I borrowed an i-mate to capture some small thoughts of our trip as we traveled. I didn’t write much because even with the K-JAM’s QWERTY keyboard it was pretty painful to type.

First a precious few thoughts from near the end of our flight into Istanbul. 20+ hours of travel, the second part of which, with a higher majority of Turks onboard was much rowdier than I’ve ever been used to on a flight.

We are one hour from Istanbul and the flights children are getting restless. Feels a bit like a family birthday party – a bit much after 20 something hours of travel and a full-on work day before that.

Our first challenge once we are free from the airport will be to tram to Sultanahmet and try locate our hotel. We will likely walk past the blue mosque and other locations of interest along the way but the yearn for a hot shower should stymie the temptation to linger too long.

Tomorrow’s tour should see us back there anyway but with someone who knows what we are looking at.

Later in the trip I revisited the memory of our first day and wrote a second document on the K-JAM – this time evidentially more stalwart, more determined to capture my thoughts…

Arriving in Istanbul airport saw us stumbling around until another traveller, a german I think, confirmed our feeling that a visa was required. No trouble, they are purchased for 20 lira right next to immigration.

A wait in a throng of european tourists and then we were through hurtling into the airport, bags arrived at the conveyor belt just after we did and so after all that flight we had slipped easily into Turkey without a hitch. A friendly Turk at the info desk pointed us to the metro and showed us our line and changeover on the map.

The metro is modern, efficient and runs on time. We experienced a brief amount of confused delay at the changeover as we searched for corresponding names on our map but nothing too stressful though as it was still mid afternoon and the weather was perfect and we were soon on the correct tram to Sultanahmet.

From the Sultanahmet tram stop you could spy the minuets of the Blue Mosque. To welcome us, it almost seemed, the prayer song began to ring out from the speakers placed atop each of the mosques towers and we were drawn towards it like argonauts to the sirens.

The clerics voice was alternating from tower to tower to create an omnipresent effect and did I mention it was maddeningly loud? Deliriously tired by this point and knowing we could only be not more than 100 metres to our hotel it became impossible to think clearly to determine how we could locate the small street our hotel was located on when the map we had did not name small streets.

We decided to sit and wait the cleric out in the beautiful warm environment however when it was obvious the cleric had much puff and as far as we knew might continue throughout the afternoon we started looking for other maps. Found them – covered in calamine lotion of course. Note to self; carrying containers storing liquids in a plastic bag is always a good idea. Try do that next time.

Hotel found, only a step or two off the main street we were quickly checked in and up to our room, remembering too late the guide books advice to tip the bag boy. Exhausted we soon were snoozing. I woke a few times feeling guilty we were sleeping through the end of what appeared to be a stunningly beautiful day in Istanbul but the exhaustion of 40 waking hours won out.

Well that feels good to have got that to print (its been trapped in the phone for weeks waiting for my rescue). I hope to follow up later (probably days, hopefully not weeks) with more fragments of my trip and a few photos at some later point as the trip for me was quite perfect and magical.

I think my recent reduction in post frequency, whilst mostly due to various events in my personal life, has been somewhat affected by growing frustrations with my authoring tools.

As I’ve previously noted, I was using the performancing.com firefox extension for authoring my blog posts. Its since renamed to Scribefire and had a few improvements however in the end its just not pleasant to write into an area that is a third of your viewing area. You can expand it however this makes the reason you would use a plugin for authoring reasonably redundant.

Browser extensions – particularly firefox ones can seem a touch sluggish and I assume this is because they are mostly interpreted javascript.

I also did a few of my posts in the editor interface provided in the WordPress administration area. Its okay for last minute edits and applying of links but in general its got a few niggling issues with the editor that you constantly come across.

Time to scout for a standalone, hopefully native application for authoring. I thought I had seen one from Microsoft but decided to Google around anyway in case there was something out there that was widely regarded as the preferred post authoring tool.

Windows Live Writer appeared in the results so I figured I may as check it out as it was a free download and of course would be a native windows application.

A painless install later and I was up and writing my post. And now this one. The interface is clean, attractive and simple. The editing area is presented like a blank sheet of paper which seems to beg for words to be entered into it.

If your OS is windows and you run a blog, I recommend checking it out.

After a very satisfying break for a few weeks, holidaying in Turkey I have caught up with work and am now back online, back to virtual reality. I can highly recommend holidaying in the real world – I plan to do more of it.

I will hopefully cover some of my holiday on this blog over the next few weeks – we have many hundreds of photos to review and share – I can’t emphasise enough how great a destination Turkey is for holiday that both satisfies needs for relaxation as well as for new experiences.

I’ve also got a bunch of web development related posts I want to put together now I have completed some projects at work that were monopolising my time. Hopefully some of these experiences will prove valuable for those of you involved in building cutting-edge web applications.

Even better, if I could inspire people to visit a place like Turkey (which disappointingly has seen a downturn in tourism in recent times despite offering such amazing drawcards in its people and its overwhelming number of brilliant attractions) it would reward the effort I will put in to documenting my travels.

Look forward to a return to posting frequency benefitting from the reinvigoration my trip has provided me.

I have long found Outlook a pain-in-the-butt to use and a few years ago switched back to Thunderbird (I had been a user of the Netscape Mail client in a former life…).

I find Thunderbird is much lighter and quicker at filtering mail than Outlook. There are better clients but all seem to have their own quirks which have kept me from adopting them.

The main difficulty with replacing Outlook with Thunderbird is that it lacked a good calendaring option. Incompatibility with the other Outlook stalwarts in my office meant I was forever having to ‘View Source’ on email bodies to see when a meeting was to be held so I could go and manually enter it into Google Calendar (my primary calendar which I share with my team). Fortunately I found the Lightning plugin to add a calendar to Thunderbird but I was still manually updating meetings in Google Calendar.

Now I have just come across this excellent tutorial on setting up what might be the holy-grail of calendar setups and want to share it with all Thunderbird users and frustrated Outlook users. Here is the short version of the tutorial for experienced Thunderbird users :

1. Install Thunderbird 2, RC1
2. Install the Lightning plugin so Thunderbird can read Outlook meeting requests and place a calendar in the Thunderbird interface.
3. Install the Google Calendar provider to allow Lightning to add two-way synching with Google Calendar.
4. Add the XML address for your primary Google Calendar (Found under “Calendar Settings >> Calendar Address”).

And you are done – test it by setting a meeting in the calendar within Thunderbird. You should see the meeting appear in your Google Calendar shortly (I had to manually refresh). More information at each the sites I have linked to.

Catchy title maybe; but hopefully anyone who is or will be experimenting with Twitter might consider this post and draw some value out of it.

The Steve Rubels and Robert Scobles of this blogoworld (notice its hard to refer to virtual domains, I keep choosing different ways to refer to the world of online information, I will continue to until I find one I like) are heralding Twitter’s importance via their virtual pulpits. After about a month of my own experimentation with the service I suggest tread with some caution when signing up for Twitter alerts to your phone or workplace IM.

For a basic description on Twitter see my previous post  ‘Tweets are the Ultimate in Disposable Content’.

Few of us have jobs which benefit from that much interuption and very little of the content available through Twitter currently could concievabley be relevant to our minute-to-minute activities at work. We cannot draw the same value out of the content as those whose jobs it is to evangelize web usage and cannot benefit from the immediacy of republishing new technologies the minute they hit blogland. I am not saying the hype around Twitter is necessarily wrong – there is useful or entertaining information on it but , like blogs it will be more useful to you at a time when you choose, for a task you determine.

As I covered in my earlier post, the value the author places on their own words is linked to the audience’s percieved value of the content. Lets put it this way there will never be twittershelves built for storing your favourite tweets from the Shakespeare’s and Dylan Thomas’s of our times. You will wait for them to publish a book and then you will buy that for your bookshelf because you know that a book will be the fruits of their considered thought and effort.

I think acknowledging that this will be how people value individual content items on Twitter will also will drive how people value Twitter overall. One of the key variables in the Twitter value equation is in the timeliness of the information – only timely information that truly provides value in being timely will serve the audience. This is not to say there wont continue to be a constant streams of banal chatter… it just means that this content will have an erosive impact on the audience – taking more from them than it gives.

To avoid being owned by your inflow of everyone’s presence information I’d suggest for now, switch it off. Then, have a think about what you will get out of it and how you might distill this information source down to an information flow that is there when you need it at a rate that will truly benefit you.

Steve Rubel has good suggestions about how to filter and utilize content (see his Gmail nerve center articles) however remember, he takes this stuff to the extreme. I don’t know enough about the particulars of his job to comment but for own jobs, I suggest thinking about what your job entails and determine how much of a need there really is to be up to the minute with all the comings and going of the internet.

Is this actually something you could catch up on once a week (or even a month!) and instead spend those valuable minutes or hours lost to Twitteruptions and use them to being productive in the actual tasks pertininent to you being a valuable employee (or betting on the dogs, whichever suits you best)?

I am interested in other people’s experiences with Twitter – let me know if you are using it, wont use it or stopped using it.

Following on from my previous post on the fast-food like properties of web-content I thought I would look at the service which embodies the latest acceleration in content consumption, Twitter.

For the uninitiated, a ‘tweet’ (as referred to in this post’s title) is a single message sent via the Twitter service. Twitter is a short-message system which can be accessed by numerous applications and devices; primarily, but not restricted to, web, IM and mobile. Messages are by default public and therefore you could think of it as ‘mini-blogging’ where messages can be posted as easily as sending an SMS or IM.

The rise of Twitter in the early adopting set (lets face it, it hasn’t hit mass market yet) has seen the introduction of a new, even more throw-away type of content. The plethora of states, moods and emotions punctuated by links to sometimes vaguely interesting content really leaves a faint impression. The experience lacks cohesion and any real filter determining significance or relevance of a particular content item. This gives it a sort of fun lightness and I guess the beauty of it is in the aggregate of the impressions you get from someone’s Tweets you follow.

There has been plenty of discussion on blogs about Twitter – all discussing what amounts to the same thing – does this medium have future? Not to be silent on the subject I do think it is a service which will be a place alongside other internet-mediums like blogs and IM. I think it will be in a form evolved from the one we know today – one of the reasons being that many currently heavy users of Twitter in this experimental adoption phase will stop or at least severely par back their usage of the service as they realise its capacity to cause constant distraction, fragmenting their thinking and to generally get in the way of Getting Things Done. I’ll touch more on this in a subsequent post.

Something I haven’t heard much in the current conversations about Twitter and that I think is important is that one of the key strategic strengths of the service is infrastructural – the link between IM and mobile network messaging and the web is a useful one which many applications will build upon. I think one of the players in the industry, whether Twitter or Jaiku or a new player to come (and regardless, likely to be acquired by one of the big companies) will benefit from owning a reliable set of gateways maintaining these links.

The direction the presence products will expand will be in their ability to filter and summarize the content they deliver – experimentation with Twitter and Pipes will be interesting as the service will need to overcome its procrastinatory qualities. With the internet already being the procrastinators achilies heel the last thing we need (and I am assuming I might be representative of at least some of us in this) is a stream of random information flashing on GTalk or our mobile phones constantly to distract us from what we are actually doing.

Where Twitter-like applications could come into their own is if they can combine the users current geo-location, mood or other information to tailor very relevant alerts to them. Currently however its like trying to work with firehose to the side of your face.

I was mucking around on 43things.com recently. I thought this was pretty funny…

It reminded me of that classic scene in ‘The Life of Brian’:

Brian pleading to his followers ‘…You are all different!’ making a point about them not needing to follow anyone.

‘We are all different!’ they return, agreeably.

‘I’m not!’ cries a dissenter in Godelian irony.

Now as far as I understand it, 43things.com is about listing things you have yet to do… arguably if you are one of 73 others wishing to be unique you are possibly already having difficulties. More likely, of course, the other 72 put ‘be unique’ in just to see how many others had, meaning there’s probably 72 other blog posts with a similar screenshot to above.

Maybe I’ve got more work to do than I thought…