Russ posts about a federated Twitter. Here's an unformed half-thought, partially drawing on our experience with measuring progress in Scrum: maybe it's better in some circumstances for something to be 100% down than 95% available.

Case in point, from the software development angle: it's easy for software, or parts of software, to be 95% done. For about 95% of a project. Getting something to that it's-nearly-there stage is easy, it's completing it (working out those "last few integration problems") that causes all the heartache and pain.

So it is with a messaging system. If 5% of my emails aren't getting delivered, I'm not in a 5% worse situation than 0% of my emails not getting delivered - it's *way* worse than that. Suddenly email is rubbish, because I have to consider that my email might not arrive.

Same with free software: 1p for a download is a radically different price to 0p, because I have to think about paying.

And ditto with a federated messaging service: I'd rather Twitter (which I love but have never paid a bean for) was totally dead, than kind-of-working (maybe delivering my updates to most of my readers, say... or giving me updates from some readers but not others).

• Semanal
  (tags: videoblogging ruperthowe)

In an attempt to make this blog a bit less "link-dumpy" (purely because it annoys me visually), I've moved my del.icio.us links into a widget on the left-hand side and turned off those daily posts. Let's see if this satisfies my sense of aesthetics...

A thoroughly pleasant weekend; drinks with Steve on Friday night at The Globe kicked it off, and after recovering on Saturday morning I did a quick jog around the Level before Mark came round; he's retaking his shodan exam soon so we're getting together now and then to run through some basic exercises (the muesli of aikido). Round to Soph's for an abortive attempt at chipping up a load of wood, and then... NaVloPoMo!

I'd been looking forward to this, firstly because it sounded quite fun (and a cross-section of local Brighton geek types was obviously to be found there), but mainly because it was a chance to catch up with Rupert, who I've not seen much of since we were at boarding school together. It was good to see he's still the same bundle of nervous energy which he was 20 years ago (a period of time which seems to dull most of us), and that he's out there shouting about videoblogging, something I know next-to-zero about.

The films were interesting, and seemed to divide roughly 50/50 into "neat little films that would probably have been made pre-Internet" (and are now enjoying better distribution) and "films which would never have been made at all were it not for cheap recording kit and the WWW". The former were fun, but didn't press as many buttons for me as the latter, where lurked captured moments of the hilarious, the mundane, and the touching. And I can't help but look forward to what happens when the economics of cameraphones and the web really kick in and we start seeing *different* stuff, not the same sort of films we used to have but done by a wider group of folks or distributed better.

So, cameraphones make cameras cheap; who's making films on the cheap with 3 or 4 cameraphones, the kind of films that just can't be made from a single viewpoint? And many of the films I saw seemed like one-(wo)man efforts - who's doing fantastic collaborative stuff online?

I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this stuff, and I'll be keeping an eye on the Semanal site...

• Lancing & Sompting on the Web - Window cleaners in Lancing & Sompting, Adur, West Sussex
  (tags: cleaners taylor office)