The Obvious?

Relativity

My little one and I were discussing how long we were having to chew our new granola this morning and she said:

"I could do two cartwheels in this amount of time"

Who needs clocks ...

Cogenz

I have been asked, and agreed, to be a non-exec director for Cogenz, the social bookmarking tool for enterprise.

I was chuffed to be asked and happy to say yes as I think social bookmarking is one of those dark horses of social computing. Small specific tools that don't grab the headlines like Facebook but in some ways that makes them easier to get accepted. Everyone saves bookmarks and doing so in a way that makes them more useful to the person saving and at the same time making patterns of interest available to others in their organisation can be a rich and powerful source of business conversations.

What I also like about Cogenz is that it keeps it simple and does what is says on the label - bit like myself really ....

Ye gods it was a beautiful plane

Stumbleupon led me to this video of the history of Concorde. The opening sequence of its maiden flight is worth watching just of its shear beauty. I was in BBC Television Centre when the last Concordes flew over London. The people in the building were hardened to celebrities and it took a lot to get them interested but there were more people lining the balconies and the horseshoe car park than I had seen since George Michael did Top Of The Pops in the eighties.

Kids and religion

This week my younger daughter has been attending an event called Lighthouse, described on its own website as "a holiday week for children aged 4-11 run by Christians from local churches." As you can imagine this is not something I am comfortable with. The whole event is such blatant indoctrination. It is a huge, complex event and they are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts so that my wife has an easy week the first week of the holidays. They are doing it so that my daughter comes home singing their "bad pop" jingle jangle songs about Christ and crosses and suffering. She's six for goodness sake - get out of her head!

So why do I "let" her go I ear you cry. For the same reasons that I don't "force" her to be vegetarian like me. I want as much as possible to tech her to make her own mind up and she very much wanted to be with her friends who were all going. She has no illusions about my own feelings on organised religion and the most I feel I can do is make my own views apparent through my words and actions and let her work things out for herself.

Like Marcus Brigstocke says "Saying that a four year old is a Christian is like saying they are a member of The Postal Workers Union" maybe saying she is not a Christian is the same?

Too much of a good thing

IT is probably true of most IT projects but particularly with intranets the likelihood of delivering something worthwhile that people use appears to be inverse proportion to the budgets available.

Losing the plot

Gia picks up on a great rant about the "truth" of television which makes the point that there is so much inevitable artifice in the process that clinging to the truth is no mean feat.

This was why it was so hysterically funny when the BBC turned the monster in on intself and employed televisual techniques for their One BBC internal comms campaign. The idea was to engender a more collaborative culture within the organisation but mass staff meetings with swooping camera moves, "hard hitting" interviews with senior managers and happy clappy staff talking heads just made some of us feel like all grip of reality had been lost. It is bad enough doing this sort of stuff to the public but doing it to yourselves ..... It was a bit like watching a dog caught in a trap chewing its own leg off.

In contrast someone on our internal bulletin board, talk.gateway, said that the forums had done more to engender a one BBC feel than any of the official activities but we had done it ourselves, slowly and subtly by spending time with each other online, socialising and rubbing shoulders. Surely the way any real culture change happens?

A sad day

I've been avoiding commenting on the fiasco the BBC has got itself into about rigged competitions because I don't want to give the impression of some frustrated harpie wingeing from the sidelines. This is not the case - I've left and left it behind. However watching Mark Thomson on the TV last night has wound me up enough to say what I think.

The story has it all, the arrogance and complacency that allowed them to get into the mess in the first place, Mark Thomson's hard man, command and control response, and then bleating on, again, about trust ...

Earl Mardle agrees and as he says there is a lot of repairing to do - not least inside the organisation. I reckon the best scenario would be for it to all fall apart and then the good guys, and there are still a hell of a lot of them there, can rebuild the place in a form approriate to the current, distributed, story telling world.

Spectator Sport

Watching a philosophy major wipe the floor with a moron has made my day.

Blog Friends

Luke Razzell has pulled together a new Facebook app Blog Friends in a ridiculously short space of time for such a well thought out and useful app. (disclosure I've been giving Luke a few words of advice along the way).

Blog Friends lets you track blog posts by your Facebook friends on topics that interest you, display those posts on your Facebook profile while they help you grow your blog readership for you in return.

The other nice thing is that RSS feeds are available for the Blog Friends sections in your profile - shame the rest of Face book can't say the same!

What happens when you click "search"

Fascinating article on how Google works. And to think all of this happens in the blink of an eye.