"The fool is proud of the one thing he knows…"

foolstr is a new website, located at www.foolstr.com. It’s all about the Wisdom of Crowds. foolstr lets you publish your ideas, lessons learned and get feedback from the community. It’s a simple social site, intended to gather up collective wisdom.

foolstr is innovative in that it relies on OpenID as its form of authentication. This …

Before I forget; Today I took a call with Olga Kharif from BusinessWeek [LINK]. She’s doing a piece on social networking and Google, specifically Orkut. I doubt I’ll be quoted but will watch out for the article in any case. Here’s a link to the last time [LINK] I was interviewed by her colleague Robert Hof [LINK].

This website is primarily for my own gratification and rarely do I presume to think that it’s a valuable source of information. On the other hand, I do occasionally put forth the odd interesting nugget of information that you won’t generally find elsewhere.
Hence it’s always gratifying to come across websites that link to mine as a point of reference. Today I came across two such instances. The first is Wikipedia on their Live USB page [LINK] referencing my post on how to install and boot Linux from a Creative …

I’ve done some multi-threading programming the last week or so for fun. Here’s the result:

This picture is made up of a few thousand photos, selected from a repository of 35,000. No image is repeated in the collage. I think I’ll make a few more when I get a spare minute. If you’d like one made for yourself, let me know.

This is hilarious. Makers of RIA (Rich Internet Application) frameworks JackBe have quoted me on their corporate website under "Testimonials". Apparently I’m a spokesman for the RIA industry!
"Until Google put this technology out there, no one was really thinking of Web pages as applications"
— Francis Shanahan, Sapient Corp. (SAPE) Software Architect

Go here www.jackbe.com/Company/testimonials.php
and click "about our industry".
I’m right up their next to Seth Steinberg, co-founder of Meebo and the guy from Gartner. Comical.

I’ve given up on conferences.
I’m a pretty decent public speaker. I have been told I break things down well, my materials are polished and sometimes, on rare occasions, I have even displayed what some have called "showmanship".
But let’s be honest, I am generally not that far ahead of my audience in terms of subject matter knowledge. For me, the best presentations are done by those whose command of a topic far exceeds the audience’s and generally, that’s not me.
I have so far been asked to speak at two …

Finally, someone was nice enough to post a review of my book [LINK]!  The review is up at CSharp-Online.net here: [LINK]
Here’s an excerpt:
"Mashups are becoming ever more important to Web 2.0 applications. (A mashup refers to a combination of various third part data feeds into a new harmonious feed or presentation.) If you are not yet excited about Web 2.0, you will be after reading this book!"
Here’s probably the most critical commentary:
"The book is a bit of a jarring experience for the reader. Much of it reads like …

In the words of Pat Ingolsby, welcome to my head, please remove your shoes.
The Irish Blog Awards are currently open for voting and this blog is nominated in the Technology category [LINK]
It’s nice to be nominated in the Technology category but more so it’s nicer to be nominated in the IRISH technology category. It’s also a great way to uncover other Irish bloggers in this space.
I often struggle with categorizing this blog as it covers a weird mix of stuff.
The list includes various projects I’ve written such as the …

I’ve created a new experiment using ClearForest’s Content Analysis services. It’s called SixDegrees and is located here:
http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees
SixDegrees is a Semantic Web experiment using Ajax, RSS and RDF combined creatively with the Content Analysis services of ClearForest. It’s a mashup but not in the typical sense.
SixDegrees uses the notion that there are Six Degrees that separate everyone in the world. My idea takes this to a new level by trying to figure out the degrees of separation in terms of everything rather than everyone.
Here’s how it works.
A …

In a recent interview [LINK] on NET Magazine, Matt Firth (design directory at Dare Digital in London) cites my very own Zuggest as a great example of Ajax in use:
"Have you dabbled with AJAX yet? Not personally, but I know our tech guys are ‘dabbling’ and looking at how it can be used in an interesting way. It’s got usability issues, but you can do some really powerful things with it. There’s some great stuff you can achieve with user interface results like the Zuggest application that enables you …