Spell with Flickr

Apologies if this is old – I found it for the first time today on Russell Davies excellent blog about account planning. Spell with Flickr is a cute little tool that lets you spell any word you like using randomly generated flickr photos. Fun.

Tickets for the Mesh conference went on sale this morning

This was a fantastic event last year and from the list of confirmed speakers it looks like 2007 won’t disappoint. There is a lot of buzz and limited tickets so register early.

Check out the Mesh blog for new speaker announcements over the next few weeks.

Inspiration

I hope everyone has a few people in their lives like my friend Dre Labre. I can sit down in a cafe with Dre (like we do every few weeks) feeling uninspired and leave an hour later buzzing with ideas.

Inspiration comes from many places – but I enjoy it most when it comes from a good friend you can just *jam* with.

Thanks for lunch eBay

I was lucky enough to go to an eBay Canada event today to meet Jeffery Cole from the Center for the Digital Future. Jeff spoke about the research he is doing on the social, cultural and media implications of internet usage and showed slides from his 2007 Digital Future Report.

He mentioned all of the points you’d expect in a presentation about internet usage:

Growth of user generated content:
> 21% of teens keep a blog, share photos or maintain their own website.
> Internet infrastructure not set up for all of this uploading – 6 megs per second download speeds and almost nothing up.

Significance of social networks:
> 43% of people on social networks say that their online connections are as important as their offline connections; 49% for teens.
> “MySpace are not going to keep their teenage users. For teenagers a social network is like a night club – when the uncool people show up they leave.”

The Internet influencing politics:
> 40% of Americans online feel they are gaining political power because of the web.

I asked if he thought we would see the same culture of star political bloggers in the 2008 presidential campaign or if he thought we might see something more widespread and grassroots. He talked about politicians needing to be more careful of what they say (i.e. citizen journalists are everywhere) but I’m not sure he answered my question.


I thought the two most interesting points he made were the most basic.

1. The ‘always on’ culture of broadband is changing how we use the web: We don’t log in now – we are constantly logged in. In fact, logging out now takes more of an effort. This completely changes our relationship with the digital tools around us.
2. Internet penetration is at 100% of those willing: His point was that today not having the internet at home requires more of a decision than having it. Penetration in the US and Canada still isn’t at 100% but it’s not because people have been slow to adopt, it’s because they are making a conscious decision to keep the web out of their homes.

Send this to your HR director

Flicked through the job listings in your local paper or on Monster.com lately? They’re almost always uninspiring, visually boring and just completely lame.

Which makes it even more cool when you see a recruitment campaign that doesn’t suck. Check out this listing for the editor of a small Virginia newspaper (thanks to Mathew Ingram for the link). They got staff, critics and readers involved and presented the whole thing in a nice little web package. More than anything the site tells applicants about the culture of the paper and the passion of the staff. I’m sure they’ll get some great applicants.

Would you take a job at BitTorrent?

A good friend of mine is considering whether he should move from Toronto to San Francisco for a job at BitTorrent. There is obviously a long list of pluses and minuses, particularly with the launch of their new service tomorrow, but when he asked my opinion it came down to three simple things: The download market is an incredibly interesting space, BitTorrent is one of the most interesting players and San Francisco is the epicenter of the tech world.

In my mind it doesn’t matter that BitTorrent face a lot of challenges. They have as good a chance as anyone and they are running in one of the most exciting races going on right now. A job at BitTorrent would be an opportunity to live on the bleeding edge for a while. You’d have a business card that would get you into a lot of interesting meetings and, very importantly, you’d be in the Valley. I think this would be an opportunity to learn and to make contacts. If BitTorrent became a huge success – great. If not I’m sure other opportunities would appear quickly, and often.

Two and a half years ago when I was deciding to move to Toronto for a job I approached the decision differently. I was looking for a company that I could help make successful. Now, potential failures are just as interesting. A chance to fail (maybe) is a chance to learn and as long as you are meeting great people and enjoying yourself then it looks like a good opportunity to me.

BitTorrent goes legit

Tomorrow BitTorrent will finally launch their much discussed play for the legit download market. BitTorrent.com will become a download store offering around 3000 movies and thousands or games, tv shows and music videos.

From the interviews I’ve read it sounds like Ashwin Navin, the CEO, has been backed into a corner. After the movie studios dictated high prices for BitTorrent to sell films he decided to rent them instead – for between $3 and $4. Of course the rentals are stacked full of DRM (digital rights management) so they are non-shareable and expire 30 days after download or 24 hours after watching them. Oh, boy – that’s some straitjacket style restriction.

The one advantage BitTorrent do have is the advantage they’ve always had – their incredible technology. Their download store will be based on the same per-to-per system that lets people share illegal content so easily that it allegedly accounts for 55% of all internet traffic (although claims vary). This should mean dramatically faster downloads than most other stores: a writer from the NY Times downloaded X-Men 3 in 2 hours on BitTorrent compared to 3 from WalMart.com.

Mathew Ingram has an interesting perspective on the launch over here.

And Gizmodo make a couple of interesting points:

The real question is: “Can BitTorrent compete against itself?” The BT network already offers a vastly superior catalog of content without restrictions (or cost), albeit not so legally. Something else to consider: since they’re using your bandwidth to distribute content users pay for, why aren’t purchases subsidized according to how much someone uploads?

I completely agree with point number two. If I’m helping them make money by seeding their content then I expect a discount, or some kind of incentive.

Google Apps launches today for small business, families, schools and maybe our company.

Google finally announced their Apps bundle last night. Essentially they’ve rolled their calendar, docs, spreadsheet, email, IM and web publishing products into one hosted bundle with 10 gigs of storage and 24 hour phone support. Schools and families get it for free and small businesses pay $50 per account per year – but there is a free trial until the end of April.

We’re looking for a few little tech solutions for our company at the moment: email from our URL, file sharing, shared calendar, a wiki. I’m not sure if Google Apps with match exactly what we’re after but generally it looks like a pretty compelling package for a small business – especially if you can sign up for this in place of Microsoft Office and save the purchase and upgrade costs. A PowerPoint product seems to be all they’re missing really but I’ll bet Google announce a product launch or an acquisition of one of the existing tools before the snow in Toronto melts.

UPDATE: Mathew Ingram has a good post about Google Apps over here. “To me, the missing piece is still some kind of offline app that will cache documents for when Internet access isn’t available, like Zoho is doing. Google’s Office suite (let’s call it what it is) might be fine when you’re at HQ with a T1 line, but what about when you’re in a regional office in Poughkeepsie, or on the road?”

While I’m talking about tech tools for a small office I should mention SpanningSync again – the little iCal:Google Cal syncing product I tried out a few weeks ago. The conclusion: A+. This little tool makes my life a heck of a lot easier. No more logging into Google Cal every time I want to add an event to our shared company calendar – just pop it in iCal and hit ‘sync’. I thoroughly recommend this for anyone using iCal.

Happiness project

Earlier this year Adrian G. White of the University of Leicester attempted to plot happiness on a world map. I couldn’t help download the image and sift over it, comparing countries I’ve lived and countries I’ve visited.

This takes me back a few years to when my wife and I decided to leave London. We were trying to figure out where to live next and to help make the decision we plotted weather patterns, proximity to nice beaches/hiking/snowboarding, scores in the recent ‘quality of life’ surveys and a handful of others things. After all the research we settled on Vancouver – it pretty much has it all – and enjoyed a fantastic year living there.

It was a strange experience doing the analysis. It might have been the first time in my life I really, intently, thought about what makes me happy and what might make me even happier. How often do you think about what makes you happy?

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the link to the map.

If only I had a PC

That’s not something you’ll hear me say often.

Came across a very cool looking screensaver today via Valleywag called Twingly. It geographically plots new blog posts on a rotating globe in real time. Unfortunately there’s no MAC version :(.

I think being into this, and willing to share the fact, proves I’ve finally come to terms with my inner geek. No more trying to disguise my Symbian software searches or trips to Pacific Mall as ‘business research’.

Here is a clip of the screensaver:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgIT-hfgOXY]