Scott Rutherford

I was pointed to a couple of very interesting services over the weekend that attempt to cluster people around the sites they are currently visiting.

They are InCircles and Medium. The former is something you install in your site (see the sidebar) and it allows people to chat while visiting it (to you or each other), the later is an extension to your browser that shows friends and other bits and pieces for the site you are visiting. Sort of site based dynamic social networks.

I have to admit though I still haven’t really got my head around Me.dium (although it looks like it might do something quite clever!!!), the InCircles client on the other hand is pretty transparent and easy to use. Interesting concepts.

So a couple of weeks ago we (Cominded) put up RailsPays, a free job board for Rails jobs in the UK. These can be anything – full time, part time, contract, etc so long as they are to do with Rails. I have to admit the idea was driven by the trouble we have had finding developers to join us and, well it has worked. A week or so ago we hired Matt Mower from the first post we put up….....

There are now a couple more jobs up there too (along with ours and we are still looking), but space for plenty more!!!

Amazon have a (beta) feature called Self-Optimizing Links which can be seen in the Books section of the sidebar on my blog. This is supposed to chose books to display by parsing the content of the site – so I thought I would give it a go and see how good the optimization really is.

So far I have discovered that somewhere out there is a Scott Rutherford who writes travel books about Asia, and therefore that “Japan by Rail” is more appropriate than any books actually on Rails…..... Hence the links so far are not really relevant.

Early days yet though. So, the experiment continues.

Basically I have been a combination of busy, lazy and ill recently that has led to me being a bit slack on keeping up with certain aspects of my life. Going to the gym is one!! Posting on here has been another. Anyway here are three books I have read recently that I thought were great and well worth a look:

They aren’t exactly in the same vein by the way, but each has a lot to offer in its own sphere. Freakonomics and The Wisdom of Crowds share some mind space, but Liar’s Poker stands alone. Check them out….