Monthly Archive for January, 2007

Cluetrain quotes - 3

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/1/2007
in Cluetrain
. 2 Comments

Continuing my quotes from the Cluetrain Manifesto, here is another quote which I love from the 95 Theses:

85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.

BBC to launch Second Life for kids

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/1/2007
in Technology
. 2 Comments

I see the BBC have announced this morning that they will be launching an online virtual world - CBBC World in which children can inhabit and interact.

Details are sketchy yet but this sounds very much like Second Life to me but for kids (i.e. moderated and without the financial angle). It is aimed at 7-12 year olds who will be able to:

build an online presence, known as an avatar, then create and share content… to move around a safe, secure world where they can not only interact with familiar characters but have an opportunity to make that world a more fascinating place with their own imaginations

This sounds like a fantastic idea to me. My 3 year old has been online since he was 18 months old. He has his own computer with a broadband connection and his favourite site is PlayhouseDisney because of all the Flash based games there where he can interact with all his cartoon buddies.

I like that site in particular for him because of its lack of ads. I presume the CBBC World site won’t have ads either as ads go against the grain of the BBC’s ethos.

Former BBC’r Ben Metcalfe has a good analysis of this announcement where he discusses, reassuringly, the likely child safety which will be built into the site.

BT get a clue?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/1/2007
in SaaS and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Dennis Howlett has two interesting articles today on BT! Think about that for a sec. If you are Irish and you saw someone say that there were two interesting articles on Eircom you’d have to sit down for a while you’d be laughing so hard.

Dennis’ two articles are about a new SaaS offering from BT called BT Workspace. No, seriously!

As Dennis said:

BT Workspace is an all-in-one-eat-all-you-like offering that provides a number of the tools SMBs need to collaborate with others in their business ecosystems. It is a first of a kind service from a major telco in the UK and represents an important milestone in the creation of business infrastructure services.

Now there are qualifications - it is not hugely innovative, it is missing large swathes of functionality, but with someone like BT pushing this they can make SaaS mainstream in the UK in no time flat.

Dennis tells me there is more in the pipeline, watch this space.

Trying out WordPress 2.1

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/1/2007
in Blogging, Open Source and WordPress
. 8 Comments

I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 this morning and the whole process was remarkably painless.

The entire process took about ten minutes - the majority of that time was spent on backing up the previous version and FTP’ing the new files into place.

Of course, if you are a client of mine and I maintain your blogs, it actually took waaaaaaaaaaaay longer. Hours of research, planning, etc. were involved and if you need me to upgrade your blog, my invoices would obviously reflect that ;-)
The only glitch I found so far was that when I was double-clicking a word to select it in the Visual mode, the paragraph I had just been writing disappeared. And that disappearance was then auto-saved!

Clicking into the Code tab revealed that I had somehow inadvertently switched the paragraph style to hidden. Deleting the style info revealed the text once more.
WordPress 2.1 write screen

I like the auto-save feature (see in the image above, the post is being saved) and the ability to quickly move between the Code and Visual (wysiwyg) views.

The builtin spell checker will prove handy too when I’m not using Firefox (Firefox 2 also has a spell checker which is fabulous for illiterates like me) or the Visual editor.

The other very nifty improvement I noticed was the ability to set any page as the front page of your site. This will allow many more people to use WordPress as a simple CMS for their entire website.

WordPress just gets better and better, great job guys.

Win an Acer pocket PC with Roam4free

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/1/2007
in Telecoms and voip
. 0 Comments

As I posted earlier, Pat Phelan has launched his new Roam4free product.

He is now looking for feedback and is offering to give an Acer Pocket PC to the “most helpful review”.

Pat entered me into the competition because of the feedback I gave in my previous post - thanks Pat.

Can you beat my feedback (it shouldn’t be too difficult!)?

Roam4free goes live

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 22/1/2007
in Telecoms and voip
. 12 Comments

Finally after months and months of long hours and lots of hard work Pat Phelan’s site roam4free.ie went live this evening.

Roam4free is a site where you can buy a SIM card online for your mobile phone to use if you are traveling abroad. If you use the Roam4free SIM card in your phone, you can receive calls free of charge (as opposed to the extortionate roaming charges the mobile operators charge) and you can make calls for a fraction of the normal cost.

Roam4free SIM cards are €20 each and include €5 call credit.

Well worth it if you are a frequent traveler.

Well done Pat. A couple of quick questions for you though which are not obvious to me from the FAQ:
1. Can I get an Irish Roam4free number (or do people who want to call me have to call a non-Irish number)?
2. Can I get access to 3G/GPRS services abroad with the Roam4free card? and
3. Can I keep my old number of have my calls forwarded from my regular number to my Roam4free number?

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