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From now on I’ll be blogging at my new Blog Use Your Noodle.
Cool.
Perhaps Chief Noodler? - (noodling being what you do when you thing about stuff – ie using your noodle)
Hey – I’ve just discovered that noodling is a fishing term – according to Wikipedia.. No reference to Noodle as something you use to think….
hmm….time to start something. New Blog (can I redirect this one to that one?) “Useyournoodle” is born!!!!
My regular Friday FryUp was a Credit Crunch edition. And bought with it a bright spot in the form of some wonderful video’s inspired by said Crunch. I love the way people get creative in bad times. Here’s a few I enjoyed:
That’s it, I’m sick of it. Gloom Doom Bust. We’re all going to hell in a handbasket.
While I have no doubt that the meltdown is real (and in some part overdue), I think the media is having a field day with it and fanning the flames. We’ll survive. It might be tough but with any luck we’ll learn a few lessons along the way.
For a short time anyway, I’m going to be finding something to be happy about as often as I can.
Gerry McGovern gets fired up in his latest post on Giraffe Forum titled Obsessed with Technology. Most of the time I agree with Gerry and this is no exception. The web is a technology enabled medium and you can’t get away from that – why would you want to, it’s half the fun!. But I’d say though that many people working in the web space whose skill-set is not technology based has been aware of and had to work around this bias for a long time. A lot of people (and not just IT people) seem believe that technology is the answer to all your problems, and if you just implement xyz system or application, that’s all there is to it – everything else is peripheral.
Not sure what inspired someone to write this piece on the Australian government portal but had to giggle at the comment left by the manager of USA.gov portal. Well, that’s what you get when you make comparisons. It depends on what you’re looking for and how hard you look. If you’re going to compare something like government portals, you better be sure that you do more than a quick surface scan because they all do things slightly differently. The UN survey rankings includes human elements like how well educated your population is, which means western countries fare better than some others who are actually doing some quiet interesting stuff from a service perspective. Oh, and I’d agree with the US.gov manager’s comment that survey links on the homepage don’t get as good a response rate as pop-up windows.
Nicely summarised results of Yahoo!’s usability testing of Open ID.
If ya want something a bit denser, try the report on Google’s research on federated login.
And this is why you have to be careful: Google backs down amid privacy concerns.
Call me paranoid will you? Despite the removal of a controversial clause in their end user agreement that would give Google ownership of everything you enter/do in their new browser, as the writer states – Google makes their money from advertising and they are strongly motivated to gather as much information about you as a) you will let them and b) they can get away with.
Be warned.
Do No Evil eh boys?……we all know power corrupts.
Well, I’ve found them interesting. These are sites/places I’ve been looking at but didn’t get around to posting about at the time:
- I got momentarily distracted at LiveLeak.com thanks to this video of a hell landing in the old Hong Kong airport (having just had wild ride into the new airport myself) – and the other eyebrow raising video’s of plane landings
- Big ups to Arthur for keeping me in the know with American politics. Check him out on Amerinz
- I was reminded the other day how much I luv boxes and arrows Check it out if you’re into good design
- So Google have launched their own browser. I dunno – maybe I’m a cynic or maybe I just don’t trust organisations that try to take over the (virtual) world. We’ll see. I like a bit of competition and would prefer to choose from a number of companies that do a few things well than one that does a whole lotta stuff not so well.
- Our “Culture and Heritage Minister says “The internet is now so much an essential part of life and commerce that access to it can be seen as “a human right”. Riiiiiiiggghhht.
- Cynic of the week goes to: The Economist for their story on Cybernationalism
- Thanks again to The Oracle for helping me solve the mystery of the carpet stain – and how to get rid of it. Er – The Oracle being our term for the www.
- I’m now on Facebook but in my typical identity-risk adverse way haven’t added that much to my profile, and still am a bit mystified about the value – I don’t want to link to random people I don’t know. We’ll see – I’ll ask around peep’s I know and see if I can set up a few meaningful links.
- Twitter Twitter Twitter – what’s the point?. I know – EGO
- Spore gets released on Friday. So does Stalker – Shadow of Chernobyl. Whee heee. If you’re not a gamer you won’t care.
- Have a look at newtondotgeek Cool.
- And just because my dinner is ready, a little bit of a Bit On The Side…. I don’t know how I feel about the conclusion – perhaps those that know me can tell me if it’s true:

Which OS are You?
My husband says “yeah” Yeah wot? It’s accurate ?
Ok I’m back from a two month hiatus – most of which was spent in the UK on holiday. Yay – probably comment about this trip from time to time as is relevant.
Any-who, this post is express some frustration at some things I find irritating when surfing around the net looking for stuff about a particular topic (it could be anything – this morning it was about privacy). You google the relevant search term and start perusing the list of returns. One looks promising and click on it – only to find that the article is for members only. For some of the better news sites , the word subscription appears in the description, but not all of them. So it’s a wasted effort. The other annoying one is to follow as return only to be taken to a site that is a list of links to other sites that are lists of links to other sites. All links and no CONTENT. Don’t even get me started on links to articles that no longer appear.
