From now on I’ll be blogging at my new Blog Use Your Noodle.

Chief Yahoo.

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:

• Credit Crunch Song
• Credit Crunch cereal
• Credit Crunch anthem
• Credit Crunch song (Chips chips)
• Credit Crunch the musical
• Financial Crisis: The musical
• My Old Man’s a banker – not the sound quality is not good
• Economic Bailout song
• Crash Dance

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.

Are they like, so last-version-of-web ? According to this guy they are.

I don’t agree. There are still lots of us that have stuff to say that can’t be said in 140 characters or less, don’t need to be ‘right now’, and isn’t in the form of a image or video.

I agree there is a lot of c#@p blogs out there (ahem, hopefully this one aside!), but just because some have become “too big, too impersonal” and lacking intimacy doesn’t mean there aren’t squillions out there providing fun, insight or just plain craziness for us to enjoy.

It’s revealing that the article’s author says ” text-based Web sites aren’t where the buzz is anymore”….ah-ha, maybe that’s what the problem is. It’s no longer the next big thing enough or cool enough for the hip crowd to be doing it any more. That doesn’t make it no longer valid, that just means it’s found it’s place.

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.

If you were going to turn up for an interview in Second Life? A Missouri government agency who hired it’s first employee from Second Life obviously could not refuse a small kitty.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that the agency involved is the Department for Natural Resources ?!
Given the individual in question did have to turn up for a follow up interview ‘in person’, I don’t see much difference between a virtual world approach and a document (aka a CV).

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.

I liked this post about some of the different approaches to identity management – it explains it simply for those that don’t want to get mired in detailed techno-babble.