Daily Archives:September 9th, 2005

1.5 Billion Customers

Apparently there are now 1.5 Billion people using GSM. Wow.

SocialMac

At Foo Camp I wrote about the fact that Mac users seemed to be account for about 50% of the attendees.

I counted here at Our Social World and it’s about 25-30%. The difference is probably partly due to a slightly less techie audience, and partly due to not being on the West Coast, but it’s still well up on the overall Apple market share.

Quickipedia

Tom Coates gave a talk earlier this morning and mentioned that he didn’t have an entry on Wikipedia. By lunchtime, someone in the room had created one for him.

Tom’s from the BBC, is a very nice guy, and has a good blog here, by the way.

VoodooPad

This is just another plug for VoodooPad, one of the Mac apps that has a permanent place in my Dock.

I mentioned it a while ago as a general note-taking utility; I find I haven’t used it very much for that, but there is one situation where it works very well for me; taking notes in conferences. Creating lots of short pages, one for each talk, very easily, finding pictures of the speakers on the net or taking them on a camera as I go along and just dragging them onto the pages, typing in URLs that are mentioned and having them automatically become links. Having just enough text formatting for the task, and so forth – it’s great.

And best of all, it has a Spotlight adaptor which means that I can find any page in any of the documents using Spotlight. This size of page is a good granularity for search results, I find, and yet because I write notes for a whole conference in one file, I don’t need to create lots of little files and think of lots of filenames.

Our Social World

I’m at Our Social World, an interesting conference about blogging and other forms of social networking which also is conveniently within cycling distance of my home.

We were all encouraged to bring laptops and we’re all, of course, being very ‘social’ – IMing each other, posting entries like this, and so forth. It’s bizarre to see posts popping up in my RSS feeds from people just the other side of the room. It’s fun, if you’re at a conference, to type its name in quotes into Technorati. The challenge here is to get the balance between being electronically social and just chatting to the person next to you.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser