Well done i thought.

If you would like to have your photos included please feel free to send them to my minti mail.

The photos will not be identifiable and are for 2 songs "Oh ovely lovely Child" and "My My My"

You can hear the songs here where you can tour the website and purchase the songs if you like them. 

The music is aimed at pre school and kinder age children and is intended to be positive and uplifting and if you want your child featured (but not identified) in the music clips please send you photos.

Please bump this or share with friends who may be interested.

Thanks and have a great day :-) 

Two icons from my growing days gone, certianly stops you in your tracks.

With forcasts of 4-5 days in 40+ temp then high 30's (100F) after that there will be a lot of hot tempers  on parents and children alike.

This is the time we have to take a deep breath and react calmly when things go wrong or take too long or someone snaps because they are hot and cranky.

Remember our children are watching what we do and emulate our actions so this is a great opportunity to show them that hot days don't mean shouting matches and grumpy grown ups.

Have a spray bottle of water near you and spray your face then stand in front of the fan to cool your hot head.

Have a great day and stay cool.

I have been busy working on my own business in a desperate effort to keep working for myself and to do this I need to make my home based business sustainable and profitable.  To do this Ineed to put in many hours and that means not as much minti time as I used to.

The great news is that so far I am growing my business enough to stay at home for now and make a dollar as well.

I have started a web hosting service that builds and sustains small websites for home based or micro business and this provides income to offset the subsidised computer training service I provide to the elderly and dissabled in my local community. The computer training is done more for personal reward and fuzzy feelings so it will never really work as a business in the long term so the website hosting service is working out to be a godsend for now and should see me through until I start my next big project which will be internet based and may see me through into my eighties and create a few jobs and much positive family values along the way.

So this is what I have been doing and I look forward to sharing my progress and experience along the way.

Have a great day form the Big Red F.   

I have started working on a community toolbar to initially share with my customers and eventually to whoever wants it. I am so proud of it I want to show it off to you but I would like suggestions, ideas and feedback.

It is perfectly safe and containd no bad things but it has a lot of good things such as

• search,
• links to banking and shopping (Aust links only at the moment but will update on request)
• an online radio
• email checker and notifier
• gadgets (to do, notes, games ect)
• weather
• news
• a message service where I deliver urgent security updates or news
• chat rooms

and many other features that you can add yourself.

If you are interested please download it here and let me know what you think.

Thanks in advance.

• children
• ball
• park

Just grab your children and drag them to the park and kick the footy, throw a ball, play soccer or keepings off. Play tagg for a while and then head home and you will probably find you are turning the heater down for while.

Save money, keep fit and bond with your family. .

Tomorrow night is just as much about me as like many dads you set these goals and have these dreams that one day you will go to a game of football or other activity with your son and to have it happen is like a little milestone for me.

It makes you think you are doing a good job with your life and the plans you set are falling into place.

Well done to all involved including those who are using the features.

The Cook boys are making Cookies

Frontiers Foto Friday is back

If you plug the quoted phrase “the data finds the data” into any of the search engines, the first hit will be one of several essays on Jeff Jonas’ blog. Other evocative phrases that lead to Jeff’s blog include “perpetual analytics”, “sequence neutrality,” and “persistent context,” but while those will soon resonate once you scratch the surface of Jeff’s work, none is as broadly compelling as “the data finds the data.” As sound bites go, that one’s a keeper.

Jeff Jonas is chief scientist for IBM’s Entity Analytic Solutions. His long career in data surveillance, and recent interest in privacy-respecting data surveillance, has drawn a lot of media attention lately. In the mainstream he’s appeared in Newsweek and on NPR. In the techsphere, Tim O’Reilly blogged about Jeff’s visit to PC Forum, Dan Farber interviewed him at the Web 2.0 conference and Phil Windley wrote a detailed review of his keynote at ETech 2007.

Given our shared interests — including surveillance, analytics, security, privacy, and manufactured serendipity — it’s surprising that I only recently became aware of Jeff’s work. Of course, we’ve been working different ends of the same street. He’s focused on finding bad guys: casino fraudsters, terrorists, and others who collaborate secretly. I’ve focused on helping people who collaborate openly do so more effectively. And yet…these really are two sides of the same coin.

Here’s an example of “the data finds the data” in Jeff’s world, from his article in IEEE Security and Privacy entitled Threat and Fraud Intelligence, Las Vegas Style. You have two records that refer to the same person, but you don’t know that they do. Then a third record appears which relates to each of the first two, and which establishes that all three refer to the same person. The first two pieces of data find one another, through the agency of a third piece of data.

Here’s an example of “the data finds the data” in my world. On June 17 I bookmarked this item from Mike Caulfield, who is a local friend, the webmaster at Keene State College, and a forward thinker about Net-enabled education. On June 19 I noticed that Jim Groom — who is a distant acquantance at the University of Mary Washington and another forward thinker on the same topic — had responded to Mike’s post. Ten days later I noticed that Mike had become Jim’s new favorite blogger.

I don’t know whether Jim subscribes to my bookmark feed or not, but if he does, that would be the likely vector for this nice bit of manufactured serendipity. I’d been wanting to introduce Mike at KSC to Jim (and his innovative team) at UMW. It would be delightful to have accomplished that introduction by simply publishing a bookmark.

But even if that weren’t the vector, the point is that given the overlap between Jim’s published work and Mike’s published work, it’s likely that they would sooner or later have discovered one another. In the realm of personal publishing, thanks to syndication and search, data tends to finds data. And when it does, people find each other.

This process of discovery works best, of course, when there’s common data available to the syndication and search engines. When the same things have different URLs or different names, the connections are non-obvious.

For non-obvious connections that don’t want to be found, you need a technology like the one Jeff Jonas sold to IBM. It goes by the name NORA: non-obvious relationship awareness.

For non-obvious connections that do want to be found, though, we can help the process along in a variety of ways. Publishing hyperlinks is one way to expose non-obvious relationships. Publishing key words and phrases is another. So, for example, in reading up on Jeff Jonas’ work, I realized that the privacy-assuring version of NORA, called ANNA, which uses one-way hashes to obscure private information while still enabling matching and discovery, is related to Peter Wayner’s notion of translucent databases (1, 2).

I’m not the first one to make that connection — Noah Campbell noted it last fall — but this item will strengthen it, in a way that may help some data find some other data, and some people find some other people.

Dryden, New York is a small town near Ithaca. Four years ago, local resident Simon St. Laurent began chronicling the civic life of the town on a blog called Living in Dryden. In a 2004 profile the Ithaca Journal wrote:

St. Laurent can be seen, notebook and digital camera in tow, at Planning Board and Conservation Advisory Council gatherings, as well as at special meetings on fire departments, speeding and comprehensive plans.

And it asked:

What could motivate this seemingly normal man to submit himself to hours of political talk and legalese?

The answer is that Simon St. Laurent is leading the way to an understanding of how local blogging can reflect and enrich the life of a community. Day by day, and year by year, he’s showing his fellow citizens that political blogging doesn’t have to be bombastic and divisive. It can be a civil dialogue that informs and unites.

I first wrote about Simon’s project more than three years ago. I’ve mentioned it in several talks since then, and this week I interviewed him for my weekly ITConversations show. The show’s not posted yet, and I’ll probably be away from my computer when it is, but check here later today if you’re interested. Personally I think Simon’s project is one of the more important things you’ll never read about on TechMeme. Here are some quotes from the interview that highlight two of Simon’s Laws:

Responsiblity is inversely proportional to community size

When you’re doing local stuff, you can’t stay anonymous for long. I think that has a major impact on the tone of things. The content has to be a lot more accurate because people will call you on it. Somehow the level of responsibility increases as the size of community decreases. It really changes the dynamics thoroughly.

Don’t make people spit out their coffee

Dealing with the threshold where people don’t really trust what they read is something I worry about pretty consistently. My usual rule is that nobody should have to spit out their coffee when they’re reading it. I have a neighbor up the hill who’s a conservative Republican, and I count on him to tell me when I’ve gone too far. Having that kind of tight feedback loop makes it possible for me to write things that I know will appeal to a lot of people.

From time to time I like to dabble in social network analysis. Now that Facebook has opened itself up to programmatic access, I thought I’d do some spelunking to see what I could learn. Here are a couple of questions I’d like to answer about the “clubbiness” of tech-company Facebookers:

1. Looking at the tech-company population as a whole, do people socialize within and across corporate networks more than elsewhere?

2. Looking at individual tech companies, which are more or less likely to mingle with other tech companies?

The questions are certainly answerable. Surfing around in Facebook, for example, I can view the profiles of my friends at Microsoft and elsewhere, and find out to what extent they, and their friends, socialize with people in their home corporate networks, with people in other corporate networks, and with people elsewhere. Since Facebook is a web application, the same information is — by definition — available by means of screenscraping, if you want to go to the trouble, which I don’t.

So far as I can see, though, you can’t automate this process using the Facebook API. A Facebook application can enumerate the friends of the logged-in user, but not those friends’ friends. It’s hardly surprising. There’s plenty of risk in allowing that kind of transitive data-mining, and no obvious benefit to Facebook.

I guess the Facebook way of doing this kind of analysis would be to create an application that goes viral, and pools information from the perspective of many different Facebookers. I’m unlikely to do that, but if it’s something you’re considering, here are a few points to consider.

First, in order to avoid the server meltdown problem that Marc Andreessen discusses in his analysis of the Facebook platform, it might be interesting to do a desktop application. I hadn’t known such a thing existed, but I wrote a little one today, using the Python bindings to the Facebook API. In this scenario, client-side code invokes the browser to do an interactive login, and then makes API calls into Facebook. The advantage is that if your application gets more popular than you could support with a service in the cloud, it’s no problem, because users download it and run it locally. The disadvantage, of course, is that they have to download it and run it locally. And especially for an application like this one, which intentionally crosses cultural boundaries, you’d have to be prepared to run on any client OS.

Second, it looks as though, in one respect, the Facebook API doesn’t quite work as advertised. My desktop application should at least be able to report how many of my own friends are in the Microsoft network. But while the documentation says I can query for all of my friends’ affiliations, I’m only seeing one affiliation per friend. So if a Microsoft friend’s primary affiliation is the Seattle network, my application doesn’t know that he’s a Microsoft friend. Am I right in regarding that as either a software or documentation bug?

Today Lauren Weinstein draws attention to “a fascinating and apparently singular page on Google that you’ve probably never seen.” He’s right, I hadn’t, and apparently not many others have either. The page, http://www.google.com/explanation.html, appears as a sponsored link when you search for the word Jew, and apologizes for the fact that a hate site appears as a highly-ranked result. Although the apology dates back to April 2004, more than three years ago, it has so far attracted fewer citations (currently 50) and bookmarks (currently 26) than some of the blog posts I’ve written since April 2004.

Lauren writes:

The Web, after all, isn’t really computers and routers, fiber and spinning disk arrays, databases and blogs. The Web is people. Our job now is to find the path toward helping make sure that the power of Web search enhances people’s lives while not incidentally creating asymmetric opportunities for seriously damaging innocent lives in the process.

Lauren’s item today points back to a pair of earlier items in which he proposed a dispute resolution mechanism that’s reminiscent of Wikipedia’s:

Question: Would it make sense for search engines, only in carefully limited, delineated, and serious situations, to provide on some search results a “Disputed Page” link to information explaining the dispute in detail, as an available middle ground between complete non-action and total page take downs?

As we see today, that’s already happening in at least this one case. I’m sure it won’t be the only one, and that the kind of mechanism Lauren envisions will emerge.

In parallel, I believe we’ll increasingly need and want more and better explanations of all search results. Today, for example, I am the second and tenth results for the word Jon. As recently as last week I edged out Jon Stewart for the top spot. Why? I have a large Web surface area, it has grown steadily over many years, it’s mostly contained within the link-happy blogosphere.

Five years ago I called this a temporary anomaly, and predicted that a democratization of web presence will adjust the imbalance. It hasn’t happened yet, though. Meanwhile, it’s reasonable to expect that search engines might begin to provide the kinds of explanations that I’ve given here. Yes, ranking algorithms are proprietary, but some evidence — about the number of supporting pages, the structure of collections, the nature of supporting link networks — could go a long way toward helping people contextualize search results.

Web search can create an asymmetric advantage for all kinds of agendas. In exceptional circumstances where such advantage is exploited to do damage to people, I think Lauren’s right, we’ll need a mechanism to handle those exceptions. But in all cases, whether the agenda is positive or negative, better accounting for the nature of the advantage would be helpful.

It was a great pleasure to speak with John Willinsky for this week’s ITConversations show. We refer to another podcast I mentioned here. As much as I hope people will listen to this week’s show, I think it’s even more important to hear that other one, which is a talk that Dr. Willinsky gave at the UBC Okanagan Learning Conference last year.

If you’re an educator planning an offsite meeting or workshop, I would strongly recommend that you use that time to do two things:

1. Listen, together, to John Willinsky’s UBC Okanagan talk.
2. Discuss it.