Podcasts

A couple of years ago when I first got an iPhone I downloaded from iTunes and listened to an aviation podcast. I was not impressed as the speakers were amateur enthusiasts who were clearly not that well informed.

I then started listening to EconTalk, a series of excellent podcasts by economist Russ Roberts from GMU in Virginia (he also blogs at Cafe Hayek). Each week he interviews at length a distinguished economist in a manner that is not overly technical.

For lighter relief I have been listening to the Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4. These generally take the form of a quiz or short monologues focussed on the latest political news from the UK.

More recently, I have been listening to a couple of much more professionally done aviation podcasts.

• Airplane Geeks (@AirplaneGeeks) - from the USA
• Plane Crazy Down Under (@pcdu) - from Victoria, Australia

They have turned out to be excellent with coverage of civil and miltary aviation, including aviation history and technology. I have been listening to older episodes and have even sent off a couple of possible "Grill the Geeks" questions to the USA.

These have all been great listening while walking our two dogs.

Microblogging

Over the last few months I have become a fan of using Twitter (posts should be 140 characters or less and URLs are usually shortened) and some of the web links that I have previously been posting here are now being sent out from @aeropolitics  It is also an excellent method for following other relevant Twitter accounts on the latest developments around the world as they happen. I will, however. be making an effort to catch up on my weblog posting.

I have also started helping the New Zealand Division of the Royal Aeronautical Society (I am a Council member) with tweets focussed on New Zealand aviation news using the brand name @aerospacenz

And I am still using @macilree for short messages of a more personal nature.

As this can often be done from my "old" iPhone it is generally a much quicker way of providing links to information that may be of interest to others.

To assist I am using Tweetdeck both on our PC and my smartphone.

Five hundred posts on this weblog

This post is the 500th I have made on this weblog since my first post on 26 November 2006.

I deliberately decided at the outset to use my own name rather than a nom de plume. It has meant that I have been somewhat guarded in any comments that I have made, trying to appear to be the neutral public servant that my day job requires.

The weblog has probably been more focussed on subjects related to my work on international air services than I originally intended, but I hope that it has provided a useful set of pointers to sources on the web for aeropolitical matters. It is a fairly arcane subject so I have not been expected a mass readership, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of visitors I have had from around the world. Some posts attract much more attention than others, usually not because of what I have to say but the quality of the work of others that I have linked to.

Also, I have not tried to post every day as some of the more dedicated bloggers do, so sometimes it may take a few weeks for "news" to appear on this site, and I make no claims that the coverage is comprehensive. Some of the weblogs listed down the right-hand side of my weblog do a much better job of that than I do and I am a regular reader of many of them.

At the beginning of this month I placed a Flag Counter widget in the right-hand column that will give an further indication of the many countries visitors to this site come from. This is in addition to the Feedjit map and listing.

I have continued to try to keep my home pages up to date with over a thousand web links, many related to my work, and have been trying out Twitter, Facebook and Flickr (click for my material) for more personal material.

Using Twitter

I have been playing around now with the increasingly popular social networking site Twitter for a year having set up a Profile and linked it through to my Facebook page. Twitter asks "What are you doing?" and limits postings to 140 characters. Among other things, it can be used with TinyURL to give short pointers to other web sites. Mashable has a posting dated 24 May 2008 with information about additional Twitter tools.

I recently came across a good posting on Shane Richmond's blog at the Telegraph dated 6 January 2009 about how to use Twitter better.

As well as being useful for quick pointers from some aviation writers (for example, Jon Ostrower) I am following for the latest happenings, postings that have grabbed my attention have included:

• From English comedy actor Stephen Fry currently visiting New Zealand while making a wildlife documentary: "A kakapo tried to shag the back of my leg. Mark was roughly shagged on the back of his neck. It's mating time for kakapo: anyone'll do x" and "Leaving Codfish Island this morning and heading for Queenstown. Kakapo made 1 last alarming attempt to ravish me on way to loo last night x"
• From the software programmer Mike Wilson a.k.a. 2drinksbehind who attracted media attention after sending out a message on Twitter having just survived his second air crash, this one on the Continental B737 that burnt at Denver in late 2008: "Holy [Two expletives deleted] I wasbjust in a plane crash!" He has subsequently advised that although his laptop was destroyed he was able to extract data off its hard drive.

Just don't expect anything too profound to appear as part of my twitterings.

New and updated links on my home pages

When I add a new link or update an old link on my home pages (they currently have around 930 links to other web sites), next to the link I annotate NEW or UPDATED as appropriate. After a couple of months, give or take a few weeks, I remove the annotations. I have just done a count of the numbers of annotations that I am about to remove:

Updated 29
New 135

It really has been a cold, wet summer!

AltaVista Babel Fish added

For the convenience of some readers whose first language is not English I have added AltaVista's Babel Fish to the column on the right of this weblog. I appreciate that the machine translations may not be perfect!

I have also moved the Civil Aviation Swicki to the bottom of the page.

Web 2.0 - How much of it is hype?

The "summer" holidays - the weather has been unseasonably cold and wet in Wellington, New Zealand, a good excuse to stay inside - have given me a chance to revamp my Home Page, which now links to around 930 sites on the web, and explore some of the new web sites that are part of so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon. Much of this seems to be about getting individuals to generate and select web content, but having had my own home page on the web since 1998 (or was it 1997?), the concept of making "amateur" contributions to creating new content on the web is not exactly new to me. As noted in a previous posting, I started the New Zealand Aviation Yahoo! Group back in 1998. I have also been posting some of my photographs to Flickr since 2005 while more recently have made some very small contributions to Wikipedia in areas where I have some expertise.

Looking at some of the notable new web sites gives me the impression that, while there is much hype, there is now some useful development occurring and it is helping one to find particularly interesting nuggets of material amongst the mass of information now available on the web. For example, I found the 2007 Web Trend Map from Information Architects Japan to be a brilliant way of summarising the key web sites that are part of Web 2.0. The number of private individuals making a solid contribution to this phenomenon actually seems relatively small but this is clearly changing.

My recent exploration of Web 2.0 has included starting this weblog, contributing factual comments to a small number of other "blogs" that cover some of my interests, revisiting digg, and joining Newsvine and reddit. Newsvine, in particular, impresses me. I have joined its small but active Aviation group and started setting up a Column. As for reddit I have yet to see evidence of any great skill in filtering the stories that would be of particular interest to me, something that Amazon.co.uk does relatively well in terms of making book recommendations if one enters and rates previous book purchases.

In the right-hand side column of this weblog I have also been experimenting with the Eurekster swiki software by creating a search engine for Civil Aviation. My initial impression is that this software needs quite a bit more work but please feel free to contribute to improving my particular swiki.

Finding deleted web pages using the Internet Archive

Today I was trying to track down a published academic journal article that I had linked to from my Transport page. The article, which contained a significant error, was available free on the web site of the University where the academic concerned had been based. He has recently moved however and the paper has disappeared from that web site.

This is where the Internet Archive and specifically the Wayback Machine is brilliant. This site now holds over 85 billion web pages (including of my home page back on 3 December 1998)! If you know the old URL just enter it in the Wayback Machine and with any luck the old page will still be available. Almost understandably, the Internet Archive's search function does not seem to work so well though.

Google Analytics

As well as this weblog and my Home Page, I also act as webmaster for the Wellington Aero Club and the Titahi Bay Canine Obedience Club. I have now signed all four up for the free Google Analytics service and will be interested to see the reported results.

Linking up with Technorati

Technorati Profile

Yet Another Weblog Takes Off

Up until now I have resisted the temptation to start a weblog. After all it is not as if I feel the need to foist my opinions on the rest of the world. However, I have been a keen user of the web since its early days, having been introduced to it by one of the victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center tragedy, John Lozowsky. Over the years I have developed a personal home page that now has well over 700 links in areas that particularly interest me. I have also found that I have some talent to ferreting out information on the web in some of my more arcane areas of interest, such as international aeropolitics. In the same spirit - that others may find the information that I discover on the web and my commentary useful - I am launching this weblog.

I have to confess that I have not done a great deal of research as to which blogging software would be best but have decided to give the Google sponsored product a try, in large part because I am a fan of what Google is achieving.