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Bad instructions are worse than none

by on August 5, 2009 in computing, technology

I work in an annexe – not, as some people suspect, a cave. This annexe has all mod cons. It has electricity, windows, a roof, even a toilet and shower. But it doesn’t have a telephone point, so my wireless network signal just about makes it through the several doors, walls and windows but is [...]

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Back everything up, everywhere, all the time

by on August 3, 2009 in cloudcomputing, computing, technology

Beware – lightning does strike twice and before you lose your data, back it up. In which Brendan obsesses about backing up I’m writing this post at my laptop. Nothing unusual there. But what is unusual is that I have two 1TB USB drives attached to it. One of them is copying the operating system [...]

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Humans do it better – but do they scale?

by on July 23, 2009 in blogging, computing, measurement, microblogging, monitoring, PR, research, socialmedia, socialnews, strategy, technology, trends

Today, two seemingly unrelated but actually very similar discoveries: socialmention is offering sentiment analysis among other metrics; and SpinVox uses people to transcribe messages. Humans as machines First, the second. SpinVox.They offer voice-to-text conversion which is something of a holy grail for computing, and given my past interest in AI, I found the proposition fascinating. [...]

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Measurement Camp, the BBC, and The Next Big Thing

by on March 26, 2009 in advertising, cloudcomputing, computing, measurement, musictechnology, socialnetworks, technology, viral

So last Wednesday I was at Measurement Camp, this time in the swanky offices of Dare Digital. The format is still evolving under the laid-back yet effective stewardship of Will McInnes (check out his survey, it’s hilarious), so this time we had a couple of presentations from past projects, then some quicker breakouts in which [...]

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Audio here, there, but not quite everywhere

by on October 21, 2008 in computing, musictechnology, socialmusic, socialnetworks, technology

I’m a big fan of online streaming audio. I loved Pandora before it became US-only. I quite like Last.FM. Musicovery has a lovely approach in its interface and mood-based approach. Now – at last – we have Spotify, and another great utility I came across this week, Simplify Media. I’ve covered Spotify before. I saw [...]

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My birthday, and me

by on October 9, 2008 in blogging, computing, microblogging, personal, RSS, stuff, technology

So, as of tomorrow, I will no longer be thirtysomething. It’s the big four-zero with, I think, the accent on the zero.* As every blogger knows, events are good things to hang blog posts off (or ‘off of’ if you’re American – although, as an ex-copywriter, I really shouldn’t end any sentence with a preposition, [...]

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Yahoo Pipes: you’ve got to go there to come back

by on October 7, 2008 in cloudcomputing, computing, monitoring, RSS, technology, visualisation

If anyone’s been following my Twitter feed recently they’ll know that I’ve been getting to grips with Yahoo Pipes. I think it’s an amazing tool and offers the tantalising possibility of creating a wholly modular monitoring system, effectively through programming-like routines which, through a neat graphical interface, largely remove the need for knowing how to [...]

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