Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

It never ceases to amaze me; the stupidity of people. As Charles Mackay wrote long ago in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds men go mad in herds but only come to their senses one by one.

It seems there are some people who just really do not understand the Internet, and in their rush (or greed) to get rich quickly ignore all the commonsense and warnings of those who like Darren Rowse have achieved some measure of wealth from blogging. How? Darren explains often that his problogger.net website is not his mail money maker, rather his Digital Photography school website is. He provides a real product for real people.

And so to the point of this article, and the nature of the Internet that seems to have been forgotten in the glimmer of fools gold. As Doug McCaughan sagely observes, people use the web for Information, Utility and Entertainment, in that order.

So where are the fools? I think there are two types.

OpenID allows you to use a single username+password combination that lets you log into hundreds of websites including Digg, Blogger, WordPress, Technorati, etc. Unlike traditional web forms that require you to type both the user name and password, you just need to type a personal URL in the OpenID login box. To get an OpenID that is the same as your blog URL:

Step 1: Visit myOpenID and create your profile - it will be something like xxx.myopenid.com

Step 2: Open the HTML source code of your blog / website and add the following lines of code:

<link href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server” rel=”openid.server” />
<link href=”http://xxx.myopenid.com” rel=”openid.delegate” />

Replace xxx with the user name that you created in Step 1. Save and you are done. Your blog URL is now your OpenID.

I am working insane hours at the moment - just to coordinate 4 projects that have somehow managed to end up in my job queue with simultaneous deadlines and due dates.

The projects themselves are scattered across the world with 3 different time zones involved, I have developers involved in 2 different time zones. The good thing is that once these have completed I will be able to leave my desk for a half day break (at least that's the plan).

Good things have been happening though. A hard drive failed night before last. All it had on it was my entire music collection, so that was good - I had a backup and that was restored in about an hour, and the drive itself is under warranty. Jude has gone to collect the replacement today.

Lena has been working for Jethro for one and a half years now. For the past several months she has been writing technical articles for me about stuff I find on the web. In case you were wondering who the Lena was that submits posts on this site, this is a short explanation.

How we work together is I tag web pages in delicious constantly. There is a rss feed link of the latest items on the right hand side as well as easy access to the major categories. When I want to report a specific page or the details of something we use here, I add a special tag for Lena. She then reviews those items and writes an article for me on here. She does these in bulk and queues them up for me. I can then edit them and release them at my leisure (Read - when I don't have time to write one myself!)