Andrew Boyd reviews life, design, and Shiraz
This is my friend Nathanael Boehm discussing the Meraki wireless sharing hardware system at Wireless Australia yesterday (2 April 2008). Nathanael is a social entrepreneur who wants to bring free wireless internet access to all Australians - and there are a lot of people who are interested in helping him.
More information at Free Canberra Wireless.
Tags: Meraki, Free Canberra Wireless, Free Australia Wireless
Jeri Merrell has written a four part series on project management for small business. Jeri is a professional project manager who has applied her knowledge to issues surrounding small business - and I think that it applies very well to the business of blogging.
Part 1: Refine the idea looks at how to take an idea and start to form a business plan around it.
Part 2: Plan the work looks at just that - creating a plan for delivering the required tasks to get the idea up and running.
Part 3: Make it happen looks at execution and quality control.
Part 4: Take the leap covers marketing, deployment and evaluation.
I like where Jeri has gone with this - and can see it applying so well to blogging-as-business. Treating your blog project as a business has the following potential advantages:
Read the series.
I read two articles via RSS this morning that exemplify the differences between Publishing 1.0 and 2.0.
Print is Dead talks about New Grub Street 2.0 and the struggle to publish in a traditional sense (i.e. hardcopy via a mainstream publisher) and how this can lead to a lot of heartache for authors.
Jon Morrow’s interview with Seth Godin where Seth talks about how the playing field has changed - and while he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater (by advocating electronic publishing only), he does show by his own example that the blog begets the following that begets the free ebook that begets the hardcopy book.
If you are interested in writing your own book, my humblest recommendation is that you read both of these articles.
Helen and I ate at Cream (Bunda Street, Canberra) last night. It was the most enjoyable meal I’ve had in weeks.
I needed somewhere relaxing after shopping for a while - we wandered past wagamama and wondered what else there was around. Helen had heard some good things about Cream, so we went in. It was fairly busy for early evening (6PM or so) - and with a central island serving area replete with a dozen different cakes on display and a variety of espresso machnery looked to be set up for the daytime coffee-and-cake set. The menu at the door looked tempting - I like the idea of duck risotto (and would probably eat duck icecream if you gave it to me!). I was willing to give it a go. Helen has an eye for design and spent the first few minutes distracted by the impressive layout and decoration.
The menu is impressive - for some reason the entree menu is the largest part of it, which I found appealing. For an entree, I had the Carpaccio of scallop and salmon - just enough to kill my hunger but delicious, washed down with Asahi beer (on tap at Cream, one of my favourites). Helen had one of the specials, prawn fillets and corn fritters in almond batter, very filling and very nice.
Helen had the duck risotto for a main, and loved it, although she said that the bok choi slightly overpowered the duck. The duck risotto is said to be one of their signature dishes, and my small taste of it confirmed that it is something that I will order for myself on a future visit. I had one of the daily specials, a grilled backstrap of veal served with caramelised onion on a bed of caramelised parsnips. I am not a big parsnip fan but the veal was really really good - I have to admit to sopping up the juices with some beer-battered fries that I ordered as a side dish. The fries were one of the many highlights of the meal - they come with two dipping sauces: a light sour cream and a fresh tomato and basil salsa (of the sort that you wish was served on bruscetta everywhere but never is).
Full as we were by this stage, we couldn’t face the idea of dessert, as tempting as they looked. We did fit a Belgian Top Deck hot chocolate in each, a mixture of white and milk chocolate, again very nice.
Service is important to me, and was excellent throughout.
The verdict? We’re planning to go again, and take friends with us next time. I’d book if going after about 6:30PM at night. It could be a wonderful place for a celebration, coffee and cake through the day, or a beer and fries after work to relax. Entrees ran from around $8.00 to $19.00 for the exotic, mains from around $14.00 and up, and the draft Asahi is $6.50 by the schooner.
It could be that as a relatively new eatery in an over-subscribed Canberra market, Cream are making an extra effort to provide a top dining experience. If so, I hope that they never lose the drive to be excellent - for excellent they are now. The only other reference to a review of Cream was not that positive - perhaps we caught them on a good night? I don’t know, even the best of places has their good days and their bad, and sometimes there are staff members on the tail end of their usefulness. For now, Cream is good.
MyGADS is a natural language information storage and retrieval engine - it is free - take the tour.
The illustrated example uses are impressive - plain language input and retrieval on information snippets such as:
Where it starts to get really cool is in domain-specific information. At the moment I’m working with Matthew Hodgson on a nasty information management problem - a large body of complicated medical information needs to be made available to a variety of audiences in a way that makes sense to all of them. I’ve punched some example information into MyGADS and come up with some reliable answers. It isn’t a total solution by any means - it can be confused (cost equalling price, for example) and is very North American-centric (weather information and SMS access to the MyGADS query engine) - but the developers, Teragram, have a specialised solution called Direct Answers. That said, as much as MyGADS is able to provide, it provides nicely via the web and Google Chat.
My suggestion is that you get a free account and play with it - it is one more way to capture and present information.
My friends Chris and Angie are not long back from Singapore where they made a fairly big splash. People like their artwork - bright colours and friendly characters much loved by their customers, who are generally buy the original paintings for their children.
I’ll keep you posted on their success. They have other shows planned throughout Australiasia - contact them for details.
Steve Collins is a friend of mine and is an enthusiastic evangelist of the business uses of Web 2.0. He’s now guest-blogging over at Web Worker Daily. His first guest spot is on Web 2.0 social networking applications. In it, Steve talks about the connector concept discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point as follows:
The critical mass of connectedness is closely related to Malcolm Gladwell’s notion of the tipping point. As the number of users and their activity grows, social applications get better, often exponentially so. Ideally the early users of a social application are Gladwell’s “connectors�, and they “yawn� a lot. These people drive uptake and encourage others to join in, increasing connectedness. Soon, the volume of users and the connections between them reaches a point where real value is offered.
I can’t think about connectors without relating them to Seth Godin’s sneezer concept. As a sneezer myself (I get enthusiastic when things work, like Tangler and wagamama) I admire a master-sneezer like Steve.
What is the main difference between connectors and sneezers? Let’s go to the source for definitions. First up, this is how Malcolm Gladwell defines connectors:
What makes someone a Connector? The first–and most obvious–criterion is that Connectors know lots of people. They are the kinds of people who know everyone. All of us know someone like this. But I don’t think that we spend a lot of time thinking about the importance of these kinds of people. I’m not even sure that most of us really believe that the kind of person who knows everyone really knows everyone. But they do.
And this is how Seth Godin defines sneezers:
SNEEZER Some people are more likely to tell their friends about a great new idea. These people are at the heart of the ideavirus. Identifying and courting sneezers is a key success factor for ideamerchants.
I think that the two concepts are closely related - a successful connector will be a better sneezer. I’ll grant that it is possible to be a good sneezer and a poor connector I guess (imagine a totally antisocial but successful blogger if such a person exists). The reality is that most sneezers are connectors - they want to tell people about things, good and bad. I am not sure that sneezers are a subset of connectors - not all connectors are rabid sneezers, and not all sneezers are connectors - no easy Venn diagram there. If you know of anyone researching this at the moment, please let me know.
I’ve been involved with beta testing for Tangler - a social networking site - for several months now. While it is not perfect, it is getting better - worth a look if you are interested in a social networking application for a project, a social or cultural organisation, or keeping track of discussion within a distributed business.
If this sounds like you, check out the Explore Tangler page.
Celluloid is a movie review site that my friend Maria has just started. She is passionate about good cinema, and mutual friend Matt talked her into sharing her ideas with the world.
So far today she’s reviewed Primer, Casino Royale, and Mr Bean vs TMNT.
Good luck Maria, you are on my favourites list already.
Today, I bought a Nintendo Wii. It is all Matt’s fault.
I have played with it for an hour. All I can say is that the Wii is:
Helen is working late tonight - when she gets home, I’ll introduce her to the Wii.
Every other game simulates the reality of gameplay - moving a mouse to move then clicking to shoot or wield a sword has not appealed to me for several years now. I used to be a fair hand at first person shooters (DooM, Hexen, Quake, Quake ][) but they grew past me by asking for too many simultaneous control movements. The Wii has given me the fun back.
The natural way to wield a tennis racquet or a weapon is in the hands - and the Wii gives us this natural interface. It is not the same as the real thing - I am no golfer, but I have studied classical Japanese swordsmanship, and it is definately not the same… but it is closer than anything I have seen before.
I can’t say if you would enjoy the Wii experience as I do (and it is definitely early days for me), but it is worth having a play with at a game shop.
UPDATE: My Wii has its own blog now over at Wiild Life. More about my blog diversification plans at Facibus On Blogging.
UPDATE 2: My Wii blog is now over at WiiForMii.com.
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