Facebook Questions. Is this the biggest thing in our (IT) lives?

The launch of the beta version of Facebook’s Questions sees a paradigm shift in the potential for true global knowledge exchange and innovative collaboration.


Facebook has now overtaken Google as the most visited web site Google, and as such is probably the biggest single untapped repository of knowledge in the world. It carries within it billions of fragments of information, reviews, opinions and small snippets that the Google bots just can’t simply access. Questions, in theory, provides a method of tapping into that tumult of ideas and gives direct access to potential customers, partners, stakeholders and just passers by in numbers and in targeted segments, demographic or geographic, that has been previously undreamed of. You will, if they get it right, have the ability to ask anyone who can fog up a mirror what they really want from your product, service or business ethics.


Watch this space. I believe that this could be the biggest and most significant single event in our lives since Sir Tim Berners Lee woke up that morning in Switzerland with his idea for sharing knowledge.

But- like any truly ‘Beautiful Question’, sometimes we may not get the answers we like or expect.

King Coal

Even though China is bringing on line two coal powered power stations a week it currently has only a couple of weeks coal left stock piled after a terrible winter according to New Scientist. And air con requirements in the southern provinces are actually outstripping industrial demand so the summer isn't going to help much..

Now this is a really interesting and relevant story for me being based in the centre of the old Yorkshire coal mining area that was ripped out in the late 80’s, - I can see the old NUM HQ and Arthur's Seat from my window. It shows, amongst a great deal of other things, that one man's gold is another man's poison. And now - and I'm not sure if it is ironic or paradoxical or probably both, we, in my little town, are sat on a bleedin' fortune. Like steel, the price of coal is set to go through the roof and what used to be a marginal business looks like it may rise again. Chinese economic growth is actually limited by how much coal they have and how fast they can get out of the ground.

Another interesting fact the article points out is that despite its reliance on fossil fuels for generation it still has a lower emissions per head figure than the US.

Maybe the Olympic torch will be the only light shining at some times in Bejjiing this summer. If you are going, take your own candles. In the mean time anyone got a shovel?