A silence that speaks volumes.

We apologise for the interruption and normal service will be resumed shortly. I did not go off the grid I got a little busy and a little distracted and now I want to share a few of those distractions with you.

Its causing quite a stir in the traditional media with articles and small news stories all a Twitter and for good reason. Twitter the micro/nano/mobile blogging service from Obvious has certainly dragged a few eyeballs its way with its immediate stories and its open API which has lead to some fascinating offshoots in the wonderful world of 2.0 mashups. No the least of which is twittervision which presents the combination of Google maps along side the public time line of twitter to show you what the world is saying. My blog has been suplimented for the last few weeks with entries from this daily stream of my conciousness but like vitamin pills its no substitute for the real deal so I am back and blogging here. Twitter though was not without its own controversies and Chief among them was the decision by the ChiefTwit himself to move from Twitter to Jaiku.

If twitter is the stream of ideas then Jaiku is the collation of those ideas and the representation of them in terms of a single over view of content provided and updated by Nik Butler ( The Loudmouthman ). Jaiku lets me aggregate my various twitter, flickr, blog, digg and delicious contributions into one page from which a reader can see the content and the commentary relevant to my on-line presence and activity. At first I was reluctant to use Jaiku as I viewed it a too feature rich and overly presented variation on twitter. I know see it as a collated rss feed of all things contributed under planer Nik Butler ( the Loudmouthman ).

During this dive into the world of local social networks I took the opportunity to return to a previous on-line service which i had to date under utilised and so I updated my flickr feeds. I have decided to move my collection of images away from my previous hosting service ( Gallery on my own box) and into flickr. I have found the immediacy and integration of flickr to be a benefit to me and those following my content on-line that its use was becoming more common to my own requirements as an individual. Gallery on the other hand still remains for me the better choice for internal and Small and Medium Enterprises related image management given its ability to provide a more “adapted” interface and presentation layer than flickr will allow. I am now moving through a process of exporting my collection of images into flickr wherein I can mark them appropriately as either Public or Private. In doing so I remove the burden of bandwidth from my own sites and from my blog to flickr who are dedicated in this instance to handling that issue and for which I pay for the service ( a very reasonable price at that ).

It was at this point in a long Easter weekend that I realised that one of the key failings of working on so many computers and workstations and laptops was that my personal collection of bookmarks and thoughts and ideas was distributed across so many browsers as to be pointless and irrelevant to me. Delicious has for some time now provided a service which for no other reason that pride I had not inherited into my own methods and practices for tracking and organising my daily internet experience. However since moving to the service and utilising the TAGS to categorise and index my content I have found Delicious to be indispensable in the working environment to which I am exposed. My bookmarks and my tags are now to be located on-line and if you part of that network then let me know id like to add your bookmarks to my own.
At this point I was already gathering a collection of websites to which I was contributing, commenting and considering and it was getting harder to keep track until Evo Terra of Far Point Media pointed me towards iStalkr and the ability to add , in a style similar to jaiku , the various lists, feeds and opinions that surround my on-line presence and activities and so it was that I added iStalkr to the list of things to track and advertise my on-line presence, activities and interests.

It was at this point in my long easter weekend that I was reminded of my particular interest in all things OpenID. Having seen a few comments on the Ubuntu Planet and having heard about the idea through net@nite I felt I should make the effort to sign up to ClaimID and use the features to validate not only my own blog but as many other services as I was taking part in as OpenID would allow. Such as Jyte and Zooomr. The thing about having a OpenId account is that once the sites are verified and approved your sign in is your ID and no more password pulaver!

One quick word about Zooomr, it has a Linux Client ready to run with helping you to upload images and content to their services. Needless to say it works in Ubuntu but I am sure that would appreciate any other distro feedback.
Now after quite a few weeks, a few websites and a few more links later I am posting this. The above should present some idea that beyond the world of Ubuntu and code fixes and bugs and things which work so well that they are hard to write about without appearing gushing there are other equally excited and equally energised about what the future holds and where it is going. This particular blog posting is much like a Holiday photo snaps and chat about what and where I have been upto whilst not just running Ubuntu on my own boxes.

I am posting this under the ubuntu topic and this marks the start of a few changes in what I will be posting . I have started to join the social network (something)volution and I have a goal of joining or recommitting to at least four more services before the end of April ( such as Facebook, Linkedin ) . I will be blogging more about Windows and Mac environments, as well as Open Source and the Community and Ubuntu. Since much of my daily experience is within the remit of Windows as well as how Ubuntu Servers integrate with it. Also how well Ubuntu Desktops just work, it seems appropriate to talk about that experience here. I do not however want to troll Ubuntu or OSS planets with Windows or Mac content to that end I have removed my self from a few planet feeds whilst I re-organise and redefine the tags and rss feeds which define this blog , my opinions ( which are just that ) and my thoughts will be posted later once I have resettled on how I wish to publish them. I will return , just like General MacArthur and I will be loud as ever. so until then…

Thanks for reading.