Fran's Blog

As you can see, this blog has been a little more active over the last few days. Partly because life is more exciting after February, but also that I have now decided to split this blog into two.

When I started this blog I wanted to put miscellaneous things, rants, opinions. But I also wanted to go into a bit of coding every now and again, but that isn’t fun for everyone (though I do love it).

So, I introduce to you my other blog: http://devblog.whoisfrancisgilbert.com. The tagline might need to be “this might not be for you”. It’ll be a lot of stuff to help me and others with issues and tips on coding. Hell, if you want to join the group, come on in! The world needs more programmers and scripters.

In a whole list of blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader (my chosen RSS feed reader) I have a select cut of comedy blogs. XKCD, Doghouse, There I fixed it and Failblog, to name but a few. Fail blog is always the one which makes me laugh out loud. Especially the toys which are either faulty, or someone just didn’t check it before it went out there. Here is a great example, you see what it is MEANT to do at the start. Subscribe now for some of the funny stuff.

http://www.viddler.com/player/aa58fc5f/

I prefer not to use this blog as a way of showing the latest work I have worked on, or even as a platform to show you all what my agency, whoever it is, has worked on. It can be a little “I’m just posting this to get more hits”. But I really liked the video for White Knight Chronicles created by Agency Republic. The idea came from the video from years back with a guy called Leeroy Jenkins. It was a brilliant video.

So a full on hardcore gamer here (and a Project Manager) decided to take that and add to it. He wanted it to be aimed at gamers, rather than everyone else. I like it because it hits the boundary between gamers but should still make some sense to everyone else. See what you think anyway:

Google announced their Buzz platform in February to much interest and fanfare. The idea is to allow users to post short snippets of what they are doing etc. Twitter style. The “Buzz” is usually posted via mobile and mapped to a locationg on Google maps.

I jumped on board for a week just to try it out. I was a little underwhelmed because it was like Twitter, but also aggregated your Twitter and other posts to it as well. But then I realised something funny. I Buzzed something similar to “Having tea and cake. Now for some decent ale!”. Fairly mundane I must admit, but I received a reply “tea… cake…. or death”. Lovely. The thing was, I had never even heard of the person who wrote this. It smacked a little of Youtube comments. Irrelevant, often odd, usually inappropriate. Twitter tends to be a great community of people tweeting, asking questions, being replied to in a normal “I’d say this in the same room as this guy” style.

Buzz may well suffer the Youtube scenario because Google products are aimed at everyone. A great thing in some ways, but “everyone” doesn’t know that although you are behind a screen, if you wouldn’t say something to someone’s face, you shouldn’t say it online. If you look at Vimeo, the comments are wholly different to Youtube as well. Generally more constructive and friendly.

The other issue is the signal to noise on this platform. It aggregates all content added by users, if they have added a Flickr account, you get their new photos, their new Youtube posts, their new Tweets from Twitter. It makes a very noisy part where, instead of receiving what you want to read, you get everything, all the time.

I think because of Google’s omni present nature, it will be used, possibly more than Twitter eventually as it is built in to just about every Google product already, but I don’t think I need more internet noise, and I certainly don’t want the Youtube commenter community even close to my online activity if at all avoidable.

Well, a few months ago I started using Chrome as my default browser, and I’m still with it. I even switched the little lady to it, with a fantastic Cath Kidston theme (how easy it was to sell it in when it looked pretty).

Anyway, Chrome is brilliant, but it feels wrong. I am now fully tied into Google. Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Maps. Now my browser is Google. So I decided to switch my default search engine to Bing because you can’t knock anything till you try it.

It’s strange to see Microsoft as the new underdog as Google dominate the search market, and what I like about underdogs is the passion to innovate, to really knock the competition. And Bing has that (if you get time, watch this talk at TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/766 about the innovations happening at Bing Maps).

I really like Bing. The results are pretty decent and getting better (it’s only a baby still compared to Google). I love the perpetual results in images (keep scrolling and it will load more pages of results) and the preview in the video section. I also love the image on the front page with some facts each day (possibly borrowed from the old Ask site with some improvements).

The maps are really good with a birds eye view function which make the maps viewable diagonally, it isn’t quite StreetView, but a nice touch. Maps are also rotatable.

Overall, pretty nice and some good innovation happening, but whether it gains popularity over Google with the normal user who uses the term “Go and Google it” will be interesting, if Google can do it with a browser, maybe Microsoft can do it with Bing.

Right, sorry about the small number of blog posts over the last few months. It’s never been a daily event, but I’m starting to realise that most ideas for posts come to me while I’m on the bus or just walking about. I have my mobile decked up with a WordPress app to write, but typing a blog post on a screen keyboard would be tantamount to ripping my nails out with a spoon then pouring lemon juice over them.

Anyway, enough. I will try to write more, not much more so you have even more to read on your already packed RSS reader (Mashable? anyone? How many posts do they need in a day?), but more 1 post every now and again.

This year is the second year running where I have joined the club for Banuary, giving up alcohol for 1 month in, well, January (some go all the way and give up snacks and caffeine too).

Now, I do it mainly for the feeling. I miss a couple of ales mid-week, a couple over the weekend, I like getting the appreciation back though. By the end of January last year, I was back to appreciating a decent beer. I went to a pub and ordered after carefully choosing rather than a generic crap beer. This year I’ve even decided if there is the general crap lager I’ll probably even do without, there’s no excuse for serving only generic crap lager when we are brilliant at making very good ales (though that’s a whole other post).

I’m now on the 3rd week when everything changes and everything feels fresher. This is the good bit. Waking up is a little easier and things are a bit brighter. I won’t lie, it isn’t easy to get out of bed in this weather, your head just feels clearer. It’s lovely! I look forward to a good BrewDog ale at the end of it, lovely!