The First Project I Ever Worked on Online

A long time ago, in what feels like a far far away place and time, I left my job as Promotions manager for Dillons Bookstores and set up my own business as a freelance marketing consultant.

This was end of 1994 and I have strong memories of spending three days trying to configure this strange thing called Internet access and having to edit .ini files to make my 9600 baud modem work with my new Dell 25Mhz 486 PC.

Anyway, I started working on quite a few different book related projects and one of my clients was Jamie Hodder-Williams who was Marketing manager for Hodder & Stoughton. They were publishing a book called "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte and I was helping to organise an event that the author would speak at. Jamie thought that since the whole book is about the Digital Revolution, we should put some pages on the Internet promoting the book and the event.

So I wrote some copy and I found a woman whose name I can't recall, Kim maybe, who put the pages live on the Internet for me.

I remember looking at these pages years later and thinking how basic they were, sadly I can't find them anymore and never took any screen shots.

So why this long ramble about my past, well Negroponte's name came up on the BBC news site today, talking about CES in Las Vegas and his "One Laptop Per Child Project"

Incidentally, in his speech, I remember him talking about two online projects that he thought were useful and interesting, one was "Yahoo", the first time I ever heard that name and the other one was Ringo a music recommendation service - you send an email with 10 albums and what you thought of each one. Sometime later you'd receive a list of things you might like along with a prediction of how much they think you'd like each one. Sadly that seems to have also died a death over the years, vaguely remember it changing into something called Firefly but lost track after that. the idea of course lived on and lots of systems out there now for recommendations, including StoryCode and BlogCode

Nice Viral Video from Triumph for the new Rocket III

I saw this nice viral video from Triumph today, promoting the new Rocket III motorbike. I read the story about it here and you can watch the video below:



Let me know what you think

I have been online for 12 years

Just recived an email and link to a blog post from a very old friend of mine, Vash. Vash was one of the first people I met on this strange thing called the internet and whilst we haven't been in regular contact for the past few years, I do have fond memories of making friends with people through a common interest, which was Science Fiction.

Specifically, we met in the newly formed Milliways discussion forum, dedicated to the works of that genius Douglas Adams. I made some good friends in that group, some of which, like Vash that I am still in contact with and some that I am not. But interestingly, I am in contact with a higher percentage of that group now thatn I think I would have been without the power of the interent, email etc. Living proof, if you need it, that the Internet is enabling things that have never been possible before.

p.s. In a totally serendipitous leap of surfing, writing this blog entry allowed me to discover this wonderful eulogy for the late Graham Chapman by John Cleese, briefly featuring at 1 minute and 23 seconds, the late and sorely missed Douglas Adams

p.p.s If anybody reads this and has a copy of the one hour documentary Hypertext, featuring Douglas Adamas and Tom Baker all about hypertext and micons and stuff like that - I would love to see it again.

p.p.p.s I found it myself on Google Video I recommned you go watch it...