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Feb
29
March VRM Hub meeting
Filed Under VRM, Admin, Events | Leave a Comment
The sign up for the March gathering is up. Thursday 27th March, 6-9pm, venue to be announced. Investigating several options, so watch the event wiki.
Feb
5
February VRM Hub meeting in London
Filed Under VRM, Admin, Events, People | Leave a Comment
The next VRM Hub meeting will be on Wednesday 27th February. The change from the usual last Thursday of the month is due to Doc Searl’s availability on that date in London.
The meetings are open with a sign-up on the VRM Hub wiki.
Jan
30
VRM meetings in London
Filed Under VRM, Projects, Admin, Events | Leave a Comment
Getting our VRM act together, Iain Henderson and I, have organised meetings for those who would like to know more about the project, meet those involved in it and find out what’s been happening. And hopefully meet some interesting people.
We plan to have regular monthly meetings, usually falling on the last Thursday of the month, unless there is a compelling reason to move it.
January meeting is tomorrow evening from 6-9pm in Grape Street Wine Bar in Shaftesbury avenue, private room.
February meeting is currently planned for 28th February, with a good chance of Doc Searls joining us.
For more details and sign up:
Aug
4
New blog!
Filed Under Admin, Weblogs | 4 Comments
Well, still the same blogger and the name but on WordPress. Free from TypePad at last! If you detect any strangeness in your RSS feeds, that’s because the last week’s worth of posts have been manually added and may appear in your reader again.
The new look is a WordPress theme that will do for now. I know a very cool artist and web designer who I would like to do the blog design. So the look might change at some point.
Finally, many thanks and much gratitude to Alec who has toiled many hours to make the move seamless at my end. This is not a common experience for anyone moving their blog unless they have an ubergeek at hand. There was a bit of hacking and thinking done in order to preserve the existing links to my posts. This way I don’t have to have a blog ‘archive’ for the ‘old’ blog but continue blogging on Media Influencer, just powered by a different blog engine. I do hope that Alec blogs his experience as he came across a few ‘challenges’ and I am sure others would benefit from his solutions to them.
Jan
3
Goowy spam faux pas
Filed Under Admin | 26 Comments
This morning I found an email from Dennis Howlett whom I finally got to meet at Les Blogs 2.0 last month, recommending something called goowy as a new email client. The invitation was to set up an account and then let him know what I think. I like Dennis and know he gets involved in interesting ventures, and the way the invite was worded I thought he was somehow involved in this project. Also, as it was an early morning email-check (having gone to be at 3am the night before), I wasn’t thinking about matters too much and proceeded with setting up the email to test it.
First of all, it’s built in Flash, which is pretty but a bit of an overkill to say the least. But perhaps mainstream users like a graphically designed interface, so be it. Not everybody has to be a fan of gmail style simplicity. I moved on.
Secondly, when you sign up, you get to import all your contacts from your main email client. I use gmail and the import was smooth and effortless. Too effortless in fact, as I was clicking through the steps, there was a line at the bottom of the (visible) screen with a box checked, which only flashed before my eyes, as I was clicking ‘continue’. It said ’send invitation to goowy to your contacts’ or words to that effect. With horror I watched as responses (mostly out of office replies) started piling in into my new shiny inbox. You may say that I should have been more careful about proceeding to the next stage in the set up but you’d be wrong. I was setting up a simple email client, which is something I do all the time, when testing various new applications coming out of the blogosphere.
This is the real killer and the message is - You. Do. NOT. Check. Anything. Intrusive. By. Default. For. The. User!!! I am now incredibly pissed off at goowy for effectively spamming all my contacts. I did send an unhappy email to comments@goowy.com and I know I’ll be watching the fallout from this with growing unease. David appeared on my IM asking about goowy already as he received invitations from two of his contacts. He commiserated while I was fuming, offering the opinion that they don’t deserve to stay in business… And in true blogosphere fashion, he already blogged about it. I second that and may you burn in spam hell, goowy.
And now, what do I do? Send a link to this post to all my contacts? Groan.
Update: Dennis has a warning of his own.
And Ben sums it up in biz terms for them:
Sure, this clever stunt may have (artificially) boosted your sign-ups, I’m sure the VC’s will love that. But it’s created a lot of immediate bad vibe about your product, and that’s before you realise the main service is just a crappy flash app. Considering the way you have gone about all this, what percentage of these signup do you think will ever come back? Very few I would suggest.
Thanks Goowy for showing the world how not to launch a website!
Sep
29
Dear readers..
Filed Under Admin | 3 Comments
Since I returned from the picturesque New York, I have been plagued with a lurgy lurgi and mountains of work waiting for me here. But I am back and strength permitting, perhaps even with a vengeance. 
There is much to tell and I hope to do so sooner rather than later.
May
31
Work in progress
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This blog has been set up as a trial blog for Lifeblog application on my Nokia phone. However, it is now being transformed into a place where I will blog at will, not only pictures but also thoughts about trends, interesting things and of course, what I do and am trying to achieve.
For the 5 1/2 readers I have: please bear with me…
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London VRM meetings
