I dropped in to This Happened earlier this week where Peter Pratt (University of Edinburgh) talked about some nice work he’s doing using GPS with digitised historical maps. Imagine walking around Edinburgh using your iPhone or Android to guide you – the app would allow you to scroll back in time and show the corresponding historical landscape…

This short video shows you how it might look. Imagine the potential for annotating and adding other media to this sort of thing.

More about the project here

Siftables

Back then, when I worked in an office, I had a pile of journals, magazines, articles and reports with the word ‘reading’ scribbled on the top. They all had those circulation slips where you ticked your name when you’d read it and then passed it on. My discoveries depended on someone else’s subscriptions and the reading speed of the person before me. Sharing meant a trip to the photocopier and sticking an article in the internal mail.

Now my list is so much more than reading and it’s all over my screen, served up in various feeds and streams, offering a richer experience than a pile of paper and a few scribbled comments ever could. I don’t have to wait for my turn in the circle and sharing is easy. Now it’s easy to listen in to all kinds of sources and point others to the interesting stuff.

Working with a couple of groups where I suspect those circulation lists still exist, I’m hoping to help them look at some different ways of listening and pointing.

————————–

Jeremy Gould on the importance of listening

Euan Semple on the value of pointing to good stuff

Still processing thoughts and ideas from Going Solo, one of those rare events that matched Seth Godin’s new standard for meetings and conferences. The next meet is in Leeds on 12th September. If you’re an independent worker, plan to go.

If you do you’ll probably end up talking about setting your rates. How do you charge fairly and sensibly, resulting in a happy you and a happy client?

One of the panels in Lausanne tackled rates and negotiating and it’s been causing a bit of discussion ever since . Take a look here as Stowe Boyd argues for billing by time and Martin Roell tells the story of how this can’t work for him any more after working out the solution to a long standing problem after just 5 minutes.

Other video from Going Solo here and here.

Pictures are here.

Some of the work I do with special health boards and health agencies involves developing and delivering education to help control the spread of healthcare associated infections. Lots of talk about bugs and antibiotics. Lots of concern also about drug resistance. The more antibiotics we use, the wiser the bugs get and eventually they develop resistance. This TED talk by Paul Ewald has an interesting take on how bugs might be forced to evolve to less virulent strains and potentially halt the resistance spiral.

I’ve had more conversations about twitter in the past few weeks than ever before. A major part of the chat at last week’s Going Solo was about twitter and indeed, on it.

And yes, I’m hooked, constantly dipping in to see what’s going on. But I know I’m just skimming the surface. I know there’s much more value to be had from it.

I could do with a twitter masterclass.

Anyone else up for a gathering somewhere in Edinburgh to share twitter experience and thoughts on using tweetscan, twhirl, twitter tracking, hashtags…

Or is it just me?

I really enjoy the freelance thing – working with organizations from the ‘outside’, meeting great people, going off on the odd tangent … but the business side of things? I can always do with a bit of help with that.

So a while ago when I first read that Going Solo would be an event aimed at brushing up on the business of independent web working, I took the plunge and registered.

Organiser Stephanie Booth describes Going Solo as educational more than inspirational. I’m all for inspiration but it sounds like a good idea to put a sensible business hat on and compare notes with others on the realities of freelance life (contracts, pricing, negotiating and all that stuff) including Stowe Boyd, Suw Charman, Martin Roell, Laura Fitton and Dennis Howlett.

Looking forward to it.

Had the pleasure of meeting Jim Sutherland at a few of the recent Centotre coffee gatherings.  Jim brought together the rather amazing La Banda Europa “…an extraordinary orchestra of 35 virtuoso musicians all of whom play ethnic instruments indigenous to their own European country of origin” and has just started up a band blog.

I like to walk or cycle if I have meetings in town and Edinburgh’s a pretty easy city to get around.

So yesterday after (walking/cycling to and from) a chat about visualization of data I took a look at some examples of mapping. I like the look of Walk Score which gives an idea of how ‘walkable‘ a neighbourhood is. Type in a postcode and it brings up a map showing shops, restaurants, libraries, parks etc that are within walking distance and gives the area a score for how close things are. Useful if you’re trying to decide where to buy or rent a place, or even if you’re just planning a visit.

How walkable is your neighbourhood?

The new toy for me these past few weeks has been twitter. Took me a while to warm to it but I’m there – and the added value of getting updates on a mobile device made me wonder how it could be used by organizations such as health agencies. So I started to follow a few health-related twitter feeds such as BBC Health News, and NY Times health. Then I found that the American Public Health Association is using it to get some messages out about its activities and I read somewhere about medics using it to keep in touch around a hospital.

I tried searching twitter for other health-related stuff but now I see that Nedra Kline Weinrich over at Spare Change has put together a great list of health-related tweeters. There’s a lot of potential here to get short messages or reminders out. I like the look of Qwitter aimed at those trying to quit smoking.

Maybe a health section in Twitterpacks would be helpful.