Loïc: We have just launched TypePad UK.

I wonder how long did it take for the localisation... :-)

David Weinberger: Authors tags and topics:

Does this mean that folksonomies will encourage the re-emergence of topics, bottom up? Are we going to be double-minded, applying one tag for the folksonomy so the resource can be found and others that reflect our own interests? ? (If we also start tagging for local folksonomies [~] our social networks [~] we may become multi-minded in our tagging.) Are topics dead or are we rebuilding them in our images?

It's interesting, in our work we have always considered topics with a bottom up approach.

Unlike current folksonomies, we are offering users the ability to share topics via "topicrolls", allowing them to create new ones or to pick topics from a list shared among members of a "cloud".

So here I am, playing with my powerful new toy. This week we received 3 Power Mac G5, all with dual 2.5Mhz processors. Also if my old dual 1Mhz G4 did not feel slow, these new toys do feel fast.

While for others the "plug in firewire target mode and automatically move everything to the new computer" process worked, it didn't for me so I'm still in the painful process of moving some 50Gb of stuff from the old to the new Mac. Most probably there's some corrupted file on the old Mac which prevented the process from working smoothly.

It's not a big deal and it's a good opportunity to get rid from stuff that had been sitting on my hard disk forever (acually I found a folder full of stuff I had moved over from my Cube which I had never touched for at least 3 years).

Preferences have been moved, all main applications seem to be working, passwords and cookies have been recovered, I still have about 10Gb of music and movies which are moving right now in the background. So far the most amazing feature of the G5 is how silent it is compared to the G4.

PS: the new G5 is silent. Very silent. Especially since I cannot plug my old not powered speakers (the G4 had a built-in amplifier). I guess I'll have to buy some speakers.

Testing Radio on my new G5. Hmm... it doesn't work... Yes, it works! :-)

Back from shopping this morning I posted this silly picture to Flickr from my phone. I just went n the site and and tagged it as "artichoke". I must own this tag I thought. I mean, how many pictures of artichokes can exist on Flickr? 29!

Technorati: artichoke

As soon as Gmail opened, last April, I immediately requested an account. I didn't hear from them until today: the "Gmail Team" just wrote to say that I now can have my gmail account (of course I already have it... btw, I have 50 invitations available if anyone is interested).

Well, it looks like a little random numbers generator can feel it. A quite intriguing article about how a bunch of random numbers generators connected together on the net can apparently "sense" and in some case predict events with a big impact on humankind.

Since in these days I'm posting pictures to Flickr much more frequently than posts to this blog I decided to move my flickr badge at the top of this template for a while and see what happens.

Here's some google juice for our last hotel in London.

Checking in they asked me to fill the form only with my passport number, nationality and email address. It's a step forward but what they should really ask you is my weblog url. This might have helped them deciding about the room to assign us.

The Paddington Court Hotel in London belongs to the Best Western chain (reservation made via hotels.com). Visiting the hotel site you will have the chance to look at some beautiful virtual reality views of their premises. Here's what you don't get on the site.

As with many other in this area, this hotel is the result of many houses stiched together. This mean that to get to our room we had to go up some stairs, trough the lounge, up more stairs, trough a corridor, down stairs, another corridor, up more stairs... all this with a pretty large suitcase (which later at the airport would have been labelled "Heavy" with two large yellow stickers). By the time we reached our room, which I estimate was probably in Cambrige, I badly needed a shower. The room had everything you would expect from a modern hotel room but the room.

Look at the picture, it was tiny, the bed was against the wall (and the radiator) and there was hardly the room to open the suitcase. The bathroom was somehow better, even if we had to fix the sink and the shower was so limescale encrusted that it was spraying water everywhere but in my direction.

The hotel was horribly expensive but this applies to all hotels in London so nothing to complain on this side.

Overall it was not worse than many other hotels in the area, travelling alone the rooms are probably okay but they are definetly too small for two people.

I have always liked the River of News approach with RSS aggregators (I like this definition btw). I like to quickly scroll trough very long pages scanning posts and news in a browser.

Since I started using BlogLines I have had a chance to group feeds I subscribe to, my current pattern is clicking on the group's title and get the river of news view of every group (I never read a single feed).

I separated them to get homogeneous flows, bloggers with bloggers, English with English, Italian with Italian, etc. It's interesting to notice that I read some groups more frequently than others.

After some usage, here's how I divide my rivers and how I read them:

• Comics - here's where I get my daily dose of Dilbert. I check this group once a day.
  
• Dashboard - Technorati links, feeds from our own k-logs, alerts, etc. I check this group every time it updates.
• English blogs - Blogs in English that don't belong to the following category. I check this group once a day.
• Friends - Blogs in English written by friends or people I like. I check this group several times per day
• Guitar - Stuff and news about guitars. Once a day (it doesn't update very frequently)
• Int News - News from international news sources (BBC, NY Times, Yahoo, etc.). I check this group rarely, maybe once per week. Quite often I mark all items as read even if I don't read them
• Italian bloggers - Weblogs written in Italian. I check this group several times per day
• Italian News - News from Italian news sources. I read this rarely just like Int News.
• Tech News - News from technology news sources. I read this group a little more frequently than other non-blogger feeds, but not that much.

The bottom line seems to be that I trust bloggers much more than other news sources to get my information. This doesn't of course mean that I don't read news sites. To the contrary: I read many news sites but I usually get there via a blogger and not their RSS feeds.

I'm curious to learn how other aggregator users group their feeds.

While in London I met Euan at the Apple Store, he asked about Shuffles and they had them on stock. So he got one. How could I resist?

Anyway, the toy needs 4 hours for the first charge so I went back to the hotel, plugged in, waited 4 hours (actually they weren't exactly 4... but it looked charged enough to me), loaded some music, unplugged and... the headphones weren't working! The left channel was weak and scratchy.

Went back to the Apple Store the following day and I got the unit replaced, no question asked.

Now I'm the happy owner of an iPod Shuffle, I'll throw myself out from the Vintage iPod Owners Club. ;-)

We'll be meeting old and new friends, real-time updates available on my Flickr channel.

I use google quite frequently to check spelling of words and to look things up on dictionary.com, all words used for search used to be linked to the dictionary.com definition in the top-right corner of google's result page and to me it's quicker to get to dictionary.com looking up the word on google starting from my browser's search box than loading dictionary.com homepage. Anyway, today I checked a word and the definition was linked to Answers.com.

I heard you're buying Bloglines, that's pretty neat. But please remember how important this service is to a lot of people out there. I spend more time on Bloglines than I have on any other web site *ever*.

I use it day and night, at home and at the office, on my Mac and on my PC, on my desktop and on my mobile phone. I refresh like a crack monkey looking for the next hit. I use it for my news, I use it to look for houses, I've used it to look for jobs, I use it to hear PodCasts, I use it for my favorites page, and I use it to keep track of what people are saying about my weblog (which it does quickly and efficiently). I use it constantly and incessantly and if it went away or was changed drastically, I would be very unhappy.

In other words, please don't fuck it up. [Russel Beattie]

Amen.