The Obvious?

How long before we have virtual polling booths in Second Life?

MySpace has launched a new service for its ever-expanding troupe of savvy teenage networkers: political empowerment.

The Guardian

A sense of place

It's been very interesting here at Shift talking about geography and how much where you are and where you have grown up matters when you have a medium like the web which shrinks distance and time.

What happens to culture when the people you "rub shoulders with" are remote in every sense of the word?

I upset my father recently by saying that I didn't feel Scottish any more. I am where I am, I meet the people I meet and increasingly that exchange happens online.

But by most common definitions I am Scottish. I grew up there, I have an accent, and I am proud of many aspects of what I gained by the experiences I had when growing up there.

But would I defend being Scottish against being English or Welsh or Portuguese? Would I fight a war in the basis of these "differences"?

I think this is where Europe has a major contribution to make to the web. We've "been there and done that" when it comes to silly wars based on silly differences. We understand shared spaces like city squares, and market places, and village greens. Through our colonial past we understand how to feel grounded in one culture yet willing to engage with others from different cultures and truly adapt and adopt the best bits from each.

We are past the antler clashing approach to global politics that seems to be dragging us into a conflict with Islam at the moment ....

.... we can do better than this.

Caption competition

Add your entires to the Flickr page

Portugal here I come

Off to Shift at some unearthly hour tomorrow morning but first time in Lisbon so looking forward to it.

Excellent support at Panasonic UK

A story to counter my occasional rants about customer service.

I have just had phone calls and e-mails to Panasonic UK about my DECT phone answered quickly by named and re-contactable individuals who knew what they were talking about.

Bliss!

Oh dear (2)

I thought perhaps that Luke's comments on my previous post about Royal Mail were a bit harsh but maybe not.

Having orered a Skype phone for my Mac the vendor sent me an e-mail with a Royal Mail tracking number so I scurried off to their web site eager to see when the device would be delivered.

When I entered the number I got the following message:

Recorded Signed For™ items are only tracked after the item has been delivered.

Eh!??

Oh dear

I just tried using the Royal Mail online postage system this morning and if it wasn't for the fact that I have pre-paid I probably wouldn't use it again.

1) You have to add the address each time manually. I don't want the address added. I have a database that does that really efficiently - all I want is the stamp.

2) The choice is between printing directly onto envelopes or a label choice of A4, A5 or A6 - who the hell has A4 labels!!

3) Having selected envelope it didn't print correctly and I had to faff about for five minutes copy and pasting the image label into another programme.

Classic!

"There's just time to introduce our Newsnight podcast... news without the irritation of topicality..."

Jeremy Paxman via Niall Cook

What the world needs now ....

... like a whole in the head is yet more attempts to define Knowledge Management. Dave's right, the best bits of KM were common sense that needed re-stated, most of the rest was just agonizingly awful.