I am going to stop posting to Plaxo. If you are reading this blog and/or Twitter feed in Plaxo and want to continue to see updates then you will need to subscribe directly, see below. I am deleting my Plaxo account one week from today on August 6.

No offence Plaxo. It’s not you it’s me and yes, there is somebody else. Too many somebodies.

So if you are a Plaxo reader, please add me somewhere else…

• If I work with you or have done there is LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/peterlindsay
• If we’re friends there is Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/petelindsay
• If you are random there is,
  • This blog: http://www.triviality.net/blog/?feed=rss2
  • Twitter: http://twitter.com/triviality

While the idea of selectively sending content from different sources to different groups in Plaxo appealed initially, it just ended up sending updates to people who were already getting them elsewhere and gave me another profile to update. I just don’t need Plaxo, sorry (but best of luck n’all…).

I am also deleting my xing.com account at the same time. This doesn’t appear to affect anybody at all, which is reason enough to do it. That and because the name sounds like a Chinese word and isn’t, so it’s confusing.

Update 2010-08-06. Plaxo and Xing accounts have been deleted.

Super cool presentations with Prezi!

I was recently pointed at Prezi the new new thing in presentations and was instantly impressed by the eye-candy and then, on following their online demo stuff, even more impressed by the potential for presenting information of various kinds in a way that allows the viewer to see everything, move through logically or jump to something interesting and drill down. (h/t to@otfrom for the tip)

In an effort to understand it a little better I’ve been having a play. To speed up the process I have migrated (er, ish)  a ppt I did to support a speech I made at Toastmasters introducing Getting Things Done. The original ppt is available on slideshare here. The prezi is below, follow it through step by step or go mad clicking, zooming and swooping about. Bear in mind the original ppt was done to support an actual presentation not to simply be browsed.

That’s my best, er only, effort to date. For something truly cool, check out this one (not mine)… http://prezi.com/iwthettnve9q/

Image Credit: "Google Wave en la actualidad" by Rafa.Garcés on Flickr

My first thought with Google Wave was that this was something that was great, I could immediately see a bunch of uses for it…

• More feature rich chat medium
• Great for working collaboratively on creating text / documents.
• A half way point between email and chat for conversations that spam a couple of days (you know when you feel you’re having a conversation by email).

But I have to be honest I did think it was too much of a paradigm shift. It’s been said elsewhere, but I did think it would go the way of RSS where it was just too much of a different way of thinking for people to get it any time soon.

And then people in my contacts list started using it and I was surprised not just by how many but by whom. The people I’ve been waving with are mostly not the obvious web2.0 earlier adopters. And then I started seeing what people are doing with embedded gadgets and it’s power really started to become apparent.

Now something else has just occurred to me about Google Wave. It’s the perfect back channel. We all have people in our contact list that we send links, thoughts, questions, etc. to multiple times a day. Currently we either send emails, which is a pain a) because emails are too asynchronous, the paradigm is a letter and people feel obliged to craft a proper response and b) everyone battles with keeping on top of their inbox. Or we send links in chat which is too synchronous, the paradigm is a conversation and useful stuff is too easily lost in the chatter or we feel we’re interrupting and people are obliged respond (immediately).

Wave is the perfect semi-synchronous (i think I made that up) medium. You can drop links, thoughts, snippets, whatever into wave and your collaborators can review later. You can have multiple people per wave (teams), or multiple waves per contact (different projects). Now I think for a project team, or for a bunch of other uses, that could be really powerful.

I’ve got some invites going spare if you’ve not tried Google Wave and would like to. If I know who you are (or if I don’t and you think you can convince me you deserve one   then let me know.

I’ve posted to Slideshare a slide show about microblogging in a corporate environment.

I’ve adapted versions of this slide show for several different audiences now so thought it was about time I shared on Slideshare. My aim was not to go into lots of detail but more to challenge the naysayers or worse still those seeing it as another avenue for uni-directional coporate communications.

How cool is this? A graphical representation of what you’ve been listening, or more accurately what you’ve been scrobbling with last.fm. Made by LastGraph.

Click for larger image.

I’ve been using jajah.com for a few months now and am really impressed. If, like me, you need to (or would like to) make international calls on regular basis then this is worth a look. It’s particularly good if you want to call people when you’re not at a computer or call people who aren’t at computers.
The way it works is that instead of making a call over the internet from a computer or dedicated device you use the internet to set up a call from and to a regular phone. Setting up a call can be done at a computer (for a future time if necessary), using the web on your mobile phone or using an application you can download for your phone.
Basically you just tell jajah.com which of your numbers you are on and who you want to call. A few seconds later (or at whatever time you specify) you receive a call from Jajah, once you’ve answered it, it calls them. Calls are free between Jajah users and not expensive the rest of the time. If you’re in China or somewhere else where it’s common to pay to receive calls it’s probably worth getting on to a plan that allows you to receive calls for free. Calling a UK landline from China with Jajah is currently 1.7p per minute.
The really beauty of this for me is that it enables me to use little windows of time to call the UK that I otherwise couldn’t, that is to say call when I want to not when at a computer or when I can get the other party to a computer. The back of a taxi, waiting for friends to turn up, on a break at work, etc.

Check it out. And expect more calls.

squiffy
Originally uploaded by Triviality.

I’ve just found a cool web site called Bubblesnaps that makes photos like this. I have a long list of features they need to add but will save it – it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

sprogs
Originally uploaded by Triviality.