In through the outfield

4 October 200717 November 2012

Social marketing ratings from Hey! Neilsen

Hey! Nielsen is a new free service from the well known market and audience measurement provider Neilson Company.

They are asking registered users to give their opinions on TV, movies, music, personalities and the Internet.

Assuming the site is successful and once it has been running for a while it could be a good source of what’s hot and what’s not in terms of entertainment. It is a classic case of a win win, with Neilsen acquiring useful market research for free, but also making the results available for free.

For instance you can already chart the rapid demise of Britney Spears standing amongst her fanbase by looking at chart of her rating over time.

Britney – who’s popularity is now in free-fall.

It is interesting they haven’t included blogs which are already well covered by Technorati.

1 October 2007

slideshare and my presentation

Last Thursday I gave a presentation during the Aerospace & Defence Librarians Group seminar organised by Ben Chan at the Cilip HQ

The title of the day was the Library Information Survival Guide and there were some interesting sessions.

I was starting to panic the day before as half of my PowerPoint slides seem to have got damaged between home and work. So as well as using multiple memory sticks I also posted a copy of the presentation onto slideshare. This free service is like YouTube for presentations and includes my least favourite word of the Web 2.0 era ‘favorited’. The currently most favorited presentation on the site has had over 800,000 views which is impressive by any standards.

However what I liked about the service is that you can not only download presentations from the site as well as view them in medium size on the web, you can also run them in full screen mode. So all you need is a decent internet connection to provide a backup to the presenters worst nightmare of their memory stick failing.

Here is the link to my presentation about the Business & IP Centre.

4 September 20077 January 2013

A really simple dictionary

File this one under ‘why didn’t they think of that before’, or under the ‘less is more’ category.

Finally someone (Phil Crosby to be precise) has come up with a really clean and simple dictionary using content from Wiktionary and Princeton WordNet.

The only issue I have with this marvel is the name Ninjawords which makes it sound dangerous and Japanese. Despite that it is going to the top of my favourites list.

31 August 200730 October 2012

How flaky are your pages?

According to Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte, the gurus of all things web related via their net@nite show, the next big thing in social networking is sharing your home page.

Google already allows you to create a personalised home page using iGoogle which allows you to “Add stuff to your homepage”. These little windows of information are often referred to as widgets, and I have been using them for a while.

However Pageflakes goes one stage further and allows you to share and rate sets of ‘home pages’. I have already imported a brilliant page called Gadgets & Gizmos created by jennyzuko.

24 August 200730 October 2012

Add colour to your life with NLP

I went to an interesting CiG event last night on Super charging your motivation using NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). The presenter Katie Hogg managed to both introduce the topic and give us some useful examples of its benefits in two hours.

I approached the topic as somewhat of a cynic, but came out with one or two techniques which I will try out on some personally challenging motivational scenarios (completing my tax return and clearing a table full of filing). All you have to do is visualise your problem, move it to the top right of your view and then add colour, brightness, movement and sound. All of a sudden it seems much less daunting.

It was interesting to observe our presenter using some NLP techniques on us during the evening. For instance whenever she wanted us to respond to a question she would put her hand up in the air. I could feel my arm starting to rise almost of its’ own volition until became aware of it and my brain took over the decision making process.

To see how scarily effective NLP can be have a look at these two Derren Brown videos on YouTube

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Vz_YTNLn6w]

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=befugtgikMg]

20 August 2007

Pure Text does it for me

For me, one of the greatest benefits of computers is their ability to copy and paste content from a wide range of sources (particularly web pages) into one document.

However advantage this is almost entirely negated by the amount of faffing around required to get the text all in the same format.

Luckily, I discovered the wonders of Steve Miller’s PureText. This simple and free application must have saved me tens of thousands of key-strokes over the years, as well as significantly reducing the frustration of trying to achieve something which should have been straightforward in the first place.

PureText

16 August 2007

A revolutionary answer to email stress

According to the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday One in three workers suffers from ’email stress’.

Having just returned to 150 ‘proper’ emails (i.e. not spam or quickly deleted cc’d messages) after a few days out of the office I can empathise.

The researchers conclusions are backed up by my anecdotal evidence of most of my fellow commuters and numerous overheard conversations on trains and buses.

The general consensus is that this is an inevitable downside of using email to communicate at work.

However not all would agree and Timothy Ferriss, for one, outlines a revolutionary solution to this modern day curse. In typical American bravado his manifesto on the ChangeThis website is titled, The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload & Triple Productivity in 24 Hours.

However for anyone brave enough to follow it through (and I have to confess I am not yet) I think it could be an effective answer.

16 August 2007

The not so simple paper clip

It is surprising where the topic of inventions and patents can pop up. This evening on BBC 2’s topical comedy show Mock the Week, one of the panellists mentioned the humble paper clip and how it had never been patented.

As I soon discovered this could not have been further from the truth as can be seen at EarlyOfficeMuseum.com

Paperclip

However the iconic version of the this ubiquitous product shown above and produced by Gem Manufacturing an English company prior to 1899 was first patented by Johan Vaaler a Norwegian. However it appears that Vaaler did not make any money out of ‘his’ invention. Which just goes to show.