All posts by Armand

PR, Work

Using social bookmarking to do PR

Was asked the other day about using Digg to promote clients and gave the shotgun response: don’t do it. It’s not ethical, and its and abuse of the social system. Also – it won’t work unless you can work out how to engineer yourself a bot…

Rather gratifyingly, when browsing Steve Rubel’s blog, I found that he said the same thing just a couple of days ago.

One of the problems I’ve found with this whole social media lark is the rapid proliferation of new services. I use, and have got the hang of, del.icio.us, but now think that Digg might be worth my while as I work in (and love) technology… and I haven’t even got round to looking at reddit. How do people keep up? And do we need yet another social bookmarking service?

Current affairs, Personal

Whoa

…sorry for lack of posts. I have a cold following my time in the sun and am feeling like a sack of refuse. To top it off, I woke up from one of those dreams where you feel like you’re responsible for the end of the world and can’t shake the guilt (you have those, right?) — and couldn’t get back to sleep. So am working off about 3.5 hours sleep today.

Hopefully the vit. C overdose will kick in over the weekend and I’ll be able to catch up. For the moment, though:

    Work is in happy overdrive (nice to be applying brain after break)
    Bust-a-move is going well
    I’ve finally gotten into Stephen Erikson’s books
    Sheila is off to Scotland for a week
    Arvind is happily moved into his new place
    I wish I was a punk rocker is both addictive and annoying me a lot
    Bill Gates and Robert Scoble both seem to be changing jobs (I go away for *two* weeks and MS falls apart!)
Guestblog

Sheila blog stats

Sheila’s done some good blogging in my absence. She’s achieved the following:

    Approx 300 visitors per day (closer to 40 once you strip out the ‘bots’, but not far off this site’s average)
    9 blog posts
    15 comments (well above my average!!)
    A currently indeterminate, but significant,number of emails
    A first ever blog comment from Daddy!

Which is great! But… (suspenseful pause) Sheila’s considering NOT BLOGGING anymore. Which would be a decision but, I feel, a wrong one. Please encourage Sheila to either set up her own blog or to consider ongoing guestblogging on division6 until she feels comfortable spreading her wings – send emails to her usual address, or post comments here (preferably the latter!).

Personal, Travel

Armand in the USA, Armand in the USA!

I’m jetlagged and have some personal issues to deal with — so may not post on my various vacations as soon as I’d like. But expect to see, in the not to distant future, posts on (names of posts, themes, etc, subject to change without notice):

    Adventures in Sardinia
    NYC: meeting cultural and televisual expectations
    Conversations at an apartment block BBQ
    American dreams (of food)
    Key West: Party Town

I’m now in a no-drinking, salad-eating, no-spending phase of my life, so apologies if it gets dull. I do have a few interesting posts saved up, I hope… and some are only tangentially trip related:

Oh, and photos will shortly appear on Flickr, in the usual location. More soon (ish)!

Update: Photos are up and have begun to link to the articles I’ve written… enjoy!

Personal, Travel

I’m back

1 Comment

As Sheila points out, I’m back today. Knackered after a busy and exciting few weeks; have a lot of stories to tell and will get around to structuring thoughts and writing stuff down over the next few days, as I recover from my jetlag. Very pleased to see that Sheila has developed a bit of a following and think I will have an in-person conversation with her about how she continues her burgeoning blogging career. Will Division6 become multi-author? Will Arvind seek to enter the fray? Who can say – but watch this space.

Books, Technology

The three laws

Simon B points at an article that reports on new safety guidelines for ‘next generation robots.’ Because he’s on LJ, and I don’t have a LJ login or OpenID (!! – how lazy am I?) I thought I’d comment here…

Simon points out that the three guidelines sound quite similar to Asimov’s three laws of robotics:

The guidelines will require manufacturers to install enough sensors to minimize the risk of the robots running into people and use soft and light materials so they do not cause harm if they do so, the officials said.

They will also be required to install emergency shut-off buttons, they said.

….

There are also efforts under way to create global guidelines. The ministry plans to have its measures reflect the global standards, the officials said.

Asimov’s, for your reference, are:

1. A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Source: Wikipedia.

First of all, how cool is it that the real world is catching up with science fiction (well, a teensy bit)? And secondly: I’m glad the through inaction subclause hasn’t made it into the safety guidelines. Imagine if we had robots wandering around trying to lower our cholesterol intake or preventing us from drinking alcohol in case we were to ‘come to harm’ inadvertently… Always a flaw in Asimov’s laws, I think :P.

Still, it would be concerning if they came up with the zeroth law independently, as Simon comments… ;)

Technology

OpenID – doomed from the start?

Sorry; Sheila’s not quite taken over yet and there may be a couple more techy-ish posts (especially as I seem to be coming down with a cold and a good bit of geekness is always good to get me feeling like I’ve achieved something).

Read about OpenID when trying to comment on a Livejournal blog earlier today; its an “actually distributed identity system.” What this means is, when you want to post a comment asserting that you are someone – e.g. on this blog, asserting you have your own blog at iamcool.net (or whatever clever domain name you’ve chosen ;)) — you don’t have to register for each blogging system that has instituted a registration policy (qua Typepad, Livejournal, etc) — you take your identity with you.

The rationale for requiring registration in the firstplace has a few motivations. (1) To prevent spammers and identity fraudsters from getting too excited over your blog, and a cynical (2) to allow the blog software owners to expand their user base / do some nifty data capture.

But will it work? The net is littered with ‘open’ schemes for one thing or another. The Windows Live login is the only one that has been useful to me to date, and let’s face it, not many organisations have MS’s purchasing power. So what’ll make people adopt OpenID?

Well, support from all the cool guys out there who require registration – Typepad etc. And fast; if people lose interest in this… And I guess the second thing it needs: for anti-spam / anti-fraud software not to get too clever. WordPress lets ZERO comment spam through. Of course, I virtually have to approve every legitimate comment at least the first time around… but the point is that, if you aren’t worried about identity fraud or spamming, you won’t bother with a registration firewall.

At the end of the day, most users dislike these registration walls (alongside the ‘click here to read more’ buttons in blogs), and so will avoid them. I think. So we’ll see… Comment spam is less of a problem for me than many people (with my mighty 63 comments since this blog’s inception in early 2004).

Guestblog

Guest blogger on division6

Now that this blog is all shiny and sophisticated, it seems right that it stays current even when I’m on holiday, which I’ll be from Wednesday. So I’d like to introduce you to the person who’ll keep you entertained for the next couple of weeks…

SHILABILAGILA

Sheila, for those of you that don’t know, is my sister. Some would say she’s much more interesting than me (most people), others would say she’s annoying (me). Sheila’s on the prowl for a career in the literary world, so expect (non-slanderous) posts about literary agents, publishers, authors, drinks parties, shopping (erm, ok) and pimms.

Sheila may overlap on a couple of posts so that I can make sure she’s got the hang of WordPress before I head off… you’ll know its her and not me because, um, it’ll probably be a little less geeky, but crucially: it’ll say ‘posted by Sheila’ at the end of each post. So watch out for that – and welcome, ShilaBilaGila, to division6. Remember, metaphysically speaking, there is no division6…