Holiday!

I'm off on my hols & will probably not have access to blogger for a couple of weeks - so no new postings for a while.

Blog Qualities

Just a quick note, I'll get back to this later. I was reading "On the bursty evolution of Blogspace" (Kumar, Raghaven, Novak, Tomkins) and pondering what the defining qualities of a blog are. So a very brief starter for ten is:

• it's closely linked to time - date stamping, date ordering
• usually to a single person - which ties it in closely to trust and reputation
• highly linked (whether cross-blog postings, blogrolls or intra-blog linking in terms of Comments etc.) - this then means (along with point 2) that they form a tight sense of community

Anyone else have any particular "defining" thoughts...

I feel clairvoyant...

I was mightlily chuffed to see via Metro that Firefighters in Fife, Scotland, are being equipped with Nokia photo mobiles to take pictures at fires and road accidents to send on to consultants at hospitals in Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy. I mentioned a short while ago that I thought this was a great opportunity for photo mobiles, and I'm glad to see it actually happening.

Six Degrees of Speed

My girlfriend was delighted today when, within three hours of sending an email (or courriel in this case) to a long-lost friend (whose email she discovered via a google search) she had a response from said-friend who was having drinks in 10 minutes with a girl whose wedding they are both about to go to in a few weeks. It might easily be put down to networks and the small world theory, but all the same, it's always surprising when it happens so swiftly.

My colleague, Jeremy, also had a dose of the same medicine when sending around a fun email getting people to compose film, book and song titles which might use the comedy haircut term, Mullet, in them. Jeremy was stunned that within two hours of pinging this message to no more than a half-dozen people, he was getting responses from across the UK, Switzerland and the Middle East.