Richard MacManus

Congratulations to Peter Jackson and his team for the 11-oscar sweep! New Zealanders (all 30 of us) are currently basking in the reflected glory of Jackson’s achievement, like an escaped otter sunning itself on the deck of a student flat. Full credit though belongs to Peter Jackson and the LOTR team. The rest of us kiwis can’t … Read more

I might Go Quiet for a week or two following this post. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by blog reading and writing and maintenance. Time to set my focus back on family, work, contemplative writing (read: not seat-of-the-pants writing as blogging can get for me when Info Overload hits). Besides, I need to get stuck … Read more

I’ve now swapped my comments system from Radio Userland’s comments server to the Python Community Server, developed and hosted by Phil Pearson. The reason I did this was because I’ve experienced frequent problems with Radio Userland’s comments server, causing slow downloads of my webpages and sometimes no service. This is probably caused by the large … Read more

Just testing my swapover to PYCS comments server. Please ignore (unless you’re Phil Pearson helping me get it set up!). Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

I’ve begun the push to introduce wiki and weblog technologies into the company I work for. As I wrote in my last post, I’m aiming to enhance Information Flow within my company. There is some initial skepticism from my colleagues about wikis and weblogs, but mainly due to unfamiliarity with these tools. For example, one concern is … Read more

Dina Mehta wrote today about implementing Weblog, Wiki, IM, and other collaboration technologies into an Intranet environment, to replace an “archaic” Knowledge Management system and improve inter-office communication. I’m embarking on similar activities with the company I work for, so I’m eagar to read about others experiences. In my work, I’ve made a couple of proposals to IT mgmt … Read more

The RSS Aggregator Bloglines is starting to build a lot of whuffie on the Web and it’s justly deserved. I signed up to Bloglines at the beginning of August 2003 and at the time I raved about the benefits of having a browser-based RSS Aggregator – as opposed to the so-called “smart clients” (non-browser based … Read more

One of my goals this year is to get my writing published professionally. I called it “Paper-publishing” when I wrote down the goal at the beginning of 2004, but I include online publications in this definition as well. I’ve taken my first steps to publish a non-fiction article, by submitting a proposal to Digital Web Magazine. … Read more

Over the past week I’ve been devouring a bunch of Etech 2004 session notes, including one I read today from Cory Doctorow on the subject of e-books. Cory wrote the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and released it as a free download on his website in early 2003, under a Creative Commons licence. His book … Read more

I’ve noticed that a few of my favourite webloggers are being hit by comment spam. Bill Seitz’s WikiLog has been hammered this week and Andrew Chen noticed this morning a new trick. A spammer had exactly mirrored a comment made by me a few days ago on Andrew’s weblog, using my name but replacing my URL with its own nefarious link. Webloggers that … Read more

Today I came across a very interesting article in the New Zealand Herald newspaper entitled “US power and influence warrent careful scrutiny” by columnist Barbara Sumner Burstyn. She starts off by explaining why she writes about America so much (and gets flack from her readers because of her perceived anti-American stance): “So why do it? The answer … Read more

I’m in the process of writing a short story on the themes of Subjectivity and System in the blogosphere. I originally intended to treat it as a mini-Nanowrimo, but on reflection I’ve decided not to publish the story until it’s finished. This is not the same situation as Nanowrimo, which was all about Quantity – 50,000 words in a month. I published my … Read more

So I’ve decided to write and serialize a short story on Read/Write Web. I’ll treat it as a mini-Nanowrimo, with me as the only participant (unless anyone else is game). I’ll aim for 10,000 words in 2 weeks, which is pretty cushy compared to when I wrote 50,000 words over 4 weeks in November 2003. The … Read more

I’ve been following Erik Benson’s recentposts about his quest to find a “Big Goal” to work towards. The conversation has been very heavy, which is hardly surprising since we’re talking about The Meaning of Life here 🙂 I recommend you go over and read the discussion for yourself, but I wanted to cross-post my latest “comment” (which seems … Read more

Thought a) Some people post too much. Recently I subscribed to 7 Journalist Bloggers – 6 of them post too many items, so I’ve fallen behind already. One of them has 81 unread items sitting in my RSS Aggregator and it’s only 3 or so days worth. It’s too much! I don’t have the motivation to catch … Read more