Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

And as happens once a year I look back and forward. Back to the first year of being 40 and realising that it wasn’t the beginning of the end at all. Playing AFL again was great, the cycling and running is still happening, though not quite as hard as before and I can still show the youngsters a thing or two there, and coaching basketball and volleyball has been fantastic.

I think part of the reason I am hanging out with the young guys and girls so much at the moment is because there is virtually no one my age keen to have a go. Most of the Dads and people I know round my age are sedentary. Sad really. I am organising cycling trips, rock climbing and hiking events, playing basketball and volleyball and these guys just sit there and say things like”Where do you get your energy from?” and “I wish I could keep up with you”. Well the answer is – You can! join me – if you dare. I have a couple of mates who comes when they can and go as hard as I can push them. Dave is one of those. He hates me and loves me at the same time. Here is a video of him finishing a very punishing ride we did on Monday.

I’ve been wanting to write an article for some time now about how the social (web 2.0) web works, and why there are so many different sites out there. specifically I wanted to explain the use of sites like FriendFeed, Profilactic and Ping.fm

I have built a small diagram that hopefully illustrates a small portion of this. It is not comprehensive, though it is accurate in the detail it does show.

The missing stuff includes a dotted line back from any of the sites in the 2nd or 3rd columns back to the first column.

Let me explain the circle of internet life and how Ping.fm, Profilactic and Friend Feed play a part.

So what is it? Why do you need to keep reading this? Well you probably don’t, unless you work in an organisation with internet access and more than one person there. Well that’s most if us!

Did that get your attention?

How about this?

Has Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Google videos been banned in your workplace? What about instant messaging or Skype?

I want to talk a little about why this has happened, and for the wrong reasons, and also how it will change in the very near future.

Organisations have been very jealous of their employees time (and they have a legitimate right to require their workers to be focussed on work not their social lives while in their employ. IT managers and CIO’s have seen applications like Facebook and messenger to be purely time wasting social applications with no business use. That is starting to change.

I had a real great weekend. While Jude took herself off to art classes on Saturday morning I did some work while the kids played and cleaned. After locating a container with Chinese checkers marbles in it, I decided to make a Chinese checkers board. That’s harder than it sounds. After a bunch of maths and several false starts I finally had a board marked out with the correct number of spots. I then drilled all the holes using a countersink and then cut the board to an even square and routed the edges. Jude was home by this time so we all then played a game.

Sunday at church we sang the Michael W Smith song I’m desperate for you. The words in this are awesome. It made me think, about how we are desperate for air – so desperate we breathe all the time – try holding your breath and see how desperate you become when starved from air. the challenge for me is am I that desperate for God?

After church we headed off to Peter and Kitty’s engagement party. This was  real blast! There are some photos on my facebook account.

Sunday night we had a mini party here and then I worked again.