Content Fairy – Guy Redwood's Blog

I love York. It’s a city of great people, high employment, high levels of commerce nestled around the fabulous backdrop of a walled city center set in the North Yorkshire countryside. There’s very little in the way of grants and funding in this region because it’s doing so well. Everything in York seems to be self financed because people love it here, including me.

But there’s a problem with all this.

Back in 1995 (or was it earlier?), I was one of the original pioneers of the web industry in Leeds, the home and hub of many succesful internet businesses, including Freeserve. This industry created a scene filled with peers, observers and wannabees. It was great – Friday evenings in Leeds was a great place to talk web and swap ideas and knowledge over coffee and beer. There was a way of contacting anybody within the industry through a friend of a friend – and that was of huge benefit.

York, however, seems to have very little in this way. Sure we have seemingly dead Creation Network and creative wing of York Science City. But these are/were quango-esque in their existance and operate for a too broader group of industries. I was unaware of the seemingly bouyant industry of museum display design & manufacture – until I started attending functions within the city.

So – York needs a web industry group. No quango – just a vehicle for encouraging socials, networking and a voice. Not a group for lobbying – just a group that will give the industry some scale within York. An informal vehicle for people to share experiences and mentor.

Anybody up for working on this with me?

Apparently, Microsoft lost the court case with Eola over a patent issue, which means that they can no longer embed active-x content directly in  Internet Explorer.

An update to Windows is now filtering out from Microsoft, and these changes take effect immediately after the update is installed.

What does this mean? Well, anyone using Internet Explorer will have to click on flash movies/devices at least once to make it work. From there on in, the end user will notice nothing different, after clicking once on each piece of embedded content. So those sites that have lots of little flash and activex buttons – will be teaching users to double click on everything – cos that’s how to make it work.

I guess what goes around, comes  around. You either want software patents or you don’t?

I understand there are ways around this with javascript – so I need to start reading up!

A real company working on a lift/elevator to the moon. With discussions on their bulletin board about pushing rope, info about trials so far… I’m almost speechless.

http://www.liftport.com/

This is my third brief attempt to understand this. I get that my attention is valuable – but what is this site/service about? It could be huge – but what exactly are they doing?
AttentionTrust.org

WebTrends has much work to do to win me over. As one of the pioneering users in the very early days who knew a thing or two about analytics beyond the pretty graphs – we got our fingers burnt and never looked at webtrends again.

But they are now opening up their analytics data to queries through ODBC. This is huge. This should allow website managers to create specific dashboards on their intranet for internal customers (customer service managers, regional marketing managers etc).

Thanks to Mike for bringing this to our attention