that canadian girl

Category: Blogging & Online Media

  • FOWA: We're not divinating the future

    Future of Web Apps LondonI’m at the Future of Web Apps in London today. So far, I’ve attended the intro keynote with Om Malik and Michael Arrington, followed by Heather Champ & Derek Powazek on “We’ve got this community: Now what?”. I’m now in Tony Conrad’s “Future of Search”.

    The main running thread of all talks so far is quite clear: Nobody knew what would happen next after launching their app. And in fact, few ended up where they expected to go. Someone this morning said that the real work on a web app really begins after you launch (see, I was listening, but didn’t take note so not sure who said this…) You need to listen intently, watch your users and see what they make of it. Odds are you’ll notice that they’ve hacked your app and use it in ways you would never have imagined. That’s your cue to harness their creativity and evolve accordingly.

    Sometimes, Web 2.0 big names can get a bit cocky about success, but I think this is one point everyone agrees on: You just don’t know what’s going to happen next when you launch a startup.

  • Monster.ie doesn't understand data protection

    [Update: Some further info on the post on Michele Neylon’s blog. Monster PR? Get on this one like a fat kid on a smartie now!]

    Tom Raftery posted yesterday to let the world know that Monster.ie doesn’t quite grasp the concept of the DPA (Data Protection Act) which covers personal data like email addresses.

    This morning one of it@cork’s members forwarded us an email conversation he had with John Burns, Monster’s Business Development Manager in Ireland. We were incredulous when we read it.

    It started with an email from Monster’s John Burns to 189 recipients and CC’d to our member (!). Our member replied to John that this was spam and

    …coming from Monster, most unprofessional. Worse, you exposed everyone’s email address to one another without their permission

    Unbelievably for someone working in an online organisation, Monster’s John Burns seems to be unaware of the data protection legislation and responded to this saying:

    These email addresses are part of a networking list from http://www.itcork.ie and are all available for everyone to see.

    I do appreciate your concern chris, (i will keep my eye out for the bloggers!!!)

    Having worked in email marketing before and being rather precious about my personal data (well… aside from the fact that I publish just about everything aside from my bra size on my blog!), shit like this winds me up a treat.

    Some people don’t mind having to wade through piles of junk mail just to get to the important stuff, but it doesn’t give them permission to do the same to everyone else.

    The Data Protection Act specifically requires a sender to have explicit permission from a user before mailing them, which is basic common sense anyways. But what I find absolutely gobsmacking, if I’ve understood the above correctly, is that he put 189 recipients in the “To” field. When anyone dares send me mail like that without making all recipients “Bcc”, it makes me want to do unspeakable things to them. I haven’t even received the email, yet it’s making me want to get my ass kicking boots on and go visit Johnny over in Ireland.

    Urgh, some people just shouldn’t have access to the Internet, much less be involved in running an online business like Monster!

    [Via Paul Walsh @ Segala & his twitter comment]

  • mobileCamp London

    I’m spending the weekend in London for mobileCamp, a sort of ad-hoc gathering of people who work with mobile, or just outright love them. I’ve already posted a few pics on Flickr, and will add more throughout the weekend.

    The first panel was on the topic of S60 Web Widgets, which was a bit on the geeky side for me, but this second one is on Digital Kids and Disruption is looking interesting. More later once I find somewhere to plug my laptop in!

    Cozy beanbags, interesting presentations

  • OMG a woman on the internet

    I bow down to xkcd, the best geek cartoon in the world.

    xkcd.com - the best source of geeky cartoons evar!

  • WordPress 2.3: Pretty much painless upgrade

    Wow, well this was a pretty easy upgrade! I managed to make it as much of a pain as possible for Andrew; forgetting to disable plugins, upgrading from a pre-widgets theme, and being a whinge-bunny.

    But now it’s done, with that new swish “Tags” feature at the bottom of the post. I love the ease with which I can tag posts, and I bet that tag cloud (currently at the bottom of the sidebar) will grow to show just quite how nerdy my blog posts are…

    Great job, WordPress team!

  • WordPress 2.3 now released

    If, like me, you’re using WordPress, you’ll be pleased to hear that version 2.3 has now come out of the oven. It’s upgrade time!

    Matt MullenwegSome highlights: Tagging now comes as default (so no need to faff with third-party plugins), notices when plugin updates become available, automatic non-www domain forwarding, old post slug forwards to the new one if changed (Halleluia!), some improved post management and a big handful of ubergeek features. All in all, some pretty exciting changes!

    It’s so funny to see that the very adorable Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, is even throwing a WordPress upgrade party at his place tomorrow. Shame, San Francisco is a bit of a trek for me. Cambridge upgrade party anyone? 😉

  • Post Secret + Lolcats = LolSecretz

    If Post Secret is too heavy for you, and i can has cheezburger is too silly, then find the perfect mashup of the two of them in LolSecretz.

    soemtimz i screemz when i eez alone

  • I love the internet…

    For making conversations like this possible.

    Steve Jobs writes an open letter to all iPhone owners today, offering them all $100 gift certificate in return for their loyal, early adoption.

    Within hours, Robert Scoble has responded with his own open letter of what he’d like instead of $100.

  • Funny Google Searches #9: The Jaded B*tch Edition

    Every so often, I trawl through my blog’s search logs to find out what topics have ignited the interest of readers. There’s the top content, the usual search terms. But then there’s the dregs, the random gobshite some people search for that leaves me completely mystified HOW that landed them on my blog!

    So here’s to sharing the random Google search results some people have used to find some of my posts.

    • “toby carvery nutritional information”: I dunno, what’s the nutritional information for cardboard?
    • “how the canadian girls do they look like”: How the who wha?!
    • “where to place l plates on ford ka”: Right, and they should let you pass your test why?
    • “guardian journalists rubbish web copywriters”: Hah, you said it first, mate!
    • “husband corset”: *Slips her the phone number of a good marriage therapist*
    • “imovie 08 red line when trying to drag clips”: To fix this, Step 1 – Take iMovie disc out of drive, Step 2 – Put back in packaging, Step 3 – Take back to store and demand a copy of iMovie ’06.
    • “funny & nasty domain names blog”: 😦 I don’t think my blog has a nasty name *cries* I’m hurt.
    • “tablets to get into a mood of sex”: Open email. Check spam folder. There you go, plenty of “sexy mood” tablets for ya!
    • “how do you work out if a girl fancies you” & “how to make a move to make out with a girl”: Hmm how to explain you have NO hope.
    • “where can i read the latest darwin award entries?”: Uhh let’s see DarwinAwards.com?
    • “my sister-in-law nude pictures”: Dude, that’s NEVER a good idea…
    • “thong knickers banned in schools”: Excuse my ignorance, but umm, do they check every morning?
    • “canadian pillow humping”: Buahahaha wtf?
    • “smartass”: Oh, sorry, I’ll stop now.

    Previous edition: Funny Google Searches: Looking Back at 2006 Edition

  • Update on Twitter username call for help

    On Thursday, I got annoyed enough with my half-assed Twitter username, and not getting a response from the team that I made a blog post out of it.

    The next morning, I woke up to find a response to my feature request from 6th August from Crystal at Twitter:

    Hello Vero,

    Thanks for your email, apologies for the delay. We do this for the sake of ease. The limit on characters is mainly for SMS purposes; each message you send will include the user name associated with your number. Twitter messages have a 140 character limit, and a minimum of 10 characters is your phone number; adding 15 characters for a user name to 10 characters minimum for a phone number would be at least 25 of 140 characters. A long user name will also make it difficult for people to direct text you from their phones. Sorry about that! Can we send you a t shirt to make up for it? 🙂

    Thanks,

    Crystal

    So there it is, I won’t get my full username back, which means I’ll continue to miss most @replies unless I change my username altogether. Part of why I’m making a big deal out of this is out of curiosity to see what it would take to get a response, but also because it strikes me as a bit of a lazy fix to truncate usernames of legacy users to 15chars retrospectively. Oh well, I still love Twitter.

    As for the tshirt, I’m a sucker for schwag, so hopefully Twitter will send it to me even though I’m not based in the US.