to fight the blue tongue virus, farming experts say, is by vaccination, since slaughtering infected animals does not make sense while midges are responsible for transmitting bluetongue.
Now that the EU Commission is sanctioning vaccination, the UK government vet Debby Reynolds must begin to take notice.
“We consider that vaccination is an important instrument to fight this disease. It isn’t mandatory but we would look favourably on any (EU-27) member state request to apply vaccination,” an EU Commission official said. (reuters)
But the problem for UK farmers is that the particular strain of the virus that has occurred in the northern EU, and has been confirmed as the cause of the two cases so far in the UK is one called “serotype 8″ and for this there is no vaccine yet available. However two companies are now developing a vaccine for serotype 8 and this is likely to be available in early 2008. The best hope in the meanwhile is for an early winter cold snap to kill off the midges which transmit bluetongue disease.
Experimental Wordpress plugins deactivated September 23, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, wordpress , 1 comment so farI just deactivated two experimental WordPress plugins.
- Jiglu autotag widget
- Amazon Links Pro
A brave attempt to add “intelligent” tags based on some kind of text analysis of blog content.
The tags map made a change from the usual tag cloud, and the overlay display is manageable, but the results for ‘people’ and ‘dates’ were irrelevant and the same 5 posts kept popping up for nearly all tag searches in the overlay window. To be fair, Jiglu is a very new application and probably worth another chance when it’s more mature.
Less profligate than Jiglu, the Amazon links were hit and miss, based on people’s names and phrases. No sales, but the the plugin only works with amazon.com and not amazon.co.uk.
With both of these I soon felt uncomfortable with the idea of automating the insertion of hypertext links into an article, which is after all, a piece hand crafted author written text even if it’s only a blog post. I think it clashes with the perception of the author’s voice coming through the text when the deliberate insertion of a link can happen alongside some others which are machine generated and therefore differently motivated.
This means I also have to consider very carefully the use of SH-Autolink which is a simple time saving search and replace type of hyperlink generating plugin. For that one, I need to tweak the php code so that only the first instance is hyperlinked in each post containing that string. That will be better than having to avoid using my source phrase more than once, which kind of undermines the whole point of being able to just write and let something else take care of the commonly linked phrases.
I’m now going to try and avoid temptation to test any more experimental Wordpress plugins until at least after the upgrade to version 2.3 has settled down, with all the backward compatibility problems threatened by that procedure.
Three months Flickr pro for free September 21, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Flickr , add a comment
I just had my Flickr Pro account extended by three months for free. That’s not exactly going to save me a fortune in general internet running expenses, well not in terms of dollars or pounds, but little things like this can help keep me going, so I thought it would be worth telling you how to do it.
It’s all because Yahoo! are closing down Yahoo! Photos in favour of Flickr, which they bought last year and is much better. So closing down the old one is a sensible thing to do. You wouldn’t keep google video open if you’d just bought YouTube would you…?
The three months free Flickr Pro is a reward for agreeing to import any old photo sets I might have had on Yahoo! Photos, into my Flickr Pro account. That’s all there is to it. The old photos are all imported with privacy set to “private” at first, so I can decide whether I want to make them public or not, and no mention of the reward was made until after the photos had been imported, so you wouldn’t know about this nice little bonus unless somebody like me blogs about it.
Here’s the FAQ
http://www.flickr.com/help/yahoophotos/
It’s nice to have more of my photos all in one place, and a Flickr Pro account extended by three months for free.
People Per Hour now accepting Paypal September 18, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Microjobs, London , 2comments
People per Hour, the London based freelance jobs market startup launched last week has just announced that they are now able to accept that most popular of web currencies, paypal.
Paypal Payments introduced « People Per Hour :: Community
Buyers will be able to use Paypal to pay for posting a project, as well as for depositing funds to their peopleperhour.com account (to be used for paying providers for work done).
It’s amazing. They didn’t announce beforehand that they were about to make an announcement, and then leave everybody to wait for a while. They just announced it as a new facility which already works. But the question is, will companies and entrepreneurs be willing to pay to post projects or is it expected that everything should be free?
Some have ventured the opinion that free jobs posting boards are worth exactly what you pay for them, and will always fill up with spammy scams. On the other hand, freelance workers want some assurance that they will actually get paid, and handling the transactions through an intermediatory can help to build confidence in a fair marketplace.
UK at the hub of VC investment for Web 2.0 startups September 17, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London, UK, web2.0 , add a commentVenture Capital investment is flowing into London for web2.0 startups. You only have to be around some of the geek/coffee/launch events to sense that the first half of 2007 has seen a tipping point for the community of developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, social media pundits, angel investors and VCs. As well as the homegrown scene, many European and American individuals with skills and initiative are moving to London to set up their new web2.0 startup companies because of the buzz on the London scene, and because the regulation and tax frameworks make it so much easier to set up and expand new businesses in the UK capital.
Now there are some figures to show the world:
TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » UK, Ireland grow as Web 2.0 goes global
Within Europe, the United Kingdom posted the most activity in the first half with a record seven deals accounting for US$22 million invested.
MyBloglog, Romlet or BlogRush? September 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, wordpress, blogs and community, web2.0 , 6comments
In this post I am going to review three similar on-blog widgetised linking services. All three are currently in my sidebar here, displaying links of one sort or another and tracking visits. I also use the excellent Facebook application “Blog Friends” but that works a bit differently, and was covered earlier.
Blogrush is the newest, being released only yesterday, and at the time of writing it’s temporarily broken.
I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.
MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog is the oldest and best established. I like it for the simple idea of displaying visitors faces, which can creep up as a loose sense of community eventually, and also for the three column layout of the stats page. It flows naturally from left to right, showing where visitors came from, what they viewed, and where they left for.
For a quick glance analysis, this is so much more intuitive than for example Google Analytics. Disadvantages are that it can often take three clicks to make a reciprocal visit, navigating the pages at MyBlogLog itself. With practice you can get this down to two clicks, by paying careful attention to the links as illustrated below:
ROMlet
I was invited to Romlet beta via MyBlogLog with whom they are really a direct competitor.
ROMlet is a brand new blog widget that incorporates the best aspects of a brag badge, stats counter, bookmarking tool and popularity booster. JOIN THE COMMUNITY now and then sign up take part in the beta release!
As a beta product, it’s not at all clear where ROMlet is headed for now. The service is so simple that it hardly seems to do anything. The so-called “brag badge” is a collection of icons which give out a certain amount of referral stats data, which is not really something that I consider adds value for my visitors, nor particularly for myself. I did have a little trickle of traffic when one of my articles was popular enough to appear on their front page for a while, but if the service becomes at all well used then I would expect this to be an increasingly rare occurrance, thus undermining its own success. So all a bit baffling really, and I’ll probably take it off in due curse.
BlogRush
Blogrush is the newest, currently getting a lot of attention from marketing bloggers, which betrays the origin of the service. There’s a multi-level referral scheme which is supposed to favour early adopters so if you are interested in these type of things then it’s best to get set up with BlogRush sooner rather than later. The only danger I perceive is that with all the multi level marketers jumping on board from the off, the service could well prove Hugh’s Law to be correct right from the start.
Conclusion
Hmm, do I need to write a conclusion? It’s fairly clear that MyBlogLog is providing a lasting service which slowly helps to build some level of blogging community and relationships, as well as the handy stats. Linda pointed out that in some ways it’s a shame that these automated and uncontrolled systems have taken over from the manual blogroll to some extent, and I can see that personal choice may be diminished. With Blog Friends, you can choose to filter your reading of friends of friends blogs ( I’d rather read my friends‘ blogs unfiltered ) and with BlogRush you can choose which category to associate with, and you can also choose to take it off altogether - something which is very easy and non-destructive with widgets for Wordpress 2.2
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
