Blogging

All About Information Taxonomies – Yet Another Blog

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Further to the Ark Group presentation on information taxonomies on Wednesday, Ark Group have put forward a moderated forum for the further discussion and comment on Information Taxonomies.

You can click here for further information.

The welcome message is reproduced below:

“Welcome to the Ark Group Taxonomy Forum. Following on from Designing a Business Focused Taxonomy, we felt that it would be useful to start a discussion forum. The way that the discussion and topics progress is entirely up to you – the members.

Ideally, all discussions should be targeted towards particular business issues that you face with your taxonomy project. Please feel free to introduce yourself and organisation and your particular area of interest.”

Just When You Thought Blogging Was Blase

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The world’s most famous blogger (or at least, in IT world-dom that is) is possibly giving a demonstration of how to put your foot in it when blogging. This article on The Register shows Robert Scoble is blogging about new Microsoft program problems before the bug-fixers know about them. It now becomes an entertaining game of he-said-she-said – or perhaps the age-old “I was quoted out of context” game.

Peyton place in a teacup, methinks.

Requires the grey matter to be engaged before plugging in the keyboard.

Business Blogging Redux

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As an aside, I was today interviewed for an article in InTheBlack about business blogging – not because anyone is necessarily reading my blog, but at least partly because the ITM COE suggested it to InTheBlack as a topic for the October edition.

I know that Shauna Kelly of the COE is also writing an in-depth article for the CPA website to be published soon.

It will be interesting – I note that Ed Charles (the journalist) is working on podcasting the interviews he does. An interesting idea – we could go from business blogging to business podcasting…

Speaking with an ISP

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A well-documented problem for many people – at least in Australia – is having Telstra Bigpond as your internet service provider (ISP). The problem is not so much having Bigpond as your provider, as understanding their approach to business and what you need to do to keep them on their toes.

A colleague has been on a “1GB business plan” for $59.05 per month for the past three years. Not being tech-savvy – he’s really only interested in doing things with the computer, which is a novel concept for some people – he’s never really explored his options there. Telstra changed their plans and charge rates eighteen months ago, but unless you specifically request it, they leave you on your old plan and conditions. Telstra’s argument is that they can’t make value-judgments as to what’s “better” for a client so therefore they do not change your plan to a “better” one when it comes in. So in this instance – a 1 GB plan that is no longer available, with a 15c per megabyte excess charge, stayed in place. The fact that there is a 10GB plan, with no excess, available for $59.95 (a whole $0.90 extra) was never specifically advised.

Things have been going fairly swimmingly for some time, but unfortunately my colleague bought his daughter an iPod, and she started filling the iPod with (I’m sure it’s legal) music from the internet. So far, the excess charges could have bought a nice CD collection…

The lesson is, always monitor the Bigpond plans and keep aware of what you’re fees and charges are through sites such as Whirlpool. Telstra won’t tell you. A capped fee is best – your TD (Teenage Daughter) risk exposure is minimised then. As a Telstra shareholder, and rubbing my hands with glee at one level, with trepidation at another, I do wonder how many other Telstra customers like that there are out there.

Posting on the Internet – a User Story

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Just in case you have ever thought about it (or never have), in cyberspace everyone sees what you type, eventually. The other day I quickly subscribed to a newsgroup about Mercedes Benz classic cars (I was doing some car research – even IT people can like cars – but I suspect I’ll never get to own the car). About a week later, casually typing my name into Yahoo (as you do) suddenly brought up my membership of this group. I do this occasionally because the spelling of “Micheal” is unique and therefore actually returns entires relating just to me, rather than, say, if my name was John Smith – it’s good to know who has your details.

In this instance, I had only signed up very quickly to read about the great and wondrous things that can happen with a Mercedes Benz 450SLC (in case you’re wondering, they come in two categories: (a) expensive; and (b) marriage-threatening). It took about thirty seconds to “subscribe to our site” and now that site has my details cached in Yahoo and it will probably be there for ages yet. I’m just glad it wasn’t a support group for strange and debilitating infectious diseases that you can catch from unsanitary telephones.

But – I should have already learned my lesson, as the same search on Google shows an entry that I’m probably not too happy about! I was on a mailing list some time ago (like, 1996!) and responded to an email (foolishly using my real name). That mailing list diligently archives EVERY email ever sent to it, and accordingly Google has now cached it and it will be there forever now – it’s unlikely I can get it taken down.

As an exercise for the reader, see if you can pick up the page I’m not happy about from the link above.

So – a salient lesson in being careful on the internet.

(Postscript: I had forgotten the “findoz” website that is returned by this search – this is NOT the mailing list to which I was subscribed, I have no idea how my professional profile manages to get mixed up with “hard core DVDs” on the findoz website, and I have a feeling there’s another salient lesson there somewhere!).