I was thinking last night about my tinkering with programming, back in my youth.

(Seriously, I remember writing a really involved Zork-like game entirely in BASIC - I obviously had way too much time on my hands!)

For a number of reasons, now lost in the mists of time, I didn’t do IT at uni opting instead for journalism. But I realised last night my playing with programming had probably actually really improved my communication skills.

When you’re interacting with a computer it will do *exactly* what you ask it to do. It won’t second guess what you really meant, and if you don’t phrase your request in exactly the right way it won’t do anything,

Essentially the burden of communication is entirely on you. You have to figure how to phrase what you want to say in a way that is meaningful to the machine. You have to use a language it will understand. You have to make sure it has all the background knowledge it needs to understand your request.

This is largely true when communicating to a large group. You have to phrase things in ways that are meaningful to the audience. You have to make sure you use language they willunderstand. You can’t assume they have the background knowledge they may need to understand what you are telling them.

Which probably explains why nearly all the really good communicators I know are also good with technology, and why the truly great programmers I know are also pretty reasonable communicators.

The man I think of as my Godfather (despite my, my parents, and his athesim) passed away last week. He, and his wife Elizabeth, are those rare people who are naturally kindly and generous, blessed with a keen sense of humour and a finely honed sense of the ridculous.

The Scotsman has a lovely obiturary, which made me smile, as I rememberd Kenny saying cheekily, “Let joy be unconfined” when something went his way.

He one of the world’s genuine treasures, and the world is poorer for losing him.

Over at Throwing Sheep there’s an interesting post on the role of Web 2.0 in anti-social behaviour.  Unsurprisingly, given the tendency of people to respond to headlines rather that the copy, it’s sparked a number of netizens to defend the utopia of user-generated-content, and interaction that is Web 2.0.

But, that’s actually doing the authors a real disservice, and doesn’t really address their point. They are not arguing that YouTube causes mass murders, rather that YouTube, to some extent normalises mass murders, making the unthinkable, slightly more thinkable to people who may have been on the edge in the first place.  They also point out this is not a new phenomenon.

…this phenomenon is called the “Werther Effect”, after Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. In Goethe’s 18^th century sturm und drang novel, the melancholic hero Werther shoots himself in the head over his unrequited love for a girl called Lotte. When the book first appeared in 1774, it triggered an epidemic of similar acts of despair – the first known examples of “copycat suicides” in modern history.

Web 2.0 is not more responsible for killing sprees, than Kurt Cobain and Kate Moss are for glamourising drug use, than tiny models are responsible for anorexia, than the mass media is responsible for the early sexualisation of girls…

The word you are looking for is cofactors people.

Somethings are too complicated to be caused by a single thing..

e-MANcipate! is a project to accelerate the acceptance of male pantyhose as a regular clothing item…

It’s a weird world..

The sinking feeling when you realise you’ve just clicked “OK” and you *really* should have picked “Cancel”…

On Tuesday I was (as usual) doing half-a-dozen things at once, when I was prompted to update something. Now, with the apple, I pretty much always update everything immediately - it’s easy, and keeps the machine running nicely. So, without really reading the dialogue box properly I clicked “yeah go ahead” and carried on with what I was doing…

About 30 minutes later a new dialogue popped up saying “restarting your iPhone - do not disconnect”

That’s when I got that sinking feeling. In fact I got the feeling that can best be summed up by bomberman “MISTAKE!!!”

But, by then, it was too late, my iPhone had been upgraded to a non-jailbroken version of the 2.1 firmware - which meant I was locked out, and no longer had a functioning phone.

<sigh> that will teach me to *read* the fricking dialogues before I make a choice.

All was not lost however, thanks to the fantastic work of the iPhone Dev Team I was able to get the phone unlocked and activated again.

It only took me 2 hours - mostly because I had a bitch of a time getting the phone to go into DFU mode. 

And I’m never making a choice without carefully reading the options again.

1. You have this silly little grin on your face when you hear people say on the elevator: “that was an AWESOME speech (or e-mail) from the CEO”—because more than likely, you or one of your colleagues wrote it.
2. You’re willing to put your marriage on the line by continually correcting your spouse’s grammar.
3. After 10 years in the profession, your family and friends still don’t understand what you do.
4. Although they don’t understand what you do - they come to you to get complaint letters written, grant proposals checked, and theses proof-read.
5. There’s nothing better in the morning than your coffee and getting your news fix for the day.
6. You ponder for hours the irony of the phrase “elevator speech,” given that most of the time in and around elevators, no one says a word or make a sound.
7. You still get nervous anytime you have to launch a company-wide e-mail.
8. You know no-one ever reads the whole annual report but you.
9. The press releases your boss likes best are the ones you wrote as a joke to show him how awful all those cliches are…
10. You ponder for hours the fact that although you are a communicator - you don’t appear to be able to communicate what you do.

Some of these come from the Communicators Social Network myragan.com and some of them are my own observations…

Laurel Papworth recently wrote about a new social networking site for film makers. In that post she makes the excellent point that you need more than just cool tools for a Social Networking site to work. You need an active community.

I’d add to that it really helps if your community has a common interest - ideally in something more than just “catching up with old friends”. I have a Facebook account (who doesnt?) but I’d check it once a week at most; there just ins’t enough there for me to care any more than that.

But I’m not against “Social Networking” per se - far from it. I’m very active in a variety of fora - where the members and I have more in common than just our members.

For example, I’m pretty active over on the MobileRead sites - I’m passionate about my Sony Reader (as you may know), and I enjoy interacting with the other e-book enthisiasts, Whether it’s helping new users, sharing tips and tricks, or even getting into the nuts and bolts of hacking the hardware - I’m there.

But MobileRead is pretty old fashioned by today’s standards - it’s just a place for people to communicate - nothing fancier than that.

My pick for “Best Social Networking Site Ever” is Ravelry. It’s a community for Knitters and Crocheters (Common interest - Check) You have to be invited to join (slightly exclusive - cool) but you can register for an invitation, and it only takes a couple of days (not too exclusive - nice) Once you are a member - the tools are perfect for the needs of the users.

In my Ravelry profile I can display my current knitting project and get help with it (and help others). I can keep a record of what yarn I have in my stash, and which needles I have - and then find out from other members what sorts of projects I can do with the things I already own. There’s a facility to draw my blog rss feed straight to my profile - so I don’t have to create content in multiple places.  And it’s easy to share patterns, tips, tricks and information with other members. And, because we’re all knitters/crocheters we have a common interest to build our relationships around

It’s seriously great - and if you knit or crochet you should think about joining - and if you do You’ll find me here.

More at GraphJam

One of the more intesting things I get to do at work is provide ‘advice’ on building/designing/web2.0ifying websites for our clients.

Almost invariably they come to me with the same basic issue, they have an old, out of date website that they find impossible to maintain and update. It’s usually hosted somewhere else (and more often than you’d think  - they don’t know where) and if they have any access to it at all it’s through some weird homebrew CMS.

*Sidebar - there must have been a squillion ‘web design agencies’ 2-5 years ago building their own CMS for clients.

There are 3 main parts to the advice I offer

1) Information Architecture/Site Navigation: What do you want on your site? What sections does it need? How do those sections interrelate? How do you use your website? How do your users use your website? What pages do they look at most? What pages do you want them to look at? What do you want them to do (if anything) as a result of being on your website? etc

2) Content review: Is the content written with a web audience in mind? are you making full use of the ‘interactivity’ of your site? Is your site just an electronic brochure? Is the content up to date? Is the content written so that it will date quickly? etc

3) Technical Advice: How much traffic does your site get? What functionality do you need from a CMS? How technical are the people who will be maintaining the site? How scalable does the solution have to be? What do you want to be able to do with the site? etc

It’s this last piece that is the source of today’s title - when I’m giving technical advice I find myself comparing wordpress to blogger to joomla to drupal to ‘the existing solution - whatever that is’

I’m always careful to do the comparisons in terms of “If you need feature X and option A then you probably want to consider product G - if on the other hand you want feature Z and option B then product H is probably a better fit”

But despite that (or perhaps because of it) I still find myself getting asked “But which is best?”

Today I finally snapped. I took a deep breath and said to the client…

“It’s not a matter of ‘best’ they’re different. It’s not comparing apples to apples - you’re not even comparing apples to oranges - you’re comparing apples to - magpies - or forklifts. One’s great if you want a snack - the other is useful if you need to move things.”

Sadly, I still don’t think it got through.

Back in December I wrote about the terrible dilemma of having to choose between a Sony Reader and an iPhone. I ultimately decided on the Reader - and it was a great decision, I use it every day on the train during my morning commute, and it’s just brilliant for taking on holiday. Particularly if, like me, you’re a voracious reader, but you don’t want to either be buying books all the time - or carrying 20 with you on your journey.

But - the brilliance of the Sony Reader, and my total love affair with it didn’t really diminish my desire for an iPhone. Sure my Blackberry did practically everything the iPhone did, and had better battery life, and GPS built in - but it wasn’t an iPhone.

Finally, Apple released the 3G iPhone here in Australia - Now I could get one easily, I wouldn’t have to mess around with cracking or firmware updates - and I’d be able to get it subsidised by the phone company. So I raced out and got one right?

Wrong.

It turned out that what I had really, really loved about the iPhone was the industrial design, the sleek form factor, the metal back - and the 3G ones were thicker (although not much) and had plastic backs.

So - what to do.

My first thought was to talk to the few people I knew who had the original 2G iPhone here and see if any of them were planning to upgrade - and if so, could I buy their old iPhone.

Didn’t work so well, the few people who were planning to upgrade had already promised their old handsets to other people.

So off to ebay…

I found a guy selling an original iPhone here in Sydney. I lost the auction by a lousy $10. But - the guy who won - dropped out. Breaking all the ebay rules the seller and I agreed to an “off market’ transaction. We met in a dodgy pub. Cash was exchanged and I left with a 2G iPhone.

Colour me delighted.

I spent the weekend upgrading and then cracking the firmware. (thanks to the dev team).

There are a couple of things I’ve noticed.

• The battery life isn’t terrific  - but that could be due to me using it almost constantly
• The screen is *gorgeous*
• The camera is surprisingly good
• The screen gets dirty faster than the speed of light. I seem to be almost constantly polishing it
• Everyone wants to play with it.

The main thing I’ve noticed though - is something I’ve observed about all the apple products I’ve used (laptops, keyboards) It’s just plain *fun* to use. The design is all about making it nice to use - not about design for design’s sake - very Bauhaus - its function defines its form.

And I totally love it.