I tried to join in on Waxxi’s interactive podcast of a discussion with Robert Scoble and Shel Israel today.
I signed up to join in the podcast very early on (long before Mike Arrington blogged about Waxxi). I received my email with instructions on the number to dial and I dialled the number at the appointed time.
I had my question ready and, as per instructed on the phone, I pressed the correct combination of keys to let the moderator know I had a question.
I waited to be called in with my question. And I waited. And I waited. Remember I was dialling international from Ireland.
I waited one hour and fifty minutes to see if I would be called in to ask my question (what can I say, I’m a bit slow on the uptake).
I heard other questions being asked from people who emailed in their questions or IM’d them in. I didn’t know who I could IM my question to (there was no mention of IM in the email instructions), so hearing that others were getting in ahead of me didn’t do much for my mood.
The podcast ended and I didn’t get to ask my question.
I realise that many people had signed up for this podcast but if this format is to be interactive, more interaction needs to happen between the guests on the show (Robert and Shel) and the people who have rung in. Reading out questions emailed or IM’d in is no more interactive than the podcasts I do at PodLeaders.com.
I had a couple of hosting issues a week or so ago which got me to thinking (worrying!) about backing up the content of this blog.
Fortunately WordPress 2.x ships with a backup plugin builtin.
Unfortunately, I had failed to get the plugin to work previously and hadn’t persevered. Now, I decided, was the time to fix that before I have any problems again!!! The fix was easy enough, all I had to do was change the permissions on the backup directory to 777 and the backup worked.
The issue I had now was that the backup plugin is manual - you have to remember to go to Manage -> Backup and click the Backup button to do a backup. I’m not disciplined enough to remember to do that every day.
Fortunately, there is a WordPress plugin called WP-Cron which comes to the rescue here. It is extremely basic but when activated on the Plugins page, it adds the following options to your Backup screen.
With WP-Cron you can schedule your backup to occur nightly at midnight and have the backup emailed to you at an address of your choosing. Sure, there are lots of other bells and whistles it could have, but for me right now, the ability to get a nightly backup of my blogs is extremely re-assuring.
Damien is organising a bloggers dinner for June 7th, the evening before the IT@Cork Web 2.0 mini-conference.
Stormhoek have confirmed that they will supply wine for the event (thanks Hugh).
Shel Israel, Salim Ismail, Rob Burke and Walter Higgins (4 of the 5 speakers from the Web 2.0 conference) have confirmed that they will attend as well.
If you want to join us, for a bite to eat (at your own expense - unless some generous company decides to sponsor the event!) and some interesting conversation, leave a comment here or on Damien’s post.
If you are not familiar with the notion of a digital identity, I would recommend you take a few minutes to listen to the podcast I did with Drummond Reed over on PodLeaders a couple of months back.
Drummond is the founder and CTO of Seattle-based Cordance and in the podcast, Drummond explained very clearly the thinking behind and the importance of digital identities.
The lack of a digital identity infrastruture is something which has always annoyed me. Why do I have to kep track of a different username and password for every site I create an account on? Why can’t I have a single sign-on which I control, which allows me access to every site?
Well, today VeriSign made the first significant step towards that goal with the launch of their Personal Identity Provider (PIP).
With a (free) PIP from VeriSign, you get a personal uri for your identity (mine is TomRaftery.pip.verisignlabs.com). You submit this address to logon to websites in place of the usual username and password and the sites get only the identity information you chose to share with them from that address. Sweet.
Now all we need is for websites to adopt this standard and I can forget all the usernames and passwords I have to remember currently!
I can see a time in the very near future when I will use the availability of this as the deciding factor in whether or not I use an online application.
As an aside, I wonder how long it will be before there is a WordPress plugin available which will allow bloggers deploy this for commenters on their blogs? Or if WordPress have any plans to build it into the core of the next WordPress release? Matt?
I’m involved in the organisation of the June 8th, IT@Cork Web 2.0 mini-conference, as I have mentioned previously.
I’ve set up an IT@Cork Web 2.0 calendar with Google Calendar. It has the schedule for the talks and a bloggers dinner the evening before which Damien is organising (thanks Damien!).
The calendar has two ways you can subscribe to it and keep up-to-date with the conference. You can subscribe to the iCal feed with any ical enabled application (Like OS X’s iCal, or Google Calendar) or you can subscribe to the XML feed with any RSS reader.
If any changes are made to the schedule (frankly, at this stage, I don’t anticipate any but you never know) the calendar will be updated and you will see the change automatically in your calendar app or RSS reader.
I am involved with the not-for-profit, IT Professionals networking organisation, IT@Cork.
We have our annual conference around the end of November - last year’s was spectacularly successful with speakers like Robert Scoble and Charles Handy.
I thas come time to organise this year’s conference and I’m wondering what is the perceived wisdom on good days to hold conferences?
Obviously weekends are out, as are Mondays (if something happens at work over the weekend, people can’t make the conference on the Monday morning).
What about the other days of the week? Tuesday to Friday - any obvious reasons not to go for any of those days?
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