twopointouch

The most radical change you’ll see if you get to the site, rather than read it on RSS, is that it’s single-column. That cuts out a lot of the stuff that was here before, e.g.:

• recent comments
• blogroll
• widgets

So to tackle those:

Recent Comments: To be honest, I write this blog as a semi-continuous rant or eulogy about the stuff I love and hate. Very occasionally as an ideas-gathering forum. Forum sites are far better than blogs for debate, IMHO. I’m still accepting and responding to comments, nonetheless. Lots of times I want ideas, sure, but I think other sites than mine might do better service. Comments aren’t a priority.

Blogroll: You can find it in Bloglines, if you like, but I’ll flag up anything interesting on Twitter or de.licio.us. I’ll try to recommend any new blogs I come across that are really interesting. But, honestly, do you really need new blogs to read? I rarely read my own blogroll in full, so consider it more a recommended reading list for starters rather than an indication of what I am reading.

And if you like a blogroll on a site because your interest in that is Google Juice for a better search position, then just Fuck Off. I don’t care: write more, better stuff.

Widgets: They are the devil’s spawn. Fuck ‘em. Honestly. They screw up every website they’re on. There may be one exception to that. But I’ll either do without or incorporate somehow. (More on that soon).

There are also some benefits to the theme:

Flickr feed: inappropriate for the Internet photos of me, my family, friends and stuff I go to.

Twitter feed: inappropriate comments about what I am up to and cool links.

Delicious feed: best links of the day without that annoying ‘links of the day’ post in the main blog. Clearly, you can subscribe to my delicious feed, if you really care. Never seen the point of those sort of posts in the blog, but as a value-add, I can.

Gorgeous: Oh c’mon!

First day back to work. Thanks, world, for the 1000+ emails in my absence. Still, food for thought on the way:

I confess, I was totally taken in by this for a second. I thought, “Wow, there’s a course about blogging at our local college. That’s amazing.”

Of course, I was wrong. Because bloggers are sad, buck-toothed losers with no friends. And they wear spectacles. Yes!

Clearly, I should be getting myself down to such delights as:

Be an Expert in English - Spelling, Tenses, Apostr [sic]

I am off to Croatia to hvar nice time. Hahahaha.

Enjoy yourselves in the interim.

On Amazon, this book is tagged ‘liar’, ‘alcohol’, ’sociopath’ and ‘jail’. But also with ‘entrepreneur’, ‘web 2.0′ and ‘dotcom’. It should probably also be tagged ‘genius raconteur’.

The book tells the tale of Paul Carr’s successful beginnings - a published author while still at university, a Guardian columnist a couple of years later and a blogs-to-books publisher shortly after that - to the grisly end of his stab at Web 2.0 e-trepreneurship, Fridaycities (a site which continues under the leadership of his former business partner as Kudocities). With the Credit Crunch beginning to close its jaws on new Internet investment, Bringing Nothing to the Party couldn’t come at a more opportune moment.

We have to express an interest here - Carr spoke on a panel about social websites at our conference last year, NMK Forum, which gets name-checked within the volume. At that point, Fridaycities was still in business, and Carr was, as ever, an eloquent and intelligent contributor, despite (as he reveals) not having slept the night before.

There’s lots to like in the book, particularly if you have been to any London Internet social events. Carr captures the flavour of these sorts of evenings very well - khaki trousers and check shirts seem to figure prominently. Lots of the regulars show up: Michael Acton Smith, Saul Klein, Nic Brisbourne, Robert Loch, Mike Butcher, etc. Carr’s prose style makes for easy reading, and - as you’d expect from the architect of projects such as The Friday Thing - the gags come thick and fast. It’s a little like John O’Farrell’s Things Can Only Get Better, but with more swearing and a lot less politics. Carr is an excellent story-teller, and you’ll end up really wanting to corner him at the bar on one of these nights.

If there’s a problem with the book, then it’s that the alleged ’story’ - the rise and fall of a dotcom entrepreneur - doesn’t actually amount to very much. It’s the ‘padding’ that contains the most colour - the wild parties, the people he bumps into at bars, the wilfully doomed relationships, the back stories behind some of the big sites on the Web. That’s not an enormous problem, but if you already know about the origin of the name ‘Google’, for example, you sometimes wish he’d get on with it.

The other story, the real story, is about Carr, though. His journey from gonzo journalist, to accidental business owner, to accidental web business mogul, to very-near-jailbird, to working out what actually makes him happy in life. It’s somehow quite surprising how much we end up liking him by the end of the book, having documented his personal and business failings quite so comprehensively. It’s a well-worn formula in fiction that might make readers roll their eyes when the good-for-nothing protagonist finally achieves wisdom (cf. anything by Nick Hornby or Tony Banks), but when it’s real-life then that’s something different.

Bringing Nothing to the Party is available from Amazon and Waterstones, among other booksellers.

[cross posted from NMK]

But sorry it was too good, and at the very least, you must watch to from (thanks, Steve) 3:00′ish.

Via Jemima Kiss

I’ve just deleted two trackbacks that led directly to malware installation routines posing as Anti-Virus scanners. On IE7, it was necessary to switch off the iexplore process manually to get the windows to stop. I’ve scanned for any traces using Spybot - S & D and seem to be clean.

This is obviously really annoying for all of us, and if I find this trend continues, I’ll be forced to switch trackbacks off altogether. It’s difficult for the spam detection filters installed on the site (Akismet and Spambot Assassin) to detect these latent attacks, and the risk of damage to readers’ data - with me as an unwitting accomplice to the attackers - is very worrying.

[as a noteworthy aside]

NMK has employed the services of Elizabeth Varley as a new events consultant. She will be producing around four new events and a similar number of courses for us over the next year.

Elizabeth has been working in new media for a number of years and has great links with a number of key organisations in the web 2.0 revolution as well as web 1.0 diehards (viz. the ones that made money). She’s also a kick-ass writer and thinker on this stuff.

I’m really thrilled to be working with Elizabeth. The key thing, for me, in a role like this, is that you’re able to spark off each others’ ideas but at the same time complement each other’s skills. She’s clever, well-organised, focused and determined… So that should work out fine.

Join the NMK Facebook group here.

[This is a tad off-topic but has a 2.0 in it and so is fair game. Feel free to disagree.]

I was at a press briefing for the launch of a new report called Learning 2.0 from the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) this morning (it’s not online till 21/2). They asked me what I thought of the title. I’m not sure they appreciated me saying that calling everything 2.0 makes me roll my eyes nowadays. They reckoned that for mainstream marketing people, the idea would still seem pretty fresh.

Anyway, the report was about training and learning in the marketing industry. The gist of it, which I thought was pretty sound, was as follows:

• People nowadays don’t have jobs or even careers for life. We have these portfolio careers and we’re all entrepreneurial about those careers. The average in-house marketer stays in a job for four years; it’s even lower in agency land.
• Our employers don’t have our individual agenda at heart when they design training or development programmes. They have the company’s interests in mind.
• There’s a conflict of interest here, of course - you might want to do a public speaking course, for example, because you envisage yourself as an effective public speaker. But if your boss doesn’t think that’s part of your job, the chances are, you won’t be doing one.
• Employers also tend to confuse training and learning. Training gets done to you. Learning is something an individual does themselves. Companies tend to think of training as their responsibility, rather than learning. They also think (62% of them - HROs - do) that “done to” training is the most effective way to deliver education for the job, according to survey results.
• Educationalists have identified at least 37 different types of ways in which we learn stuff, from reading a book to playing simulations. Each individual will have their own preferred and most effective learning styles. In-house training tends to focus on one - sit in a room with a bunch of other people and get talked at.

Therefore, there’s a big need for change when it comes to professional development. Individuals need to do more to take the initiative, since they’re ultimately in it for themselves. Their own preferred learning styles might mean that the current provision their company offers is utterly useless. They’d learn more from reading books, or blogging, or going to excellent networking events. Probably a combination of different learning activities. They should push for those things to be recognised as CPD investment, and potentially paid for by their employer.

On the other hand, employers need to open up their definitions of training and learning. Why does only sitting in a room and being talked at tick the box? This doesn’t necessarily imply extra investment or resources on their part. Just an openness to recognising that learning is taking place in other ways. Companies need to fund and provide time for the learning an individual wants to undertake - not just the kind that’s always been provided.

To my mind, this situation has arisen as a consequence of the dreadfulness of appraisal culture:

“Now, Ian, it’s your annual review. You have done OK, but could do better. How can we help you?”

“Well, boss, I agree I could do better. [and really want a pay rise which isn't at all linked to this appraisal. wink-wink.] But you see, I don’t really know much about phone sales.”

“Ah - we’re doing a course in May about phone sales. I’ll send you on that.”

Box ticked. Job done. Next subject. My arse.

(Bonus link to a fab blog post on this very subject from the Chief Happiness Officer - from which I stole the wink-wink gag.)

Afterthought: the worst CPD I have ever received was when I worked as a teacher. In many respects, it’s the loneliest profession - you spend your entire day with clients. Yet, the professional training is zilch - “we’ve bought this new CMS and we’re having a training day on how to use it.” “Yeah, but, how can I be a better teacher?” “Sorry, what?” - How appalling is that?

Thanks to DrewB for this invaluable reminder of my status, via Ffffound:

I have three invitations to Ffffound, if you like pictures. First come, first served in the comments.

If this is here, then my upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress and a new theme won’t have been a complete disaster. If it isn’t here, then let’s keep it to ourselves, eh?

The newest thing is native support for tags, as well as categories. Everything is miscellaneous, of course (check this fantastic video  of a presentation by David Weinberger on this theme (57 minutes) if you haven’t caught onto this idea yet), so tags ought to supply a folksonomy for posts on the site, as well as the taxonomy it’s always had. Windows Live Writer apparently supports this natively now through the Keywords field at the bottom of the editing window. Except it isn’t quite right, since I am the only person who can add or edit those tags. I wonder if there are any plug-ins out there yet that allow this to be carried to the next level - to let users add their own tags to articles in a way that sits inside the system rather than through widgets and third parties like del.icio.us?

On the theme: it’s back to Cutline again, for the time being, since it’s one of the few that supply native support for tags. Yes, it’s easy to hack existing themes to provide that, but I really can’t be bothered.

Things to do:

Haven’t quite finished with the masthead - there’s still a couple of generic pics in there and I think the title of the site needs to be a few points bigger.

Add tags to previous posts. I used to use the very popular plug-in Ultimate Tag Warrior. It used too much CPU ultimately whenever this site became moderately popular, and I had to drop it. Nonetheless, a lot of the posts on this blog have already been tagged. Some sort of import for that would be more than welcome.

Database may or may not be screwed. Oops. (Proper IT person: "Of course you backed up your database before performing such a drastic operation?"; Me: "Uh… yeah… sure I did."). Updating old posts to add tags results in a MySQL error, though the edits are carried out nonetheless. Have to google it and see where I may have cocked things up.

This is what it looks like, for people in the know:

WordPress database error: [Table 'twopoint_wrdp1.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]
SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = 'publish' GROUP BY cat_ID