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  Peter Jackson and the American Dream for kiwis

  Congratulations to Peter Jackson and his team for the 11-oscar sweep! New Zealanders (all 30 of us) are currently basking in the reflected glory of Jackson's achievement, like an escaped otter sunning itself on the deck of a student flat.Full credit though belongs to Peter Jackson and the LOTR team. The rest...

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  Remix Culture

  I might Go Quiet for a week or two following this post. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by blog reading and writing and maintenance. Time to set my focus back on family, work, contemplative writing (read: not seat-of-the-pants writing as blogging can get for me when Info Overload hits). Besides,...

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  Moving your Radio Userland comments system to PyCS

  I've now swapped my comments system from Radio Userland's comments server to the Python Community Server, developed and hosted by Phil Pearson. The reason I did this was because I've experienced frequent problems with Radio Userland's comments server, causing slow downloads of my webpages and sometimes no service. This is...

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  Testing PYCS comments server

  Just testing my swapover to PYCS comments server. Please ignore (unless you're Phil Pearson helping me get it set up!).

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  The Passion of the Information Flow

  I've begun the push to introduce wiki and weblog technologies into the company I work for. As I wrote in my last post, I'm aiming to enhance Information Flow within my company. There is some initial skepticism from my colleagues about wikis and weblogs, but mainly due to unfamiliarity with these...

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  Information Flow

  Dina Mehta wrote today about implementing Weblog, Wiki, IM, and other collaboration technologies into an Intranet environment, to replace an "archaic" Knowledge Management system and improve inter-office communication. I'm embarking on similar activities with the company I work for, so I'm eagar to read about others experiences. In my work, I've made a...

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  Subscriber Stats in Bloglines

  The RSS Aggregator Bloglines is starting to build a lot of whuffie on the Web and it's justly deserved. I signed up to Bloglines at the beginning of August 2003 and at the time I raved about the benefits of having a browser-based RSS Aggregator - as opposed to the...

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  Real Live Book

  One of my goals this year is to get my writing published professionally. I called it "Paper-publishing" when I wrote down the goal at the beginning of 2004, but I include online publications in this definition as well. I've taken my first steps to publish a non-fiction article, by submitting a...

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  To ebook or not to ebook, that is the question

  Over the past week I've been devouring a bunch of Etech 2004 session notes, including one I read today from Cory Doctorow on the subject of e-books. Cory wrote the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and released it as a free download on his website in early 2003, under a...

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  Much Ado About Comments

  I've noticed that a few of my favourite webloggers are being hit by comment spam. Bill Seitz's WikiLog has been hammered this week and Andrew Chen noticed this morning a new trick. A spammer had exactly mirrored a comment made by me a few days ago on Andrew's weblog, using my name but replacing my URL with its...

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  American influence on the blogosphere

  Today I came across a very interesting article in the New Zealand Herald newspaper entitled "US power and influence warrent careful scrutiny" by columnist Barbara Sumner Burstyn. She starts off by explaining why she writes about America so much (and gets flack from her readers because of her perceived anti-American stance):"So why...

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  Short Story update

  I'm in the process of writing a short story on the themes of Subjectivity and System in the blogosphere. I originally intended to treat it as a mini-Nanowrimo, but on reflection I've decided not to publish the story until it's finished. This is not the same situation as Nanowrimo, which was all about Quantity - 50,000 words in...

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  Getting back on the Writing train

  So I've decided to write and serialize a short story on Read/Write Web. I'll treat it as a mini-Nanowrimo, with me as the only participant (unless anyone else is game). I'll aim for 10,000 words in 2 weeks, which is pretty cushy compared to when I wrote 50,000 words over 4...

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  On Big Goals and measuring Success

  I've been following Erik Benson's recentposts about his quest to find a "Big Goal" to work towards. The conversation has been very heavy, which is hardly surprising since we're talking about The Meaning of Life here :-) I recommend you go over and read the discussion for yourself, but I wanted to cross-post...

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  Game Neverstarting?

  Does anyone know when the beta of Game Neverending will start? I signed up a month ago, but I've only received one email from them and it basically said: wait till the beta starts. I can't find any timelines on the official site. Incidentally my GNE article is currently the...

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  Ain’t that the truth

  S¯ren Kierkegaard, 19th century philosopher: "Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion--and who,...

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  Random thoughts about Blogging Overload

  Thought a) Some people post too much. Recently I subscribed to 7 Journalist Bloggers - 6 of them post too many items, so I've fallen behind already. One of them has 81 unread items sitting in my RSS Aggregator and it's only 3 or so days worth. It's too much! I don't...

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  Internal Corporate Blogging

  One of my 12 main categories for this weblog is Corporate Weblogging. I recently wrote my category headings in the form of a manifesto, so here is how I actually phrased it: "Weblog technology can be used to enhance Corporate/Business communications and KM."Thus far I haven't written much on this...

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  Fun with XSLT – my draft thematic taxonomy

  Over the past few days I've been doing some work on a new XSLT-based topic navigation for my weblog. I started it over xmas, but had parked it since the new year because of a couple of bugs. My goal was to swap my Radio Userland-hosted OMPL-to-HTML transform (see Weblog Archive - by Topic in my menu) with...

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  This is off our first record, most people don’t own it

  Well my Fractal Blogosphere concept seemed to generate some interest this week. I think it's the first article I've done that got picked up by the populace without the support of an A-Lister. By that I mean, it got linked to by many "normal" people and no A-Listers (as far as...