I pretty much just summed up two of my favourite all-time web memes — and both can be credited to American politicians who were probably not the most technologically savvy guys (if there’s an understatement award, I just won it).

The history of the word “internets” is pretty short, having been coined by George Bush on October 17th, 2000 in the third Gore-Bush presidential debate (interestingly, note that the word “interweb” — another term that poked fun at the technologically not-so-adept — had already been around for a few years).

The “series of tubes” meme has been around even less time. Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens used his “series of tubes” analogy to explain his position on net neutrality. Senator Stevens’ explanation was mocked shortly thereafter on a Wired blog. Here’s what Ted Stevens actually said:

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

Continue reading »

The ability of a meme to grow and transform, seemingly on its own, is quite amazing. Yet memes don’t actually transform on their own — they are in fact transformed by people. Take Leeroy Jenkins for example.

Either you know who Leeroy Jenkins is or you don’t (don’t feel bad if you don’t, I had no idea what this referred to until very, very recently, thus I have apparently been living under a rock for the past few years). But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Continue reading »

Why do you read your favourite newspaper? What about your favourite magazine? You’d probably answer that it’s because they print content that you find interesting. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

But, if you think about it, you also read your favourite newspaper and magazine because of the content they don’t publish. Lots of the time, whether it’s in knowledge management or content management, we think about getting users more content — the old “if they only had the right information at the right time, things would be better” approach.

I don’t know about you, but I have more content to deal with every day than I can possibly handle. Feed updates, emails, voicemails, podcasts, blog posts, the list goes on and on (and I’m sure you can think of many, many more). I would say that around 90% of the content I get in a day remains unread (and the most often unread items are usually automatic notifications, system-generated emails, mass emails, etc.). And I’m not even taking spam into consideration.

Continue reading »

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, postulates that there are four important environmental factors that contribute to the ultimate success or failure of a society:

1. “Continental differences in the wild plant and animal species available as starting materials for domestication.” Having more domesticatable species of flora and fauna mean a head start for that society in terms of farming, feeding a population and manual labour (from domesticated animals).

2. Rates of technological diffusion and population migration within a continent. How fast people can move around within a particular continent affects how fast they can spread technologies to other people within that continent — as well as allowing for other proximate technologies such as increased communication speed.

3. Rates of technological diffusion and population migration between continents. North Africa, being relatively easy to reach from both the Middle East and Europe, benefited from many early advantages that more southern African countries did not, due to their separation from North Africa by a large desert.

Continue reading »

Well, after battling with incessant server errors, things seem to be back to normal here. I’m hoping they stay that way. Any problems you may have noticed on the site were caused by a few upgrades that were done by web webhost (BlueHost), but things seem to have gotten straightened out.

However, I thought this would be a good time to update WordPress, update all plugins that the site uses and delete some extra files that were hanging around on the server. I’m hoping that this will keep the site running quickly and efficiently — with everything updated, your experience here should be even better than before.

If you notice anything that isn’t functioning properly, just send me a quick message and let me know (or just leave a comment to this post). Thanks again for your patience through the hosting issues!

Well, it would seem 2008 has started out as a rough year for my webhost — all domains I own have been down more than they’ve been up for January. Apologies to everyone who has been trying to access the site in that period of time — I’ve spent many, many hours on the phone with BlueHost trying to get this fixed.

While I appreciate that Matt Heaton (CEO of Bluehost) has admitted that things have gone off the rails, I don’t feel terribly confident about BlueHost as a hosting company these days. After about 10 phone calls (and as I said, many wasted hours), I’ve only managed to get the site up about half the time — and problems keep returning.

What bothers me the most however, is that aside from Matt’s blog post, there has been no communication from BlueHost at all about the problems. No list of problems, no potential solutions, and no timetable for fixes.

Matt Heaton mentions that the company has grown at an unusually fast rate over the past month or two. Great — but sacrificing the satisfaction of your existing customers for new business hardly seems like a good move. If you don’t have the capacity for all that business, you need to be honest with yourself and not bite off more than you can chew as a company.

Continue reading »

I’ve been debating (largely with myself) for quite a while whether to place full posts on the front page, or whether to abbreviate the posts with the ‘More’ tag. Most of the time, I’ve chosen to go with the abbreviated posts.

Why? Well, my logic kind of goes like this. If you have a bunch of full posts on the front page, it’s going to be very, very long to scroll down, even if there are only five or six posts on a page. The advantage, however, would be that you don’t have to actually click on an item to see the full post.

So I thought I’d ask you. Would you rather see the full post on the front page? Or would you rather have it abbreviated with ‘More’ and then click on it? Or, perhaps, you read through an RSS reader and don’t really care what’s on the front page. It would be great to get some feedback, whatever it is.

Continue reading »

I came across a post on Charles Stricklin’s blog about how the Graffitti content management system was knocking WordPress in their Google ads. Now I’m not really that partial to any technology, and I get a little freaked out when people evangelize to me about how great a particular technology is (people in general, I’m not referring to Charles’ post).

But, seriously, WordPress is a pretty great tool — and not only that, it’s free. As I said in response to Charles’ post, the biggest problem with Graffitti’s statement is not whether or not they have a superior product — it’s that it’s just a bad marketing tactic.

Presentation Zen had a great post about this from almost a year ago, that sums things up nicely. The main point: when you talk about your competitors, don’t be a jerk. Be gracious, whether or not you think you do something better than they do, and remember that you can always learn something from the way they do things.

Continue reading »