Working with colleagues spread across Massachusetts, New York, California, Oxfordshire, London, Britanny, Victoria, Lower Saxony (and that’s when they’re not travelling) means that face-to-face conversations aren’t universally available. Instant messaging is good because it’s the next-best thing to direct contact.

With geographical distance comes timezone distance. Before the invention of immediate communication this was a self-correcting problem (most people can’t shout over more than two timezones). Of course, when one simply has to type into a computer (caps-lock for shouting) one must be sensitive to the timezone of one’s correspondent. Easy advice to give, but also easy to forget. Slack, like any long-distance communication medium, has the effect of reducing people to avatars somewhat.

On November 30th 2016, the login feature of FolkTuneFinder.com will be removed, and you will no longer be able to use favourites and group tunelists.

One month ago I wrote the a blog post about sign-in on FolkTuneFinder and placed a message on the site. I also put word out on the FolkTuneFinder Facebook page. Since then I have recieved only two messages. There are 5,367 accounts on FolkTuneFinder. Some of them are spam, but some of them are real users who log in and use favourites.

The Royal Mint are launching a new pound coin. It’s

The most secure coin in the world

according to their website. I saw it linked from BBC news.

The site looks good. It’s all about how businesses should look out for the new coin and adjust their security practices.

It goes into some detail about just quite how secure this coin is. They’ve obviously put a lot of thought, time and energy into the micro-lettering and latent image.

Skint is a weekend of music and dancing, with workshops, bals and sessions all run by volunteers. I’m on the committee.

This year’s Skint was a joy. I am immensely grateful to everyone who came and made it what it was, which, as I’ve said, a joy.

These are not the best photos in the world, but they are mine.

Bundpolska Workshop.

Hands up who’s here for the first time.

Summary

I want to remove the ‘favourites’ / ‘bookmarks’ feature (and then the ability to log in altogether). I would make sure that no-one lost their ‘favourites’ lists and could transfer them elsewhere. What do you think? Email me at joe@folktunefinder.com , but preferably read the whole piece first!

FolkTuneFinder is used by up to 10,000 people per month. It’s enough to make me feel like it’s worth running keeping it going, and I hope I always will.

We found an oak in the corner of a field in Oxfordshire. In the tree we found a colony of bees. The bees were making the most of a warm day with an abundance of wild flowers. From the rate they were coming and going I estimated the colony to be about the size of my bees. The hollow must be a cubic foot or more.

I hope they’re ready for winter. They looked like they could handle themselves.

I sometimes to go to conferences. Sometimes I talk. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes both.

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://www.crossref.org/annualmeeting/index.html">Crossref LIVE</a><br>
      London, November 2016</td>
  <td>The Crossref annual meeting.</td>
  <td>To catch up with Crossref members and the scholarly publishing community.</td>
  <td>Not speaking (unless spoken to). Showing what the Strategic Initiatives team (that's Crossref Labs to you) are up to.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://altmetricsconference.com/category/3am-bucharest/">3:AM Conference</a><br>
      Bucharest, September 2016</td>
  <td>Discussing alternative metrics for assessing published research.</td>
  <td>To talk to researchers, funders and infrastructure providers about Crossref Event Data</td>
  <td>We need neutral infrastructure to collect data on how research is used and mentioned online. Here's what Crossref's doing.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics16/">altmetrics16 Workshop</a><br>
      Bucharest, September 2016</td>
  <td>Sharing research and research methods for alternative metrics.</td>
  <td>To talk to researchers, and share and understand expectations and techniques.</td>
  <td>Transparency is important when producing the data that underpins alternative metrics. Here are the transparency principles of Crossref Event Data.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite_2016">WikiCite 2016</a><br>
      Berlin, March 2016</td>
  <td>Talking about how people cite things in Wikipedia and how to improve it.</td>
  <td>Lots of citations on Wikipedia are made using DOIs. </td>
  <td>Here's how much use they get.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://csvconf.com/">csv,conf,2016</a><br>
      Berlin, March 2016</td>
  <td>Talking about data, both structured and unstructured.</td>
  <td>To talk about data!</td>
  <td>Here's how we collaborated with Wikipedia to improve DOI use. Here's what happened.</td>
</tr>

What?	What??	Why?	What did/will I say?
PIDAPalooza Reykjavík, November 2016	Discussing persistent identifiers for research objects.	To share experience and best practice about the use of persistent identifiers.	It's difficult when people don't use PIDs to talk about things that have them. I still have to look for them. Here's how.

I’m not in it for the honey.

A refrain I’ve repeated for a year and a half. Bees are the most incredible creatures. I think humans are hard-wired to find fascinating what bees are hard-wired to do. A social insect, forming colonies from which intelligent behaviour seems to emerge. An insect which, on an individual basis seems to have enough character to be charming, but when viewed in great numbers is inescapably prone to anthropomorphism.

I think that summer is a far better host to ‘new year’ than winter. If you’re lucky enough to be able to take time out to enjoy it, it offers a chance to stop whatever you were stuck doing for a little while and think about it. A reset, and chance to look backward on the last year and forward on the next. For me, winter is all about hard work, when everything’s an effort. Hardly the time to stop and think. I’d much rather do that basking under the sun than huddled round a fire.

I’m sitting on the bus writing this on my BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu edition tablet. It promises ‘full convergence’ so, taking it on face value, I thought I’d start typing a blog post using the on-screen keyboard at work then continue with a bluetooth keyboard once I get home.

The tablet ships with LibreOffice, gEdit, mystery ‘browser’ and Firefox which might be used to access Google Docs. But I’m not using any of those to write this blog post. I am instead using the Notes app, for reasons I’ll come to.

These are my first impressions. All of them are honestly observed, but a couple turned out to be special cases. But they were all things I experienced.