steve purkiss

Ok so it’s been a while since I posted here but really there hasn’t been IMHO, much to be reporting about. That all changed last night though when my friend Christian Payne, a.k.a. Documentally, posted a video on phreadz.com, a multimedia site built by another of my good friends Kosso.

Documentally said that he really needed to go to the New Media Expo in Las Vegas which is on in a couple of weeks, and said how much he could show off a platform such as Phreadz, and long and short of it is within half an hour an anonymous donor had stepped up to the mark and donated enough for Documentally to realise his vision. Funnily enough the founder Kosso can’t even afford his rent next month - goes to show what angels are prepared to invest in, and rent doesn’t seem to be one of them!

Now I’ve never known a social media network to get any amount of funding direct from its users with such success - I did email Mike Butcher from techcrunch.co.uk with the exciting news, but even though he is a member of Phreadz and has sung it’s praises previously, he seemed rather disinterested in this news (too busy talking about iPhone Nano’s to worry about what’s going on in the real world lol!), so I thought I’d post it here - ah, the power of blogging…

What I find funny is that people, the general public, still don’t seem to have caught on to the fact that they hold they keys to change in the world - don’t wait for someone else to step up to the mark - if there’s something you feel should exist in the world and there’s a paypal button attached to the side of it well you know what to do….!

I’ve been missing the old open4.org - open for organizations - what I liked to call a ‘Plain English Guide to Open Source Software’.

Unfortunately open4.org died a death because I enjoyed helping people out so much I didn’t focus enough on creating a sustainable business model out of it.

Using the wonderful WaybackMachine I see ‘open for organizations’ articles used to get thousands of reads, so hopefully with your help I can crack it open better this time…

I launched the community helping people find out more about Free and Open Source Software from 2003 after the J2EE web app framework software house I worked for didn’t make it through the ‘dot-bomb’ and I discovered all this enterprise-quality software out there which was free yet practically no-one had heard of it.

Fast-forward five years - many more use it, have heard of it, but still we have a long way to go in order to make it easy enough for people to use and get support… in Plain English.

As an exploratory post, if you’d like to add a comment as to whether you would use a site like this and what for, I’d love to know. I thought I’d do some research first this time round… TIA!

I’m getting Social Networking Fatigue - are you?

One of the biggest pains I’ve had of late is not being able to use sites like seesmic from my GNU/Linux partition because Adobe don’t provide support for it yet. I’ve found a hack though, and it works a treat!

Thanks to Kosso for pointing me to The Flashcam Project, which provides all the info to get it up and running. If you’re like me and using Ubuntu GNU/Linux, then all you need to do for the requirements is:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

…then follow the instructions. It’s a bit of a pain because you need to run flashcam -qD and it leaves your camera light on, but at least it works. Let’s hope Adobe pull their finger out soon and give us the same user experience as any other computer user.

I’ve just cancelled my broadband service from Virgin after only one week. Why? Because today I woke up to find my ‘unlimited’ service had been throttled because I apparently used it too much. I’m now getting less-than-dial-up speeds and the service is all but useless to me.

When I phoned up to order, I stated to the sales guy that I used 60-100Gb per month and asked if that would be a problem, to which he said ‘no’. I now find, only a week later, that according to them, it is. So I check their Acceptable Use Policy, to which they supply no figures whatsoever as to what is acceptable use. So how are you supposed to know?

After spending many hours, nine phonecalls, and 24 hours without service when I swapped over because Virgin ‘forgot’ to do something to enable my line, I have had it with them and apparently am going to receive a MAC address so I can change back to my old supplier, enta.net reseller ukfsn.org (whose profits go to funding Free Software projects). I never had any problems whatsoever with them, and whenever I phoned support they didn’t put me on hold for ages and they knew what they were talking about - I wouldn’t have changed in the first place if it wasn’t a cash situation - it’s £34.99pcm for 2Mb unlimited from ukfsn.

To top it all, I checked the webmail and found that they’re charging me £44.99 for a £14.99pcm service - I phoned Virgin again and there’s a set-up charge which I was not informed of either - I have complained to them about that too and requested a refund as at no time did they tell me this.

On top of all the stories in the news this week about them not supporting net neutrality, it has not given me much good to say about Virgin.

I’ve just read Social Media expert Jay Deragon’s fantastic post over at Social Media Today entitled “Are We Contained and Controlled?”

Certainly the best blog post I have read this year, and I don’t want to spoil the enjoyment of reading it first hand by adding or commenting, just share the link with you. As the first commenter says “Profound”.

Thanks Jay, this is a wonderful piece of writing.

seesmicsidebar.com is now live, so please refer to that site for sidebar related issues.

I will be moving the sidebar posts from here over to there so I can reclaim my blog!

There’s been quite a few changes to my unofficial seesmic sidebar lately, including the ability to add links to your videos!

Once you’ve posted a video, you’ll see an “add link” link by your post in the sidebar, click that, enter the URL and click the add button. That’s it!

If there’s a link attached to a post, you’ll see a green “link” link by the side of the post, click on that and the link will open up.

You can only add links to your own posts, and currently you can only add one link. Also, the link will open up in a new browser window until I get the open in new tab code working.

Also new is the timelines so you can see all the usual timelines - public, friends, inbox (including private DMs), and sent.

Testing and feedback welcome!