• UK users waste money by wasting mobiles
  (or How can we be wasting money when the phones were described as “free”?)
• Web searches feed health fears
  (or Mark Twain would be proud)
• Web Xmas shopping heads for 10 per cent boost
  (or we can’t afford to run the car anymore so we’ll have to shop online)
• Microsoft and Yahoo dismiss report of search deal
  (or What are they up? Search me!)
• Human error tops IT security concerns
  (or I didn’t press anything - honestly)
• CIO’s feel “out of the loop”
  (or What Loop!?)
• LHC restart pushed back further
  (or Stand back - well back)
• Data centres’ code of conduct
  (or Last one out - switch the lights off)

 

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In Sharon’s words:

First and foremost, you should be considering not what YOU want but what your CUSTOMER wants and needs.

Size doesn’t necessarily matter so think about whether your customer needs a full list of your products and services or is a rough idea more appropriate? Would your customer be prepared to search through the site for what they want or do they just want to make a quick visit for pertinent information? Would your customer like to have a place where they could give you feedback or leave a message 24/7?

These are excellent considerations and something that is easy to forget, when doing pretty much anything you should always consider the customer, be they a trading partner, a friend, a customer, or the even the kids at home.

You can read Sharon’s full article Q: what do you want from your web site?

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RFC (Request For Comments) is the mechanism through which the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) discusses networking technologies. Internet standards are often born out of RFC, some of the more well known standards to emerge from RFC are SMTP,  HTTP, and SNMP. The IETF is an international open standards organisation, consisting of a number of groups, that develops Internet standards.

The first RFC - RFC1 emerged in 1969 entitled “Host Software” by Steve Crocker, the inventor of RFC, and opened discussions of how best to ensure communications between hosts on the ARP Network. In particular the discussion of a console control language called DEL (Decode-Encode Language) which was covered more in RFC5.

As of the time writing the latest RFC published is RFC5405 entitled “Unicast UDP Usage Guidelines for Application Designers” by Eggert and Fairhurst and talks about best practices for the application of UDP.

I am currently reading all the RFC starting from number 1 so if I do one a day, every day, it could well take over 14 years, check my progress on my RFC Review page.

Further Reading

• IETF
• Wiki: Request For Comments
• Wiki: Internet Engineering Task Force
• IETF: Request For Comments Index

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Have you ever been somewhere interesting and later couldn’t remember exactly where it was? Perhaps you know someone who might find a particular place interesting but they don’t know where it is? Looking for ideas of interesting places to go? Or simply want to know where your friends hang out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could grab your phone and tag your current location, or other places of interest, then search from a list of locations using keywords, for example - find a nearby Cafe or Park ? Perhaps Tagggit can help.

Tagggit describes itself as “…a location-centric social network that allows members to find each other and the tags they left behind” and is the brainchild of Loughlin Spollen, who, with the help of John Fogarty, are adding a real-time dimension to social networks. The recently launched mobile feature in particular makes this a must have application for your mobile phone.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do is head on over to the site (www.tagggit.com) and create yourself an account which is a simple process of clicking on the sign-up button, entering a few details, confirming the terms and conditions, then identifying your preferred location.At this point you may have concerns over privacy of your data, in their own words, Tagggit “… take your security very seriously. We actually take it so seriously that we leave no information behind on your computer… just like your online bank.”

Get Geo-Tagging

Once your account is created you can create tags of locations, search for locations, invite friends, plan events and even create and join communities to share your tags with.Creating a tag is simple enough, click the ‘Create a Tag’ icon on the left hand side then complete the simple three step process:

• Where is it?
  Pinpoint a location or place of interest on the map
• What is it?
  Give it some useful keywords (to search for later) and a more detailed description. You can also add a handy picture.
• Share with?
  Choose to keep it to yourself (that quiet place in the park for example), Share it with everyone or just your friends or communities you have joined.

Once we got to grips with the interface we found adding new tags painless and rather quite enjoyable as we set about cataloguing the places around us including interesting eateries, parks, places to take the kids, and just interesting places to visit. It would be nice to assign a particular icon to a place so we could see at a glance types of places around us - in the same way we can assign landmark icons to GPS applications.

Going Mobile

So you have your account, your tags and have joined a number of social communities and invited all your friends? Now what? Well, now it’s time to kick things up a gear and get the recently launched mobile version which says it “…lets you create a tag and search for tags around you. Tagggit knows where you are, so you can tag your current location or search for tags nearby. “. Now things get really useful.

There are currently mobile versions of Tagggit available for the Nokia N96, Nokia 95, Nokia 95 8GB, Nokia N85, Nokia N82, Nokia N79, Nokia N78, and the Samsung i550 (it’s currently an S60 application).Some phone versions require the installation of a number of support libraries but these are included in the download and easily installed (Nokia PIPS, OpenC libssl, and OpenC gLibrary) then the actual software can be installed - the whole thing only takes a few minutes (once downloaded I transferred the files across using Bluetooth and installed them directly from Messaging).

Once installed simply ensure you have an Internet connection then launch the application. Usefully, you can register a Tagggit account directly from the mobile device which then locates you using some technical wizardry and you can begin assigning tags to places or searching for publicly available tags.

Currently, you still need to add friends using the web site but once done your friends tags appear in the search list ,immediately giving useful information about interesting places around you. You can assign a stars rating to these tags and add your own comments for reference. The benefits of adding interactive features to the tags brings a sense of community to the system.

In Summary

The wireless positioning system itself is a joy to behold as it manages to locate you without requiring a GPS connection (though it can use one if you prefer) - it then gives your co-ordinates using Latitude and Longitude. An option is included to identify your location on a map to provide a visual cue - in future it might be useful to overlay your position directly on the map instead.

One question I imagine will crop up is “Why don’t you just create a new landmark in your GPS mapping software?” and in my mind there are a number of advantages Tagggit has over this:

• You can tag a location without your phone - just find an Internet connection and log in
• You can quickly and easily share tags with friends and the community
• If you lose your phone or upgrade it you don’t lose your tags
• Tags can have multiple keywords and photos as well as descriptions assigned to them
• You can rate tags and comment on them adding to the information provided

The developers are regularly refining things and adding new features. Loughlin recently told me one of the planned future features is a friend finder that can quickly locate your friends whilst they have Tagggit running - you may never get lost in a shopping centre again!

Tagggit is a neat solution to the problem of finding, remembering and sharing places. The added benefit of location based awareness adds a practical and useful depth to social networking.

Visit The Site

You can join Tagggit at www.tagggit.com

Read More About Tagggit

• Tagggit - Share What’s Real
• Tagggit in open beta and available for download
• Tagggit location tool launches for mobiles
• Tagggit hopes to change how city dwellers use…. - Geo: International
• Location, location, location – Geo-commerce is here and now

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Soon, many of these questions may well be answered with the UK launch of 123people on 27th November 2008.123people describes itself as “a multimedia people search site” and offers a simple, clear and quick way of finding and collating information about people, from multiple information sources.

Aggregating Public Information

123people combines information from search engines with a number of other publicly available information sources including Flickr, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, and LinkedIn in a neatly presented page showing web links, images, videos, social network profiles, emails, phone numbers, blogs, documents, IM and other useful information.

123people say of their services “123people is also socially interactive, applying crowd wisdom to search results. Users can rate and add information to every single search result, giving it more relevance with details that are not yet found on the Internet, taking the quality of people search to the next level. An “Update Newsletter Service” provides users information about new search results on the Internet. ”

The site initially launched in parts of Europe and recently launched in the US and seems to be quickly gaining a foothold as the services it offers increase in popularity.

Some of the features of 123people include

• 123people aggregates people-related data
• User can tag search results and give them more relevance
• Includes popular social media profiles (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing, Friendster, HiFive, FlickR, Bebo, Blogger, LastFM,)
• Instant Messenger profiles and Microblogs, such as, AIM and twitter
• Tagclouds
• Biographies
• Phone numbers, addresses and emails
• News page results from The Telegraph, The Guardian, Times online and The Sun.
• 123people is available in English and German and soon in Spanish and French.

Giving it a run

One of the first things I did of course was type my own name into the service and a number of my mug shots appeared, together with a number of other people by the same name. Many of the areas correctly pulled information about me which is a promising start - as well as an eye opener as to how much information about me there is! If you are familiar with the work of the comedian Dave Gorman this service may have saved him some time on his quest to find other namesakes..

An interesting aside I discovered was that you can also type in other information to search for, such as a postcode or telephone number and the site will return relevant matches. Running the same search in Wink and ZoomInfo shows how much more information is on offer - on ZoomInfo I barely register in the results and in Wink, although I do appear first in the list (woo hoo!!), there is very little information about me compared to what I know is available online from 123people.

Russell Perry, CEO of 123people, says “We are out to change the way Web users search and discover people information.” and he may well be right.

To visit the site click on the link: www.123people.co.uk

Further Reading

• 123people launches U.S. site to help you find anyone
• 123People searches the Social Web
• People Search Site 123people Goes International
• 123people.com optimizes Web-Based People Search
• Finding People with 123People
• 123people.com blog

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On November 26, 1894 Norbert Wiener was born. Norbert Wiener is credited as being the founder of cybernetics and wrote an important book “The Human Use of Human Beings” which laid down the foundation for study in computer ethics.

Read more about Norbert Wiener

• Norbert Wiener’s Foundation of Computer Ethics
• Wikipedia: Norbert Wiener
• Google Book Search: The Human Use of Human Beings
• Norbert Wiener Invents Cybernetics
• Norbert Wiener, A1909, H1946
• Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics
• Norbert Wiener Obituary - The Times

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Getting started with PBwiki is as simple as obtaining an account and editing the default page. New pages can be added quickly and easily and the sidebar customised as required. Access controls can be set defining who can do what. One of the most useful features of a Wiki is the history and audit trail allowing you to dig deeper into changes that may have been made an reverting to earlier revisions of documents as necessary. A whole raft of features can be viewed at http://pbwiki.com/features.wiki.

Regular webinars are run to help bring you quickly up to speed with the service.

PBwiki can be found at PBwiki.com

This post was brought to you by Jason Slater Weblog

If you know of an interesting program, service or utility that is available free online then tell us about it at freeapp@jasonslater.co.uk and share it with everybody.

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I needed to run the MSINFO32 command recently, on a Windows Server 2003 machine, but it failed with an error stating:

Windows cannot open Help and Support because a system service is not running. To fix this problem, start the service named ‘Help and Support’.

Running services.msc showed the Help and Support service to be missing. This was resolved by launching the command prompt and navigating to the windows folder, then to the sub folder pchealth->helpctr->binaries and running the following command

helpsvc.exe /regserver /svchost netsvcs /rainstall

After running this command the Help and Support service re-appeared in Services and was already running and the msinfo32 command started successfully.

If you are still experiencing trouble I recently found there are some additional steps in this Microsoft article “Help and Support” feature is missing after you install Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2 on a computer that is running Windows Small Business Server 2003.

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