Will Knott

Meet Rover.

I think that Rover is a wolf spider (I think), and she’s living in the house. Her hobbies include reading (she makes a racket turning the pages and moving books late at night when I’m trying to sleep) and hiding in candy being given out to any kids foolish enough to visit on Halloween.

She makes a nice pet, but its hard taking her for a walk.

And yes I’m trying to finish my slides and analysis for Barcamp Cork II.

take care,
and don’t be too scared (or scary) tonight,
Will Knott

This photo was taken on Monday. Wednesday’s cold snap and sleet has turned this rose in to a browning collection of former petals. Yup folks, winter is back.

take care,
Will Knott

Right now, freezing at the keyboard in my geansai gorm, I should be making slides and a talk for Barcamp Cork II. The talk is a HCI look at Twitter and twitter applications and interfaces (but I’m enjoying the data mining of the survey too much). However I’ve noticed something from that data.

I’ve asked people why they use particular twitter applications and interfaces.  In the process of discovering that people don’t always answer the question you ask, I’ve collected a few stories about why they use twitter.

Some use twitter for marketing purposes. Social media monitoring either for themselves or for their clients.

Some use twitter, Jaiku or other micro-blogging tools for a quick response to questions.

But most people seem to use it to stay in contact with friends. With their Tribe.

Think about it. Are you a sports fan, or a fan of a particular team in a particular sport? No one is a fan of GAA but not a team, but they are a fan or their club and county (even when their club is in a different county).They can admire another team, but they are fanatics for their own. Their tribe.

A fairly lonely sport like cycling has a community? Cyclists look to each other. Sometimes look after each other on roads when they encounter each other. Even as strangers, as their bike identifies them as being of the same tribe. Help will be offered. Tips will be swapped. A spare tube will be ‘lent’.

Going to a Barcamp, an un-conference identifies you as being of a tribe. A technical minded, or technology loving tribe. A tribe identified by their laptops, mp3 recorders and gadgets. A tribe allied with web 2.0 and a love of problem solving. Help will be offered. Tips and urls will be swapped. A spare cable will be lent.

And then we have the Jaiku versus twitter debate. Almost everyone in Jaiku is bi-textual, but there are tribes, groups, clans etc. Everybody wants to belong, be part of something bigger. Be part of a grander scheme. And one which makes person to person contacts. Everyone wants to belong, even if its to a school clique.

The older, traditional tribes; church, local neighbourhoods and work are disintegrating. So new tribes are forming.

And once a tribe is identified, it will be marketed to. (Buy Burma Shave).

take care,
Will Knott

The only advantage of being up at 6am, is the view.
Well, and time to do things I suppose.

take care,
Will Knott

Inside the Shandon Bells aka The Four Faced Liar aka St Anne’s Clock Tower is well a clock.

tick tock

As the hours creep closer to the clocks changing.

take care,
Will Knott

As daylight savings time creeps near, time to save some daylight.

Will Knott

Its time I took a put a few more photos up here.

Just before October, (and the whole Pink for October theme change) I did a mini photowalk to this place.
I’ll have a few pictures from inside it shortly.

take care,
Will Knott

I’m not late yet.

The Tuesday Push for this week is LouderVoice who have just launched a range of business services. This means that you can “white label” your reviews. Or to put it another way, your site features reviews, by your customers, of your products or services, but you don’t have the hassle of creating a reviews platform along with everything else.

All the pain of creating a review system is taken off your hands. You get to define exactly where reviews appear on your site, who can review/comment and how all of that content appears. The effort involved in adding reviews to a site using this approach is very low.

Reviewing is easy, and you can do it by blog post, SMS text, Twitter, Jaiku and even logging in to LouderVoice (how quaint).

You also get a little review and link juice for your site if you want it.

More importantly, LouderVoice is open for more ideas to make things better for you.

Its not just me who thinks they are good, they’ve been short-listed for New Company of The Year by The Irish Software Association.

And if you look very carefully on the LouderVoice, you can see some reviews I’ve done in the past. I think I’ll have to start doing them again soon.

take care,
Will Knott

How do you use Twitter? Click Here to take survey. I’ll be presenting the results at part of a presentation at Barcamp Cork II.

Image via CrunchBase

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• Pre-Barcamp Cork Food

Dear Grannymar,

I don’t want you getting lonely, so would you like a toyboy to keep you company. One you can actually play with?

Meet Tommy. He’s a bit flash and a little slow… oh sorry that should be “he’s a bit of Flash“, and he’ll take more poking than a facebook account. He also seems to be allergic to shirts. Tommy is the “breast awareness guy“; the focus of a special website and starring in a tongue-in-cheek video which is also on YouTube (and embedded below).

The point of the video and the site is to teach you how to examine yourself for breast cancer (which also effects men, so its not quite as silly as it seem), and if you donate via his site he (OK, a server in Cancer Research UK) will send you an exclusive digital desktop calender featuring photos of Tommy. Shirtless naturally.

I wonder if the Irish Cancer Society would do something similar?

OK, its a little less pink than usual, but it almost fits the bill for Pink for October in Ireland.

take care,
and don’t play too hard,
Will Knott