Puffbox

I’ve just spotted that the Five Live Breakfast programme now has its own blog. It’s been running for a couple of weeks, yet I don’t remember it ever getting mentioned on-air.

But I’m wondering if it’s maybe ‘a blog too far’. I wake up to the show every single morning. By any metric, I must count as one of its most dedicated listeners. But much as I hate to say this… I just don’t buy into the ‘brand’. I just don’t care about Five Live Breakfast. And I don’t feel any need or inclination to sign up to its specific blog.

The problem with continuous news channels is that there is no programme identity. Don’t get me wrong: the programmes do their utmost to create one. Sky News keeps trying it, but its most recent attempts at ‘appointment to view’ television – the Sky Report at 7pm, the James Rubin Carcrash at 8pm – just got canned. (And rightly so.)

But I do care about Sky News as a 24-hour output, and likewise, I do buy into the brand of Five Live itself. I don’t wake up consciously at 6am so I can listen to Nicky Campbell. (In fact, being honest, I listen to the programme despite Nicky Campbell.) But I do ensure that every radio in the house is tuned to Five Live (car and bathroom included). And I probably switch it on, as soon as I walk through the door.

So give me a blog from Five Live as a whole, with high-quality input from everyone involved, and I will subscribe to it. But giving blogs to individual shows on the station? No, sorry. You’re just getting carried away with this now, Beeb.

My photo management software of choice is still Picasa – although only with reservations, as I think there are a few things it could be doing better. My photo website of choice is still Flickr… if you’ve ever used it, you’ll know why. But how do you make Google’s photo product talk to Yahoo’s photo product?

The answer is staggeringly simple – and another example of how Flickr just keeps getting it right. I discovered yesterday, whilst demoing to my mother in law, that it’s possible to drag-and-drop from the main Picasa window into the Flickr Uploadr application. (Definitely on Windows XP, anyway.) Bingo – best of both worlds!

I’m tending to use Flickr as the place for my ‘best of’ collection; the stuff I think other people might possibly be interested in seeing. Everything else stays on my hard disk, and is catalogued in Picasa. I’ve got icons for Uploadr and Picasa on my otherwise minimalist desktop, for ease of access.

Amazon is now listing a 1GB SD memory card for jaw-droppingly low £11.29. That’s a stunning amount of storage space to be carrying around in a tiny device like a PDA.

I can’t be the only one tiring of the Apple hype. It was great when they were just a niche manufacturer of computers for the graphics industry… but now they’ve claimed a market monopoly, the rules – and the expectations – have to change.

A new joint venture between Apple and Nike brings us the (fabulous looking) Nike+ ‘sport kit’ for the iPod Nano. You attach a ‘chip’ to your running shoes, plug an attachment into your iPod, and it records how far you’ve run, in what time, and talks to you as you run. It’s a fantastic innovation, at a startlingly good price… just £19 for the attachment, on top of the Nano itself. A range of new Nike running shoes is optimised for the chip, but these are optional, I think. (An early review on the Runner’s World website, if you’re interested.)

As luck would have it, I found myself outside Apple’s flagship store on London’s Regent Street yesterday. No publicity for the Nike+ gadget. So knowing it was due out soon, I asked one of the ‘geniuses’ if there was any news regarding its release. No. Nothing. Blank looks. Suggested I went to the Nike shop round the corner. So not even your own online store then, which has it for sale just 24 hours later? Brilliant.

I have £120 earmarked to buy a new Nano, and one of these. It’s yours if you want it, Apple. But I’m not sure you do.

I’m not really an advocate of capital punishment, but I’m prepared to make an exception for people on the Tube with those suitcases you pull behind you. We can no longer tolerate the brandishing of solid objects immediately below the average adult’s line of sight. I’m especially thinking of those people who take one step off the train, or pass through the ticket barrier, then stop dead to pull out the case handle. (We aren’t even going to begin to discuss people who stand on the left.) You have all been warned.

Don’t tell everyone… but it looks like Google’s ‘hosted’ domain service for Gmail is quietly open for business. The language on the signup form remains quite dissuasive, suggesting there’s a stringent approval process. But I’ve made two requests, under two separate identities, to become a beta tester – neither, frankly, with terrific justifications – and both were accepted within a day or two.

If you’ve ever felt embarrassed at having an email address with ‘gmail‘ or ‘hotmail‘ (or ‘yes-I’m-a-cheapskate’) in it, this is the service you’ve been waiting for. If you own a domain name, you can now bring it to Gmail, allowing you to send and receive email using yournamehere.com, like a ‘proper’ email service.

For a while now, Gmail has offered the ability to ‘send from another address‘ – but at the recipient’s end, the Gmail identity often remains visible. In a worst case scenario, I’ve known companies to reject my messages as spam, because the sender address doesn’t match the originating machine.

With this service, those problems are gone. And suddenly web-based email is looking a much better arrangement than using your ISP accounts. You can check your Gmail from anywhere, using any web browser – including mobile phone. If you want to keep using old-school email software, Gmail lets you do that too, once you enable it. The ‘don’t sort it, just search for it’ approach is genius, and you’ll have a hard time coming close to filling your 2GB mailbox capacity. Plus if you change ISP, you won’t need to change your email address.

Oh – and it’s all free. All you need is your own domain, and that shouldn’t cost you more than a few quid a year. I’m using Pipex’s 123-reg service, and their web-based interface gives me all the configuration options I need. Just one word of caution: like anything involving DNS, it’s a pretty ugly process, and it can take a couple of days for any changes to take effect.

What’s the most important word in project management? Is it ‘requirements’? ‘deadline’? ‘documentation’? Here’s my nomination… enough. As in:

• only writing enough documentation. If you produce something that’s dozens of pages long (and lucky you, if you have enough time to do so!), I’ll bet nobody has enough time to read it.
• understanding enough about user needs to represent those needs as you speak to the programmers; and understanding enough about the technology to steer the user needs appropriately.
• spending enough time in meetings, and no more!

but perhaps most importantly of all…

• knowing when to say ‘enough is enough‘. It’s an essential project management skill to recognise when things aren’t working as they should be; and having the confidence to call a halt.

Sky’s new News Brief blog is a real disappointment. They’ve recognised there’s a gap in the market for a forward-looking blog, and promise: ‘News Brief is Sky News’ weekday blog to keep you up-to-date with what’s coming up. Exclusives, interviews, press conferences and hot topics – we’ll let you know ahead of time.’ But the resulting content is a rather ugly bullet-point sheet. There’s no sense of personality, no character to it.

When this was first announced, I wrote about how this could be a great way to bring people into the Sky team. Remarkably, I think they’ve managed to do the opposite, reinforcing the distance between writer and reader. The anonymous and very impersonal third-person style – ‘Sky News has’, ‘Sky News is’ – makes it nothing more than a daily press release, when it could have been so much more. What a pity.