Are you still listening?
A bear with a sore head! I’ve been using and very much enjoying LastFM for just over a year. Recently I noticed play back cutting out after an hour or so, and this silly graphic appearing to punctuate the irritating silence. I thought the designers had gone insane, radio is generally a passively consumed media so the idea of wandering off, and LastFM demanding some kind of ongoing attention seemed incredibly poorly though out (dare I say vacuous).

Cyber Security Research at Queen’s University
Centre for Secure Information Technologies I was having a peruse of the latest (1oth – 23rd October) edition of Engineering and Technology magazine from the IET this morning. Contained therein is an interesting announcement from Queen’s University in Belfast of the opening of a new research centre for IT Security. The investment in the £30m establishment is part-funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Technology Strategy Board and a collection of industry ’sponsors’ such as BAE, Thales et al. Interestingly the centre is researching intelligent CCTV

7 Predictions for Social Networks
Star gazing with a Social Nostradamus I was thinking this week about Social Networks and how I saw their potential development over the next few years. As wonderful as they are, we must remember that sites such as Facebook are only really 5 years old, and they have had to spend time defining a business model, growing awareness and user bases and of course dealing with horrible scalability issues (when a site has 200 million users the industrialisation and volumetric management becomes a ‘tad tricky’). So let’s assume the last 5 years have been all about understanding the market, users and fundamental sizing problems. What will (or should) the next 5 years deliver?

The Problem with Rules
Rules, guidelines, laws and judgement A few weeks back I attended an interesting debate and presentation about Business Process Management (BPM) in the Public Sector. In fact this was a Government Panel discussion led by a consultant who was ‘much singing’ the praises of BPM backed by enterprise rule systems (ERMS). If you’re not familiar with such patterns, the basic premise is the process is separated from the business logic which is crafted and maintained in a separate, dedicated system and ‘consulted’ as necessary in key decision steps in the business process. It was a solid pitch, I certainly bought into most if not all of t

Home Base and Outposts
What’s important, and where are your spending time? I’ve written in the past about the dangers of outposts in terms of wasting effort and creating endless repetitive noise. I recently watched this nice little video from Darren Rowse over at Problogger and I want to highlight a very key observation “people sometimes give up on their Home Base and spend all of their time on outposts”. Don’t let that apply to you! Are you feeling guilty? Well first, let’s watch the