August is the ‘silly season’ for news and also the anniversary of this site launching in earnest. Last year I posted some ‘charts‘ for the most accessed pages and the most common search terms that led people to this site. Here is the hit parade for this year (based on statistics from the last six […]

Due to other commitments, it’s unlikely that I’ll be posting new entries here until the second half of July. In the meantime, a quick reminder about my collection of Furl bookmarks, to mark the fact that I recently passed the 1,000 figure since I started organising them.

Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. That’s me, sitting down in the suit — clean-cut, respectable and still the right side of thirty — on 30 June 01995. Standing behind me are (from left) Ian Gow, Pro-vice Chancellor at University of Sheffield, Mike Bower, then leader of Sheffield […]

As a result of today’s BBC strike, my normal lunch-break listening of The World at One was replaced by a short documentary called Microsoft Powerpoint and the decline of Civilisation.

From today’s Five Eight daily email: It’s our birthday today. We are four. To celebrate, we ask that your gift to us is that you let any colleagues/friends/contacts or clients know about us. It isn’t always easy being the little guy, so please know that your support of FRUKT/Five Eight is very much appreciated. They’re […]

Oh dear, not yet forty, and I’ve already become the stereotype: the kind of man who regularly spends fifty quid a week on culture, as originally coined a year or two ago by David Hepworth. For the first time I’ve broken the fifty quid barrier: I spent an average of £51.10 in the year to […]

This site does pretty well on its Google rankings, especially if the search uses terms that are in my title tags. Usually I get a top 10 ranking within 48 hours of posting: try googling Eno Blair or BBC Interactive Music Player, for example. By comparison, my 69 Love Songs wiki site — which has […]

Until this week there was a playground here. You may be able just to make out the yellow seats of a see-saw, slightly to the left of the centre of the picture. But on Monday the sounds of innocent play mingled with the incipient bullying of older children were replaced by buzz saws and diggers. […]

I’m a bit behind the breaking news here, but this Wired News article brought me up to speed on how Bill Gates has branded those who propose reforms to intellectual property regulation, to adapt them to the Internet age, as “modern-day sort of communists”. He further asserts that these people “want to get rid of […]

You can file this under ‘disgruntled customers’ and ‘name & shame’, though it’s also a case of failure in responsiveness and the breach of trust this creates, as covered in my posting on e-commerce usability. The story is a simple, one-sided tale that starts with an annoying but modest failure and ends up escalating to […]