Renaming blog tags

How to rename a blog tag across a bunch of posts, all at once.
Tops.

Blogging Less

You may have noticed. I've been writing here less. I blame my slate. I just spend much less time in front of the PC now. Hopefully, as I'm getting used to having it, I'll feel less like I want to use it all the time, and more like it's just available whenever I need. If that makes sense. The games are such massive time wasters, but I think at some point the novelty will wear off and I'll go back to more constructive things. I should look more into Cocoa Touch, and perhaps write something for the iPad, but then no idea has particularly inspired me yet.

Facebook and Twitter

Twitter and Facebook are different and should be used separately and for different purposes. I bring this up, because it is pretty clear that quite a few people are treating Facebook like Twitter, and I find it mildly annoying. Only mildly annoying, because there is an easy way of dealing with it.

First of all though, it is easy to see why people confuse the two. They are quite similar. You use both to inform people of your status, and things that you are doing, or things that are on your mind. They are both in a sense a bit of an ego trip and a popularity contest. They can both contribute to your need to feel wanted and accepted.

But they are very different. Twitter restricts you to 140 character posts. Small tweets. Links. "I'm having coffee.", "This shop sux.", "check this out - ". You can put a lot more interesting detail in there, of course, but it is still fundamentally limited. More limiting, is the level of interactivity. Yes, you can cross reference tweets, but it isn't very convenient, and doesn't really facilitate conversation.
I have used Twitter for a while, and, like 60% of people that try it get bored of it within a few weeks. The top 10% of Twitter users produce 90% of the tweets. Whereas on Facebook and other similar sites, it's much closer to 10% producing 30%. Twitter is more like a news feed. You subscribe to producers you want to hear from.

Facebook is a much richer, engrossing, social experience. People can post quite a bit of detail, images, videos, links, but much more importantly, the threaded conversations under each status post are what really makes Facebook excellent. It's engaging, social and lets face it, a lot of fun. Checking the notifications to see which threads have been updated keeps you immediately up to date with all your conversations.

So, if you are posting small, inane, irrelevant posts about your coffee, or making the bed in Facebook, you are completely missing the point. That is what Twitter is for. And you'll get followers who want to hear everything you dribble out. Use Facebook to post interesting things that may start conversations. Facebook is more like being in a room of friends, start a discussion, but don't update people with what you are doing every ten minutes. It's boring, and people will simply hide your status updates.

Predictions for new Facebook features:
- multiple threaded conversations under a single status update.
- personal stats like, %friends hiding your status, and %friends commented on your status in the last month
- better email style conversation support, and longer term look for Google Wave integration.

Then, there's always blogs for people who really want to get a bunch of stuff off their chests. Like this trollop :_)

Iran blocks Facebook

Iran has recently blocked access to Facebook.

I wonder why that would be. There has been no official reason given, but clearly this is to stop candidates using Facebook in the upcoming election. Or more precisely, one particular candidate has been using it effectively, and Ahmadinejad isn't. So he's banned it. "I'm not going to lower myself to using this effective Western technology, so nobody can."
That's not dictatorial is it.
I can see how Facebook would be a really effective front in an election campaign, especially in places where most media is controlled. Specialised apps, and even just groups can cut a blaze through relevant Facebook communities.
Have a look at the recent growth stats of Facebook here. (when the site returns)

statcounter.com

I recently added page hit statistics from statcounter.com, you can see the counter down the bottom right of the page. All you see is a hit count, but I get a load of detailed statistics. It's so cool and unbelievably detailed given that it is free!
Check this out. Yesterday, for example, I know that someone from Chicago, Illinois, was searching for "drinking blackouts" on google.com, and found a reference to my blog entry, Of Blackouts and Drinking, and clicked it. I'd say this person was probably very disappointed, but I don't have to guess because I also know the visit lasted less than 5 seconds. Heh. I also know they were using IE7.0 from WinXP and rendered the page on a 1024x768 display. I also have the IP address and their ISP name. Now it's getting scary.

+3 Post of Unveiling

Hi,
You've received this blog intro over email because I think that there may even yet, be the most desperate, most remote hope that you could be at all, even slightly, interested in some of the minutiae of my life and opinions. I have joined the great unwashed, and created a blog. Blogging perhaps represents one of the greatest social changes of this decade, or, perhaps, it simply represents the fact that never before have so many been able to tell us so little in so many words. "Teh Interweb" gives us such power, the power for example, to click on the link below and continue reading my "+3 Post of Unveiling" ...
http://unwritable.blogspot.com/
... where you will transported to the Blogosphere. Here I am, writing what I thought a short while ago was the unwritable. "It's just an online diary", I scoffed. "It'll never catch on" I asserted. "Who will give a shit?", I queried. OK, one out of three ain't bad. But seriously, after reading a lot of science fiction over the last 5 years, I've come to realise that this isn't going away. The time to get used to this is now. For now we'll just call this an official invite to come back as often or as little as you like. Check out the archive or sort by topic using the links on the left right. Send me a link to your blog and we'll cross-link. Laugh at my uber-nerdiness. Post comments to that effect.

Future Blogging

I used to think that blogging was just keeping a glorified online diary. I was wrong. OK, I was a little bit right, and I still am, but I think it is becoming clear that blogging is a lot more than this. It is a personal content delivery mechanism. "But that's the same thing!" I hear you cry with a derisive snort. I think the online diary aspect is still there, and many blogs are little more than this, and that is fine, but blogging enables people to deliver content useful to others, but more importantly that that content is searchable.
My friend and long time co-worker Tom and I recently set up internal work blogs. At first the search mechanism wasn't working, (i.e. searches on content in your blog returned no matches) and Tom said he wouldn't bother if that was the case. A work blog is more on the content delivery, and less on the diary side, and this is where searching makes it a Really Useful Technology. So when Tom blats out some really useful technical tips he just spent the morning discovering, I can come back in six months, search for said tips and have that content available, saving me a morning's (re)work.
At the moment we have discrete text and video blogging, where each individual post takes time and effort to produce. But blogging will go far beyond this. Most people are aware of the lifelog concept where your constant experience is recorded. Many people find this pretty abhorrent, but it doesn't have to be all public all the time, and of course there are things you don't want recorded at all. As technology improves, and the wearing of a video camera and mike is as easy as wearing the rest of your clothes, why wouldn't you just by default record everything? If it doesn't cost much, it just accumulates in the background, and when all that life content is easily searchable, imagine how easy a lot of tasks become. You won't have to jot notes about meetings, appointments, or any details your wet memory can't deal with. Resolving arguments about who said what becomes a thing of the past. You could prove your innocence in a flash as the raw feed would be all securely timestamped and tamper-evident of course.
From this raw feed you could pick and choose the interesting things to make public, or produce eloquent text out of subvocalised ramblings from that recent bus journey.
Of course all this requires technology to improve, and while it won't happen next year, or the year after, it isn't decades away.

It's late.

It's late. I'm tired. I'm late to the blog scene. I'm tired from trying to keep up. I used to be cutting edge. All the time. Now I wait. And wait. Until it's almost mainstream. I also need to go to sleep.

unwritable.blogspot.com
Do you know how hard it is to choose a decent domain here? I think I did reasonably well. It has both a writing reference and a technology reference. Since I'll be writing a bit about technology, it should be at least forgivable.

Right. Sleep(28800000)....