I've blogged in my personal life for years - sometimes as me, sometimes anonymously.  Mostly, blogging as me has been for my own entertainment and amusement, the appeal being much the same as keeping a diary might have held in years gone by, albeit one that, in the modern world, a wide audience of people can read if they want to.

Blogging seems to have gone very mainstream in the last year or so.  So I now have four different blogs to maintain - this one, one at work, one as the Chair of the Board of Governors at my daughter's school on our internal site and one in the same capacity externally. I'm not convinced there's much value in the latter, which is much what I said about blogging in the work environment a few years ago. I blog here, for me. I blog at work and on the Governors' site because I have something specific I want to communicate.  Why would I blog as a Chair of Governors, to an educational community - do I have something to say that is better enabled by the constraint of that limited audience? Not sure that I do - so not sure that the National College of Teaching and Leadership has really enabled the capability for reasons much beyond 'because we can'...

One thing is clear though: The amount of content being published across the globe is increasing at an exponential rate, as the tools mature to the point that it's become a trivially easy activity. And a likely response to that is increased sophistication in the tools that do the job of finding content of relevance and delivering it to the individual - not based on self-selection, in the way that RSS and portal technology dealt with the issue in the past, but based on a contextual understanding of the individual's preferences, role, habits, location... psyche, emotions, purchasing preferences... It just isn't possible for a person to manage this effectively - and it is possible for algorithms to do a much better job. Commercial organisations are already exploiting this capability... how do you think Amazon works out what to entice you with? And did you know that it may adjust the price of that irresistible DVD box-set based on what it knows about you?

Science-fiction writers have been depicting a world where the machines have taken over since the Industrial Revolution. No desire to spoil anyone's Sunday lunch - but we need to come to terms with something: They already have.

...is the marketing spin upon which Stoke Place has settled. So Al and I reinvented our traditional weekend, by eliminating the girls from it. Huzzah!

It was one of those Grouponny style Saturday nights away, with  dinner and a bottle of fizz thrown in. Al bought me it for my birthday. To be honest, the appeal was mostly in getting rid of the girls for a night and having other people run around and do stuff for the day - no particular expectations of the dinner, aside from there being three courses of it. This turned out a substantial disservice done to the extremely fine Garden Room Restaurant, which offers cuisine to Michelin Star standards, at rather less than typical Michelin Star prices. Three courses for £45, which were already included in the deal (along with several amuse-bouches).  OK, we near doubled the cost with service, coffee (plus superb petit-fours) and lack of restraint on the winelist, but this was an exceptional meal for the money. Breakfast wasn't half-bad either.

I took some snaps. Inevitably.

Many years ago - about 1995 in fact - I was 100305.2513@compuserve.com. It wasn't my first ISP - I seem to remember that was a company called Delphi - but it was the first significant online identity I had outside of closed conferencing systems (bulletin boards notwithstanding). I also had an account with CIX ('timfg'!) - before Compuserve opened up their operation to Europe - and it was primarily the fact that the two services - as well as Usenet - could be accessed with the same Offline Reader (Wigwam, which became PowWow which became Virtual Access) which drew me to Compuserve. And, not long after, a career in IT.

So this is a proper nostalgia trip for me, leaves me moist of eye thinking about my days as a beta-tester for Ashmount Research's fantastic OLR software, now so long-gone that both software and company have dropped off the edge of the interweb. I haven't seen that CIS interface for years!