innermumblog
Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:13:14 +0000
It was a typical winter's Monday morning and I was nearing the end of my journey to work. Just after 8.30am Radio 4's Today programme featured, as it unfailingly does every Monday morning at this time, a trailer for Start the Week introduced by Melvyn Bragg. In his characteristically dry and humorous foreword, Melvyn prefaced Francis Wheen’s book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, published by Fourth Estate, with a reference to the word innermumbo. I was immediately struck by the poetic phonetic of the word. I’d been trying to derive a name for my website that suited me and my website and so my first task of the morning was to check if the word was in any dictionary. What, if anything, it meant and was it available as a domain name? It wasn’t in any dictionary. It wasn’t registered to any of the high-level domains. And as a final tick in the box of my somewhat abstract thinking, Fourth Estate (the publisher of Francis Wheen’s book) was the prescribed title of an essay that I had previously had to write as part of an entrance exam for Falmouth University, where I had wanted to study Journalism. ( I got a place on the course but made the dreadful mistake of choosing a university in London – a blog for another time methinks!). It was fate and innermumbo was thus conceived!
You can see an overview of the Radio 4 Start the Week programme on 2nd February 2004 at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek_20040202.shtml
I have been using the online word processing tool by Writely for sometime now, with a view to switching permanently from Microsoft Word. During my 'testing' phase Google bought Writely and coupled it with an online spreadsheet tool. Together these two office solutions are the basis for Google Docs. The advantages over the traditional client-side applications are huge. Not only can you access your documents from any Internet connected client, but also the power to effectively collaborate with friends and colleagues is tremendous! You can import documents from all the major players including Microsoft and Open Office - the format rendering is pretty slick too. You can also save documents in the different formats too. I strongly recommend that you try out Google Docs. This is clearly the future.
A blog is simply an online diary; a form of Citizen Media. A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. The term "blog" is a portmanteau of "Web log." "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Blogging started in 1994. There's plenty more info about blogging at Wikipedia.
I use Google's Blogger.com to maintain my blog. I grab my blog using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and repurpose it on my website http://www.innermumbmo.com. You can find out how to do this by visiting my website.