Surfarama

Flynn avec ice cream wrapper,
originally uploaded by Charles.

I am in London on biz at the moment so Jennifer is sending me a pic a day. This is day 3…Flynn insisted on playing with Mummy’s ice cream wrapper. I miss him.

I wonder to what extent the WIN blogging platform, Blogsmith, will be another competitive hosted option when it becomes available…

Now, maybe I am presuming too much, but based on some comments from Monsieurs Calcanis and Alvey I get the impression they do intend to offer it as a service. And based on the functionality of the WIN blogs it looks like it would be a robust solution. It might not have some of the fancy features like photo albums and stuff (or maybe it would), but then it might have some other interesting “enterprise” type features like cross blog posting and user admin for networks of blogs (like WIN obviously need themselves).

Last year Calcanis gave the Business Blogging session at SXSWi a peek at the web based system and it looked cool. No doubt it has come a long way since then, so I reckon they would be an interesting entrant into this market.

Of course this is pure conjecture…they “might” do a lot of things.

Seb wants a web feed storage service. Not a bad idea.

I have been thinking about this recently myself…thinking about a service which just acts as a container for feed content and is accessible via some kind of API…could be useful for other developers who want to do cool stuff with the data, but don’t want to have to store it all. It doesn’t need to be very complex.

Seb rightly points out that Bloglines et al already have this in place though and I suspect that Bloglines will provide exactly the kind of APIs Seb needs in due course.

Lots of discussion going on at the moment about the problem with surfacing RSS feeds to unsuspecting readers, ie. for the vast majority of punters raw XML is complete gibberish.

This is the problem which FeedForm tries to address (see my feed), although I appreciate it is far from a perfect solution being that it subverts the original feed url, which would probably annoy more experienced RSS users.

4hlfmthsBusClass,
originally uploaded by Charles.

Flynn (age 4.5 mths) taking full advantage of the air points upgrade to business class on his first flight. This guy is getting cooler everyday :)

We’re back in Melbourne after a couple of weeks over Christmas/New Year back home in New Zealand…absolutely fabulous.

We had Christmas with the Coxhead family, which was the first time we’d all been together in who knows how long…particularly special after a difficult year, and because Flynn got to meet his Grandfather, Aunt Abby, Aunt Katie, Uncle Sam, and his big cousins Harry and Oscar.

Christmas was in the sunny Bay of Islands. The weather wasn’t great, but we did get the boat out and had a couple of nice days…got some pix which will be posted shortly. The BOI is a very cool place.

We had New Years eve in Auckland, before shooting down to Raetihi to see the in-laws…Raetihi is one of those places which just seems to run on a different timescale to the rest of the world. Very relaxing and I even got up the mountain for some snowboarding! Very bizzarre when you consider New Zealand is in the middle of ‘summer’. Had a blue bird day on the hill riding an old board which has been sitting in the garage for literally 10 years…and it worked just fine. Just goes to show how much board design hasn’t really changed in that time.

Anywho, back in the office as of today…and I’ll have more news about that shortly.