Earlier this week I was interviewed by Cian O'Sullivan for GoMo News as part of the run-up to the Location Business Summit in San Jose. The interview is now up on the GoMo News site and is reproduced here with permission.
Stand with your back to the "looks like it's built out of Lego" St. Gile's development and you'll see New Compton Street.
Follow it for a while, running parallel to Shaftesbury Avenue and it comes to an abrupt end, due to someone building 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, which is also the Yahoo! London office, right across it.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article on this blog that highlighted the issues around managing our digital identity.
Then this morning, (ex Yahoo!) Cathy Ma posted a link to her recent blog post about the Personas project being run by Aaron Zinman at MIT. Personas tries to "show you how the internet sees you". So I duly surfed over to https://personas.media.mit.edu/ and plugged in my full name and some time later a rather slick Flash animation gave me this supposed "characterization of the person".
"I'm just a face in the crowd, Nothing to worry about, Not even tryin' to stand out, And I have nothing to say, It's all been taken away, I just behave and obey"
Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails, Getting Smaller
Ten years ago our online identity, if we had one at all, was a simple affair to manage, comprising of an email address and perhaps an avatar name or two. Fast forward to the close of the first decade of the 21st century and it's an altogether more complex affair. You've probably got several email addresses, possibly some domain names and then there's the plethora of social networking sites that you frequent, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace and so on. All of which define the online version of "you" in much the same way as your passport, driving licence and bank account defines the offline "you".
The key difference is that the online version of "you" is much more subtle, complex and diffuse. We leave scraps of our path through the internet behind us. At the Being Digital conference in London earlier this year, I tried to explain this with the clumsy phrase "digital dandruff"; in the soon to be published book, "My Digital Footprint", Tony Fish far more elegiacally describes it as our digital footprint, which is "the digital 'cookie crumbs' that we all leave when we use the some form of digital service, application, appliance, object or device, or in some cases as we pass through or by".
Managing our digital identity through those sources we know about is a challenge for a significant percentage of the online population. But despite being a challenge, it's one which is achieveable if you're willing to put enough time and effort into it. But most of us don't have the time or are unwilling to put in the effort, so our digital cookie crumbs and the varying online versions of "us" stay online, ready for someone with the time and effort to search for, find and put together with profit in mind.
Some people take an active role in managing their digital footprint and try to exploit it. Some people also try to exploit other people's digital footprint. Let's look at a concrete example of this.
Ever since my MacBook Pro was upgraded to Mac Office 2008 I'd had appallingly slow app start up times, with hangs and delays of over 3 minutes being pretty much the order of the day.
After some determined surfing this I've managed to dramatically improve my startup times to around 15 seconds by applying a combination of hints and tips.
With the standard disclaimers of YMMV, here be dragons and so on ...
A product launch from Google is accompanied by a massive media campaign that reaches far beyond the techy demographic; Google is a consumer brand these days and their messaging generates headlines in both traditional and new media. This is a good thing; right?
It's certainly high profile messaging, Ted Dziuba writing in the UK based Register with less than his usual profanity laden prose, first brought the term Googasm to my attention and the recent launch of Google Latitude certainly has all the hallmarks of Googasm, but this has rapidly turned into an inverse Googasm of shrill, rhetoric laden, fin de siecle doom with the BBC commencing and London's Metro newspaper going way overboard.
With the Yahoo! Geo Technologies sponsored, London #geomob meetup coming up this week, this weekend I took a look at how many companies were actively using location within London. No easy task. After much web searching this weekend I took a trawl through those companies tagged as being in London in CrunchBase, the database of tech companies that TechCrunch operates.
Not strictly scientific but then again this is more about gauging a trend than being strictly empirical.
While I was playing with AppleScript earlier this week I wanted to run a shell script I'd written from within Finder rather than from a shell prompt in Terminal.app.
On Windows I tend to write scripts to run under Cygwin and then write a wrapper batch file to run the script under the control of Cygwin's bash executable.
Turns out the AppleScript solution is identical in principal and is as simple as
do shell script "/full/path/to/shell/script"
You may need to adjust the path to the script dependent upon whether the directory where your script resides is in your $PATH or not.
One of my standard lunchtime reading web sites started me off on this; The Unofficial Apple Weblog got me reading an article on PC Magazine's site about Argh! moments. That sort of moment when you try to do something really simple on OS X but find it isn't. In this case, Robyn Peterson's struggle to mount a network volume on login struck a chord. I'd gone down a similar route and come up with an alias to a network volume in my login items, a solution which seems to be well documented after a quick Google search.
On the left hand side there's the the 