I _Really_ Don't Know

Well, after saying "shouldn't that finish with 'if you don't tag five friends your mom'll get cooties' or something like that" I guess I more or less asked for it. I have been caught out by the rather ridiculous Five Things Meme, courtesy of Ian (internet alchemy) D.

Now, if this were email I sure as hell wouldn't do it, but as it'd my blog I guess I have to. Now, the big problem is I don't actually have five friends. So... Five Things:

So, the five things meme is going around like wild fire. I got tagged by Ian who got tagged by Leigh who got tagged by Phil who got tagged by Jim who got tagged by Erik who got tagged by Thibault who got tagged by Sylvain who got tagged by Gianugo who got tagged by Yoav who got tagged by Jim who got tagged by Sam who got tagged by Jim who got tagged by Dave who got tagged by Siel who got tagged by Ivan who got tagged by Tara who got tagged by Jesse who got tagged by Joe who got tagged by Carolyn who got tagged by Sandra who got tagged by Drew who got tagged by Liz who got tagged by Phil who got tagged by Pam who got tagged by Wendy who got tagged by Holly who got tagged by Kelly who got tagged by Simran who got tagged by D.T. Kelly who got tagged by Dawno who got tagged by Victoria who got tagged by Cathy who got tagged by Jackie who got tagged by Martha who got tagged by Ryan who got tagged by Nichole. who got tagged by Prousty, but without a link there the trail goes cold... So, Nic, if you read this then put a link and a trackback or comment and I'll continue tracing it back!

1. The meme spreads so well because it gives people an excuse to say things about themselves that they never have an opportunity to say.
2. The meme highlights the sloppiness of blogs, a lot of the links back were effectively dead as they used the root of the blog rather than the permalink; forcing me to search back to find the 'five things' posting.
3. The meme highlights the hostile nature of the web for computers; the difference between machine readable and machine _understandable_. A micro-format would have allowed the relationships to be harvested and graphed quickly and easily.
4. The meme implies a missing feature in blogging. The Trackforward Link. When we tag the next five people we're asking them to write something that logically tracks back to our own posting. We're asking for a Trackforward.
5. The meme shows we're all stil really, really silly :-)

Compilation of visualization methods called “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.” Interesting idea and some nice examples. I find a lot of these are about simplifying very complex projects into something everyone around a table can agree on. Usually by removing a lot of the interesting bits.

found via Guy Kawasaki's blog "How to Change The World"

Over at work we're talking about OpenID, one of my colleagues, Richard Wallis is skeptical...

So am I.

About time...

Managing Editor of TIME Magazine, Richard Stengel, writes in Now it's Your Turn about TIME's decision that 2006's person of the year is... YOU. They even have a nice shiny mirrored cover.

And why they don't have to...

So, I've been spending too much time in Second Life and broadly agree with Nad's "The problem with Second Life".

Rachel Davies (she's a top-notch agile coach if you're looking for one) discusses the term refactoring and suggests it may be unhelpful.

She suggests calling it Tidying Up instead as then it's clear what we're doing.

I agree with Rachel whole-heartedly that the term is somewhat grandiose when talking about the work with non-technical project members, but I don't think it's just tidying up - it's organising.

One of the first things that frustrated me about Second Life was the restrictions on real-estate that are necessary for Linden Labs business model. Having to buy land in a virtual world seems bizarre, unless you're the one selling it, of course.

What I want is an open-source world server where I can set up my own world and use hyperlinks to join the boundaries of my world others - like a kind of web of virtual worlds.

Over at Virtual Chaos, Nad's been rambling about offshoring and outsourcing.

The problem though, is that writing code isn’t something you can translate into an assembly line. What I think the people pushing this type of outsourcing failed to comprehend, and seemingly still dont understand is that farming out development overseas doesn’t lead to innovation. ... Someone famously once said every line of code is a design decision, I’m struggling to remember who it was [insert clever guys name here]. But that single statement embodies for me what the real problem is with outsourcing projects abroad.