I Need More Power!

I really wish Apple would hurry up and release the Intel Core Duo (Core Quadro?) PowerMac replacement tower mo-fo. The money's here. The desire is here. So, where is it?

I became a Mac convert in 2004; firstly with a G4 PowerBook and then a Mac Mini last year. But I'm really a power user who struggles with photo and video editing on a lowly G4 Mac Mini (basically, forget it) with its poxy graphics and processing power and tiddly hard disk capacity.

I need more power!

Pretty please with sugar on top; just release the effing machine already.

Google, Doesn't Know Eire's From Elba

I run a BlackBerry 7100 as my work communications anchor device; it handles telephone (not very elegantly but...) my schedule and, of course, email. It rocks at the latter.

Google have recently released a beta of GoogleTalk for BlackBerry devices. PS. get a load of the browser crap they be talking on that download page.

"Cool", I thought. But when you click the link (from the BlackBerry inbuilt browser) to download it, you get a message saying that because I'm in the UK, I can't have GoogleTalk. Presumably because Vodafone are scared about bandwidth, or some other threat to their fiscal health.

"So!", I thought my myself smugly, while floating aimlessly around Dublin airport this afternoon (I say aimlessly, but I had a duty free bag with a small soft toy dog inside as per Cameron's request to me this morning) , "I'm not in the UK!". And I tried to download GoogleTalk and it still came back with the same message that I was in the UK - when I patently wasn't.

And to rub salt into the wound it would let me download Google Local Mobile (mini-Google Maps) and when it happily fired up it acted all smart (or dumb) and decided to place me in Kansas or someplace in the US, not the UK or even Ireland. I distinctly wasn't in Kansas anymore, although I did check to see if Toto was still in the duty free bag.

All of which left Google's stock down a few points on my personal brand opinion index. Like they care. Like I care, like they care.

Why Do I Keep Blogging?

Stowe Boyd writes this week about Paolo's slow drifting movement away from blogging.

I think part of what's changed for me and possibly Paolo isn't so much that blogging has changed or disenfranchised people, it's more about distance from the action, like a inverted blog dendrochronology* (you heard it here first) - where the longer the run of a particular blogger, the further from the centre and closer to the outer edge he or she sits, a function of there being 31 million blogs in 2006 compared with fewer than a million in 2001.

It's more crowded, basically. This affects the even former so-called A-List bloggers like Dave Winer and Doc Searls who, three to four years ago, would have been listed easily in the top 10 or 20 of all blogs on Technorati - heck - even I was in the Technorati top 100 a couple of years ago - but who now sit outside the top 100.

So, when our traditional long-term blog anchor points like Doc or Dave get shifted away from the centre, nevermind our own blogs, it's easy to arrive at the conclusion that blogs are dead, different, mainstream or whatever negative effect you care to overlay to explain your feeling of detachment.

So, why do I keep blogging?

The principle, over arching driver lately seems to be an attitude that says I've been doing it so long that to quit would somehow invalidate all the time I've spent to-date getting here : a form of intellectual stubbornness combined with a desire to keep the line open in the rare likelihood that I might have something worthy of recording or sharing. It's also sustaining my membership (and friendship) of the community I joined back in 2000. Plus, it's also part of my life now.

I hope Paolo sticks around. We met briefly for a pint in London a couple of years back, and he instantly came over as one of the good guys. And this world needs good guys.

* The study of tree rings.