Mark Bower

Sometimes I am really impressed by the BBC. Despite its image as stodgy, old fashioned Auntie Beeb, there really are some very creative and forward-looking people working there. Right now BBC news are running an experiment in mashup journalism. As well...

Looking through my referrer logs yesterday I noticed lots of hits from people looking for Arsenal's Vista gadget. When I wrote about it , it wasn't available for download. So if you have come here looking for a download, you can find it over here . ...

Darren is offering a free copy of Office 2007 Pro for the first person with a boxed copy of Office 95 or earlier they want to swap.

Continuing my notes from Everything is Miscellaneous . I have also discovered a video presentation of some on the main ideas from the book here . Chapter 5 - The Laws of the Jungle Here the author argues that the physical limitations of organizing...

I spent some time this week creating workflows in SharePoint Designer. I have done SharePoint workflows in Visual Studio before, but this was my first time using Designer. I was surprised at how powerful it is, and yet also confused at several points...

Continuing the notes I have made on Everything is Miscellaneous ... Chapter 3 - The Geography of Knowledge This chapter examines the Dewey Decimal system of classification. It shows how the system is skewed based on the 19th Century American-Christian...

Surprise announcement today on the Beeb got my attention. Immediate thought - what the heck are Apple up to here? My current best guess is that it is designed to shift Apple Mac hardware. Maybe the reasoning goes like this: We have millions of happy ipod...

Amazon delivered me a copy of David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous at the weekend. I love the dedication in the front of the book "To the Librarians" which I sense is written with some irony. To his credit Weinberger manages to make a book...

My post yesterday on Excel as an early example of a tool for creating mashups got me thinking about the attributes of a great mashing tool. Here's my list: Ability to get data from a variety of different data sources/services Support for a variety of...

Blatant snip from the press release: Today at TechEd we announced the availability of the Microsoft SDK for Open XML Formats – June 2007 Technology Preview, which will be downloadable for free from the Open XML Developer Center as well as at this URL...

James Dellow wrote last week on spreadsheets as an early mashup tool . I totally agree, and I don't think it was the first. Before RSS and web services provided a standard way to access data, ODBC was the defacto mechanism inside enterprises. In my book...