It’s only taken me 6 years to have almost forgotten I once had a life outside London, such do I love it here. Luckily for me I’ve not gone totally native yet though. It’s nice to still have a shred of perspective once in a while.

Okay, okay, I promised you this was the last word on the Blackadder affair. But since then, other last words worth reading are here (Tales from the Net) and here (MyDD). Read the rest of this entry »

Unfortunately I don’t have enough clear space on my messy desk for yoga, but otherwise happy to know that I work in a state of 80% Zen as regards my employer’s attitude to work / life balance (albeit with a 20% tendency to working 8 days a week).

You can find out your own workplace style at the Work Your Proper Hours Day site (and put yourself on a neat-o google map mashup for a prize). Yes - it’s that time of year again. If you add up all the unpaid overtime people do in the UK, the average long hours worker works for free until this Friday - 22nd February. Read the rest of this entry »

Last word on the Blackadder Affair must go to Allison Fine of ‘A. Fine Blog‘, with a great in-depth look at what happened in this and similar cases, and how they highlight an important difference between those Web2.0 sites which are genuine communities and those which are commercial community platforms:

Who’s the Customer on Facebook?  Facebook is no Wikipedia, and not just because their functions are so different, but because their ethnology, the very essence of their being, is so different.  Facebook is a commercial site, meaning it serves advertisers and users in equal measure.  Its users are its customers only to the extent that their eyeballs on ads serve as their commerce.  Wikipedia is a community of users that largely monitors itself for the benefit of all.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have taken the opposite tack … Wall Street isn’t interested in customer service per se, only in profits and, more importantly, future profits.  While users on Facebook may have a community, or belong to many mini-communities, they don’t have a clear relationship with the company.

I’ve been guilty of a degree of selfishness in that I’ve not been singing the praises of an amazing resource for those of us with kids in South-East London. As with all ‘best kept secrets’, the fact you don’t have to queue for hours to get into the Livesey Museum on the Old Kent Road (www.liveseymuseum.org.uk) was a major incentive to ensure that it stayed a best kept secret (voice of experience after having to skip the promised dinosaurs in the Natural History the other weekend for fear of standing in line for 30 mins with an over-tired toddler to see T-rex). Read the rest of this entry »