At home, I’ve three computers that I use regularly: my Asus Eee PC, a really rather heavy HP laptop, and an even heavier and larger (and much more ancient) Sony Vaio. All run Ubuntu, though the HP has Windows XP on it for the times when I have to boot up in that flavour.

But, if the hard-drive broke on any of these machines, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

All my photos, and increasingly videos, are held at Flickr (I buy a DVD once a year of all the photos I have there, just for safety’s sake). All my documents are with the increasingly-good Google Docs. My code is held on my website, though backed-up daily. All my email, back to 2004, is held on my Google Apps for Your Domain. My list of passwords? I don’t have one, using my own password generator.

Of course, I do have some files held locally. The other machine in my house is a fairly old Mac Mini, which sits under the telly. I use it to play DVDs and sync my iPhone, but it also contains my music collection. Indeed, after an Amazon.co.uk “sell your stuff” spree, I have about five CDs left in the house. But, once more, if the hard-drive broke on this machine, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

I back up the 30G of data I hold within iTunes automatically every night, thanks to a piece of software called JungleDisk. This simply watches for changes within my iTunes folder, and uploads those changes to Amazon’s servers somewhere. I pay £1.89 a month for the storage (and like JungleDisk so much, I also spent a one-off £10.10 for the software). So, while undoubtedly it would be a hassle and a lengthy download if this disk broke, I’d again not lose anything; and JungleDisk also ensures that my music collection is available to me wherever I am in the world.

With the advent of services like Amazon S3, Flickr, Gmail and Google Docs, it strikes me that we don’t really need computers to have great big hard drives any more - certainly not on a laptop. Asus appear to be the first computer manufacturer to really understand this.

By leaving all my data on the cloud, am I ahead of the curve, I wonder? Or simply too trusting of Google/Flickr et al?

Covent Garden used to irritate me. For two reasons.

First, the lift from the tube. I hated the noise in there. Did you hear the noise in that lift? You must have done. It would either be the sound of an irritating over-enthusiastic DJ from “Capital 95 point Great, mate”; a faux-Cockney from BBC local radio; or, peculiarly, a man with a peculiar atlantic accent best known these days for his cooking sauces. (I recommend Primavera. Mmm.)

Second, I hated the fact that one of my favourite places in London, the London Transport Museum, was shut. I used to bound over, get round the corner, and realise that… oh, it was shut. Still. Bah.

Thankfully, I think they’ve replaced the voice in the lift, and the London Transport Museum reopened in November 2007! Yay! Covent Garden no longer irritates me! (Apart from the scary heather ladies. But we’ll not go into that).

Now, for reasons that are moderately unclear to me, apparently I might get these photos on the official London Transport Museum website, which would be nice, if I get some votes. To be clear, I need more votes than the other people. So I need you to vote. For me. Now. Please. Thanks.

To whet your appetite, I need to show you two of my favourite photographs. (I took plenty, but need to choose two). So, you’ll see one above.

This is a reel of destinations that used to show in the front of a bus, and now hangs from the museum roof. I was a particular fan that many places were described in terms of the local pub - The Eagle, the Red Lion, the Goldsmiths Arms: showing that the pub was then really the centre of the community.

And here’s the famous Routemaster, with said black destination reel in the front window, causing quite a buzz with the visitors on the day I visited.

So, good. Go and vote for me, then. Please. Ta.

Vote for me here.

Annie Mole, the writer of the rather splendid Going Underground’s blog was kind enough to invite me and a bunch of other Flickr’rs to the London Transport Museum today. (I didn’t think Annie was her real name, but she wore it on her name badge and everything, so it must be.)

Quite scary, actually. I was concerned that I didn’t have a decent-enough camera, having only got a little point and click Fuji. So I felt a little overawed, particularly seeing Nikki had turned up with a posh camera, and Steve had even bothered to turn up with a set of lenses for his. (”I’m not spending money on cameras any more, just glass”, he told me.) Going round the place therefore, I felt under some pressure to take some decent photos with some careful composition, rather than just snaps.

Well, I needn’t have worried. Plenty of people turned up with nothing better than my little snapper, and some apparently worse. Jag said afterwards that he’d simply turned up with his only camera, a Sony Ericsson phone, but his photos look pretty good for it. (Has to be said, I like fiddling with the settings on mine.)

Anyway, a jolly good day was had by all. Fellow beeboid Martin was there, so that was a good excuse for a beer afterwards with Phill (who, for someone who works for an accounting firm, takes some damn good photos). I didn’t have much time to chat with too many of the rest, but it was good to at least say hello to Mike (who helped organise it and also works for TrustedPlaces), Crash, Kradlum (who I think is getting an iPhone now and it’s all my fault), Meg who knows someone I work with, Lloyd Davis, Anne, who ran away when offered beer, and the other few who weren’t at my table afterwards and failed to swap Moo cards with me.

Well, all my photos are here (I say all my photos - that’s not quite true, since only about a third of my pictures made the cut), so see what you think. Have I captured, as I set out to do, something different about the place?

And an interesting comment by Kradlum afterwards (I know his real name, but if it’s not on Flickr, he mustn’t want people to know, hence my sticking to his Flickr name). He said that he didn’t start using Flickr for the social aspects of the website, but loves it because of that now. He doesn’t see the point of most social networking sites: but sees the point of Flickr.

Thanks to Annie for inviting me, and I’m now the proud owner of, among other things, a Flickr sticker, which I will be possibly ruining the PC at work with.

Interesting point, possibly to me only: in order to upload these photographs, I’ve had to boot up into Windows for the first time this year. The combination of Picasa and the Uploadr is rather too good for my Linux skills quite yet. It’s hateful in here. Looking forward to booting back into a proper operating system.)

Uploaded on 13 February 2008, this is a viewing platform in the war museum in Salford Quays. Photo by Mike Willshaw. Used under licence.

All this online sharing has to stop
It's ruining the motor mechanic industry. (No, really)

Flickr CC search
A quick page whipped up to help me find nice pictures for this blog - it searches all Flickr CC images together (which the Flickr UI won’t let me do).

Aussies Head to SXSW
A website using one of my photos, albeit only credited in the ALT tag (which isn’t cricket, by the way).

Oceanworld Manly
Another spotting of one of my photographs, complete with a link to my own website. How splendid.

Living on Earth: Swedish Body Heat
Sounds exciting, but actually it’s a radio feature about trains, aired on WBUR and other stations. They used one of my photographs to illustrate it on the web. Cool.

When statistics speak volumes
Good piece by Paul Smith on the press releases radio stations send out on figures day. Paul still owes me a fiver, by the way.

MMS For O2 iPhone
Just the thing I was looking for. Brilliant - now I can receive MMS on the iPhone. (Bizarre that it doesn’t support it…)

Twitter on the iPhone: Hahlo
While I’m on an iPhone theme, I use this for Twitter (it’s much prettier than it looks on this page). For this, and for the MMS thing, I’ve donated.

Keeping the conversation going
Nic Price activates a magic Wordpress plugin. So have I. Good idea.

Do We Have The Backup?
‘how it can be legitimate for a government to build roads but not to lay fibre is a mystery to me, and one that deserves to be questioned.’ Good point.

Big name #4
Hello, ladies. Contacting me has never been easier. Etc.

What HD-2s Don’t Stream And Should?
A rant about streaming. But included in this is interesting: WRXK’s HD2 channel (a new one only for HD radios) is entirely themed around their breakfast presenter. Neat idea. (Course, I was behind the ‘Virgin Radio Party Classics’ channel on Sky, voiced by Suggs.)

Interactivity: A lost opportunity for your station?
Some “isn’t the US behind the rest of us” type thoughts from Mark Ramsey; but some useful and interesting figures he quotes.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from January 26th to February 14th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

Photo: Ian Grove-Stephensen | Creative Commons licenced

At a conference today in Cambridge, I was struck by the thoughts of one of the audience members (which consisted of mostly ‘creative types’ - designers or artists).

I was on the panel, discussing what Virgin Radio has been doing in the user-generated-content space. A lady probably in her late 40s was concerned at what she called the ‘fad’ of user-generated-content. She described herself as a creative, and was concerned that “we were allowing” people with no creative talent to post their own work online. “Surely you have a duty to sift through”, was her argument, “to make sure that the work you promote has some artistic merit?”

She warmed to the theme. “You’re conning us all,” she said. “Do you even care what goes onto your website? It’s a totally cynical ploy to earn money out of people.”

My efforts to persuade her that the quality rises to the top wasn’t totally successful - probably because I wasn’t instantly able to show her Flickr’s automated “best of” collection, which they call ‘interestingness’.

Someone else started talking about ‘amateurs’ on the web posting content. My hackles rose; but thankfully the excellent, considerate, handsome, intelligent, erudite, and man-who-reads-this-blog, John Naughton, called time.

Michael Mullane’s blog recently featured a similar thought, describing an editor, who he calls Prendergast:

Prendergast was losing sleep over moves to embrace user-generated content. “We are pouring more and more editorial resources into sifting through pictures of kittens playing with balls of wool.”

He said that it was turning his company into the editorial equivalent of a skinny model with a disproportionately large head. “Even if we come to our senses, I’m scared that we will have irrevocably damaged our health.”

After the panel session, while talking to her along with a chap from Sky, I was struck by a thought.

You see - in many cases, quality does rise to the top - whether from popularity or from the type of algorithm that Flickr uses. (Indeed, I once wrote a similar algorithm for Media UK, which used all manner of interesting things to work out whether a particular forum thread was ‘worth reading’ or not.)

But in many cases, quality doesn’t. BBC News produces a most popular page, showing news stories which most people are emailing to their friends or reading. As of now, “Stephen Hawking In Space” is the most popular, with a story about Bob Woolmer second, and a Hugh Grant arrest in third place. Meanwhile, the US Congress has just approved a pull-out of Iraq, which the BBC bills as second-most important, but appears as the tenth-most popular story. (There’s a website somewhere which compares these two weightings side-by-side, but I can’t find it). Indeed, the second-most emailed story right now on the BBC News website is Sudan man forced to ‘marry’ goat, a story (predictably involving human/goat relations that go rather too far) which is now well over 13 months old. There’s an algorithm that needs changing.

I’ve managed to post this drivel quite successfully without anyone else checking over it for any redeeming quality - and I’m guided, predominantly, by Google Analytics (having made a conscious decision not to splatter ads all over it, otherwise I’d find myself blogging about credit cards) - so perhaps I’ve also fallen for ‘popularity is good’.

We’re drowning in content. My Google Reader is permanently full of more stuff to read. I need someone, or something, to rate that content for me - in the same way that Flickr successfully does it.

Our questioner doesn’t use the internet much, so she’ll never find this (particularly since my email address was spelt wrong in the programme, not that it would take anyone two minutes to work out what it should be). But I wonder, and whisper this, whether she might have a point after all.

UPDATE: John Naughton speaks about the panel session (MP3)

…make a backup of your Flickr photos.

If, like me, you have hundreds of photos on Flickr: get them all on a DVD and you’re sorted. I’ve just over 2,000 photos on Flickr, so it’ll cost $40 to get a DVD done and sent to me here in the UK. Not bad, really.

The amazing thing was how long it took to find the link, given I used them last year, too. It’s at www.flickr.com/do/more/ - and the company that does the DVD backups is Englaze.