Disqus - Latest Comments for Adrian

Re: To Blog or Not To Blog: That is the Question. | BPWrap

Adrian — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 23:57:15 -0000

About 6 months before I left my last job, with the local County Council, we had a new Chief Executive start.

Though he didn't start blogging, he did start sending a weekly Friday afternoon email to everyone at County Hall basically saying what he'd been upto generally, what decisions were upcoming, what kinds of things we were going to have to deal with, the big picture really.

I know a lot of people moaned about it, saying they didn't have time to read it and that, but I quite liked it. First off it helped remind me who we were, as an organisation, not just about the bit that I dealt with. It also made me realise that budgets were going to be really tight and that things weren't likely to get any better, so perhaps jumping ship was the best thing for my sanity ;)

Re: Wordpress.com has annoying IE bug

Adrian — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 09:00:21 -0000

What makes you think it's a Wordpress bug? Knowing how many 'issues' there are with IE, it's not exactly unlikely the problem is with IE instead.

This is why many of us, and those people at WASP, get a tad annoyed with IE and it's lack of moderness at times....

And Jim, are most of the readers here going be IE users? I'm not quite so sure. There are examples around of more technical sites havig much lower percentages of IE users, because many of the more technical people (me included) take the same view as Cody in the first comment.

Re: Anil wants Flickr to pay

Adrian — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 10:00:00 -0000

Flickr provides a service to peolpe to allow them to host images and share them with other people, why should people expect to be paid for using a service?

It's not people 'giving' Flickr content, it's people using the service Flickr provides because they find it useful and think it's quite good....

I use Google everyday, they don't pay me for that.
I make web sites, they get listed on Google, Google don't pay me for that. They are 'scraping' my content (in the same way MSN and Yahoo! do for instance) to use in their index, but they don't pay me for using my content. In their case, it's not even that I give them my content, unless I say otherwise with a robots.txt file, they will take it anyway.

Why do I put up with it and not expect them to pay me? Because other people use their services and find my web sites through them.

Hosting ads is a different thing altogether IMHO. If I was hosting ads for Flickr, then yeah I'd expect someone to be paying me :) I wouldn't expect them to pay for providing me with a useful service.

Re: Anil wants Flickr to pay

Adrian — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 06:04:12 -0000

If you want to make money from you're work, sell it to someone, or host it yourself, pay for the setup/running expenses, and put ads on it yourself. Don't go putting it on a web site that offers a free service to share photos.

If some of the photos are that good, then surely the photographers should be able to sell them?

How about search engines? MSN don't pay me regardless of the number of web pages they may hahve indexed. That's not even 'user contributed work', MSN just comes and takes it unless I tell them not to.

If Flickr should pay me for putting content on they site, then I think MSN, Yahoo! and Google all should as well. How many billions of pages has MSN got indexed now Rob? Paying out for all of them, on top of providing the free search service, setting it all up, maintaining it, might cut into the profit margins a bit eh?

Re: Joel, and others, give us hell for Live.com

Adrian — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 04:48:46 -0000

I don't care if it's a rip off of someone elses idea if it works better. I don't care if the launch demo's didn't go very well, I wasn't there, I didn't want to be there. I care about how it works. If it works and I find it useful, I'll use it. If not, I won't.

So I'm a little confused that after you make a big thing about posting http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/11/01/ross... Ross Mayfield's problems with MS, you then wonder why people are less than enthused about a new service which breaks number 7

"On clients, they want to choose the highest-reach platforms. That doesn’t mean a Windows app. Or even an app that runs only in IE. It must run on every variant of Linux and Macintosh too."

very badly. "Coming soon in Firefox" is a load of crap, you've just announced to the world that once again you only really care about IE. Firefox will probably come in 6 months or something, while us Opera users are still left in the dark, are we going to get supported or not? I've read around to see if it works in Safari or anything.

So after trying to say that you want to do something about the list of problems, people are then nagging at you because this big new thing you've launched breaks "5) That Microsoft doesn’t care about small businesses(markets, those browsers with less market share for example)", "7) On clients, they want to choose the highest-reach platforms.", "10) More security.", and they are jsut the easy to argue ones.

I ignored gmail untill it worked in Opera. I'll ignore this until it does as well.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Adrian — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 05:58:35 -0000

If a product doesn't work by the launch date, the launch date is usually put back a bit. Clearly cross browser support is seen as an expendable feature rather than a strict requirement.

Rather than grumble at the team who built it, maybe it's more the managers who deserve it, for setting unreasonable deadlines (if you're having to work 18hrs a day, it's not reasonable) and deciding to go ahead with a launch for a product that didn't actually work.

Especially when the early adoptors are going to be the more technical crowd, who are much more likely to be using a non-IE browser.

You say the 'blogosphere' is great for calling you out things Robert, well here they've done it(in a general sense, not talking about you personally), and I hope you don't try and deny it deserved it.

Building trust with people who have become disenchanted with MS is hardly helped by preventing them from using non-MS products.