If you have anything to do with Facebook marketing, then you should know about EdgeRank – the algorithm that Facebook uses to decide what it thinks is 'interesting' enough to show you.

If you don't have anything to do with Facebook marketing but are a Facebook user, then you should probably know about EdgeRank anyway, because it affects whether or not any of your Facebook Friends will actually see the stuff that you are posting.

Today is the 30th birthday of the ZX Spectrum — my first computer (and in its +3 incarnation, my second), and the one which introduced me to gaming and taught me the basics of programming (through writing short BASIC programmes, usually copied out of a book or magazine.)

Funny to think of a device with 48k of memory (the image above alone would fill half of its entire RAM), no floppy drive, no hard drive and a 16k operating system as having its power being a significant selling point.

Brings back memories of loading software from tapes, a small suitcase full of (mostly copied) games, and games like Harrier Attack (still don't know what it had to do with the Harrier jump jet), the twisted perspective of a man being chased by 10 foot high chickens in Chuckie Egg, Dizzy, Back 2 Skool…

Also brings back memories of the days of the fanboy wars of Spectrum vs Commodore 64 vs Amstrad CPC. I guess some things don't change so much.

Facebook is brilliant for a certain kind of "personal". Photos that I don't want the world to see, but I want to share with some friends. Idle thoughts. Songs you like. All that shit that clutters up the Tickers and Timelines and NewsFeeds.

But then there is the stuff that is truly personal. Big, life-changing stuff. Stuff that you want to share with the world, but not until you've shared it, face to face, with the people who matter the most. Stuff that you might put as a cryptic message, meaningful only to those who understand it (or stop to think about it.)

"I need to get a black suit."

Sometimes, putting the bigger stuff straight up on Facebook just feels wrong.

I suppose that when I found myself getting excited about Amazon delivering my copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte, I should have realised that I have a problem that the book wasn't going to solve. But its made it worse.

I can't stand "infographics."

Now, don't get me wrong; anything that helps communication — especially the communication of complicated information — well, thats a good thing.

And good design, making something attractive and engaging — well, that is a valuable skill.

But the difference between visually representing data and trying to make data interesting by adding eye-catching decorations is becoming something that is increasingly obvious to me. Which means that my own reaction is pretty much the opposite to what is intended. So when I see something like this (via @TomEwing, my mind turns to how the data could have been presented more effectively. For example, don't use circles to present linear data, don't make it as hard as possible to connect labels with what they are labelling, give some idea about what values are being represented - are the graphics supposed to show audience size, time spent, page views, number of visits? The whole thing, while atractive enough, is just a pretty mess of information.)

Its a bit like research, I suppose. You have the kind of "research" that shows what Britain's favourite washing powder is (or another category where no normal person would say, unless threatened or bribed to say otherwise, that they had a favourite), or that 8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskers. On the other hand, you have research that provides insight, reveals hidden truths, helps you to understand people, how they behave, what they think — and why.

Of course, when you have research like that, you don't need to get someone to make it into pretty pictures. Or do you?

Perhaps I should be spending more time with Omnigraffle and Illustrator and less time in Excel…

Following a nasty infection by a spammer, somerandomnerd.com is currently was being overhauled and is was offline, as of 20/3/2012.

While I figure out whether I want to rebuild it, renovate it or maybe do something different with it, you might like to take a look at MyElectronicBrain.com, which is something I have been working on/playing with recently while learning a new programming language.

In the meantime, something will be back here as soon as possible. Having spent several hours trying to purge the site, it may be a few days while I take the opportunity to figure out what I want to do in terms of CMS, security and general website/blog/hosting/storage stuff.

Update, 8/4/2012: Ok, so I've rebuilt the site from scratch, put together a new Theme, and (touch wood) purged the spammy infiltration from my server. All the content, files, images and links from the old site should now (touch wood) be up and working again, while a whole lot of unneeded stuff has been deleted.

If you spot anything that isn't working, I'd appreciate it if you could leave a comment here to let me know about it.

So, I've got a bit of catching up to do, but things should now be up and running again, with a couple of refinements that I had been meaning to get round to but never seemed to find the time to deal with. Including;

• A lot of security refinements/best practice now being followed,
• A redesigned theme, following a "mobile first" philosophy, designed to scale to some standard smartphone, tablet and monitor screen sizes and display content in the best way for the screen and orientation being used, without compromising by serving different content or hiding content or functionality from mobile phones. Will probably write something more about this later on...
• Adopting a proper colour scheme. As I'm colourblind, I've decided not to build my own, and instead I've adopted the Solarized colour scheme.

So, there you go. Thanks to an unexpected issue to deal with (although its easy to get annoyed, its hard to bear a grudge against what is effectively a robot), I'm taking this as an opportunity for a fresh start.

Call it an overdue spring clean…

Riepl's Law states that "new, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms."

I don't think that quite covers the whole picture. While "old media" doesn't die, elements of it do.

Today, the 244 year old Encyclopaedia Britanicca announced that they would no longer be printing. Instead, they will continue as a website.

Obviously, that isn't the same thing.

Back in August 2010, before the Apple TV 2 was released, my prediction was that the Apple TV would essentially become an iOS accessory.

I followed that up with another piece talking about what Apple TV as an iOS accessory would look like.

Since then, we have seen the launch of iOS5, iCloud, the iPad 2, the iPhone 4S, and last week, the "new iPad" and an upgraded Apple TV.

Andrew Ross Sorkin has been digging into the huge number of 'daily active users' on Facebook; 483 million people (out of 845 million monthly active users.)

The thing is, what an "active user" means isn't quite what you might suppose; in the IPO (on Page 44), Facebook define them as;

Monthly Active Users (MAUs). We define a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, *or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third- party website that is integrated with Facebook*, in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement. MAUs are a measure of the size of our global active user community, which has grown substantially in the past several years.

(Emphasis mine.)

In other words, someone (like John Naughton, who I saw this story via) who has their Twitter stream posting to Facebook but almost never visits the site itself is considered an "active user" – despite never seeing an ad.

This Cracked.com article on 10 mind blowing easter eggs hidden in famous albums got me thinking about some Stone Roses tracks. Now, anyone who has heard "The Stone Roses" album will probably be aware of a few things about track 4 (Don't Stop.) Firstly, it has a lot of backwards-sounding guitars. Secondly, it sounds a bit like track 3 (Waterfall)— in a backwards-sounding kind of way. In other words, you might describe it as "Waterfall, backwards." Which it kind of is – and kind of isn't.