External Links?

I was wondering what websites do with their external links and how they can be hijacked.

One can generate links from the Daily Telegraph: James Doig

Some random sites found in Google:

• James Doig
• Me and someone called James Doig

Or even the US government: James Doig

And Google itself: James Doig 

Wikipedia: Democracy in Action?

Wikipedia’s contribution to democracy receives a lot of hype. But it is not the articles themselves that are democratic, there the views of the last person to edit the piece stand, but the deletion review debates. These are fascinating to watch: the debate never really evolves, but everyone weighs in with their opinions, and a true consesus is rarely reached.

Real World’s Graduate of the Year, Kirill Makharinsky, has been keeping the Wikipedia masses busy. Someone — one of the family, I think it was disclosed — has been hitting Wikipedia with articles about St. John’s finest. The deletion debate received some strange comments from new users, but the (meritocratic) ‘consensus’ was thankfully in favour of deletion (now twice).

But this story highlights another part of the seedy underbelly of Wikipedia: to be fair to Mr M, it seems to have been an assassination job: as 84.70.175.84 pointed out, Kittybrewster (aka Mr/s Arbuthnot) may have edited the article PoV and then put it up for deletion. The article has gone now anyway (only the edited version is in Google Cache) and it’s nice to see group’s take wise collective decisions: Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, yes, a comprehensive one, but one that doesn’t follow ephemeral solar flares of notoriety, nomatter what Oxonian “sychophants” (to quote the assassin) think.

So, where does Mr M stand? Well, as one user said on Wikipedia, “Notability. There’s plenty of time“.

A quick overview of his companies:

• amiworthit.com, “The largest social networking club for students online” [own quote from someone actually on Facebook].
• ClickUni. (Coming soon! the site claims.)
• CanAnyone (COMING SOON, the site claims. Something — The Sphere Network — can be found in a subdomain.)
• Thinkplane, a consultancy with no online presence.
  (I hope I haven’t missed any here.)

Google ‘Mystery Page’

Tinfoil hats on. Google seems to be 'censoring' the last page of some searches, at least for one of my searches in a domain.

The screen-capture on the left shows the first page, where Google is clear there are three pages of results. But click on the '3' for the third page and Google whisks you to the second page (even though the link is correct).

Strange things are afoot!
(or it's just a silly bug)

Careers in Focus

The Careers in Focus: Management Consultancy event, run by CRAC, is taking place this Friday.

Accenture, BCG, Ernst & Young and McKinsey are sponsoring the event so it should be a fascinating adventure and a unique opportunity to meet and impress some of the very best consultancies.

Oxford in Google Maps

Google Maps finally includes streetmaps for most of Europe.

This will no doubt prove very useful to travelling Europeans everywhere, but the big wow! factor still comes from the satellite imagery also included. For some reason, maybe uniquely for a major city, Oxford is still very poorly served.

Most of the Dreaming Spires are still unavailable at the highest zoom and the resolution of the rest of the city is startling poor. What is going on?

Stranger still, there are whole fields in the middle of the Fens (captured at a time without any cows) in amazing detail.

UPDATE: The imagery of the Other Place seems to date from late 2001 – first half of 2002, because the ‘Thatcher Wing’ of the Archives Centre in Churchill College is still being built. I was resident there during the initial phases of construction (until August 2001), so I’ll be scouring the area for myself.

English Irregular Verbs

On news of Blair's savage defense of his latest crackdown on crime:

• They are out of touch with your voters.
• You make brave decisions.
• I take bold decisions that will be judged positively by history.

Past posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

New Releases: Fluxiom & Boxxet

I received invites to two new releases this week: Fluxiom, which bills itself as the solution to file chaos; and Boxxet, a new “best of” aggregator.

Fluxiom is a web-based digital asset management tool and claims to be the easiest way for people to share, store, and search their media libraries. Okay, that sounds all well and good, but it monetises these features through fairly hefty monthly fees: 9 Euros for 200MB up to 169 Euros for 8000MB [$11 to $208]. Limited 30 day free trials are now available.

Although not exactly a direct competitor, these prices will undoubtedly be compared to Flickr’s pro account (2GB upload/mo for $2).

Boxxet, pronounced ‘Box Set’, is a collection of specialised memediggers, where users decide the Box Score of various news stories and blog postings. Right now it all appears very experimental, but they do have box sets covering sports (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL), television, and US universities (inc. MIT)

UPDATE: Mashable have followed with a mention of Fluxiom.

Why They Call It Work

I’m off to Accenture this week on their Sampler Scheme so my mind has been turning once again to the World of Work, an exciting ride that Thorpe Park (see previous post) has yet to add to incorporate into their fun park.

Dutifully, I’ve therefore been catching up on my reading, as the flooding of my del.icio.us testifies, and worryingly came across this article in HBR: Why They Call It Work by E.L. Kersten [HBR, Vol. 84 Issue 2 (Feb 2006), p66-67]. It describes surveys that point to dropping job satisfaction in both the UK and US. “Robotic” seems to be an understandable descriptor.

Where the article is strangely insightful is the ‘innovative’ analysis of the reason for this decline: it can’t be that workplaces have degenerated so much in recent years (although, at least in the UK, the rise of soulless customer service centres must have had some effect on morale). Instead, Prof. Kersten suggests, it may be because employees have been taught to expect too much from their jobs. This seems to ring ridiculously true (so much that I hope it’s ironic) with Prince Charles’s ambition remarks about people having ‘ideas above their station’.

People may often have exaggerated ideas of their own achievements and worth, as mentioned in the excellent article on bounded awareness in the previous issue [M.H. Bazerman and D. Chugh, Vol. 84 Issue 1 (Jan 2006), p88-6] — ideas that I will admit on catching myself entertaining occasionally — and I believe that this may play at part in people expecting too much from their careers. We can’t all be brilliant analysts, communicators, leaders, etc. and it’s maybe only natural that we tend to more readily recognise our strengths and others’ weaknesses. And, yes, this may lead to dissatisfaction with our jobs, but I think that, managed successfully, this can be a wonderful force for the good.

If I’m happy with my job what is really striving me onwards through gruelling self-development to better myself? Is happiness — or rather ’satisfaction’ — just a manifestation of a lack of creativity and ambition?

For me that’s key: I think I can be happy in a job while being totally disatisfied, and long may I always be…

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p.s. When I just hit ‘publish’ and the title of this blog appeared on the screen, it finally dawned on me: who is the ultimate example of satisfaction? Grossmith’s Charles Pooter. He may do his job very competantly, but the book doesn’t describe any way in which he is singularly helping the company except when his son is fired, he worries about his own future, and he is really driven to extraordinary lengths to secure the custom of Mr Huttle’s American never-named friend.

WordPress Back!

Phew, WordPress appears to be back after an outage all of Easter Sunday.

That obviously wasn't the reason why I can't sleep tonight, and a puzzling article about crowds at Thorpe Park in today's Guardian won't help.  The piece describes Thorpe Park's new ride — Stealth — as being part of the reason for the crowds.  Apparently it is such a draw because the drop is the fourth steepest in the world. 

The drop – the fourth steepest in the world – is vertical.

That's the 4th steepest.  Not the first, or even the second.  Yet it's vertical?  No wonder the crowds are going crazy.

Windows Live Academic Search

Microsoft are trying again to leverage their search capabilities to compete in a field already well served by a number of well-established players and, more recently,Google too.

Their answer to the back-to-basics approach of Google Scholar is a new academic search facility on their growing Windows Live site.

The commercial citation search services, like Scirus run by Elsevier, were awkward to use and not as 'click-friendly' as Google, so there was certainly some room for maneuver in this space.

Screenshot of Windows Live Academic Search.

 "nanotube raman pressure"