Oh and I read the Subtle Knife. And I'm suddenly glad I left it this long to read it, because if I didn't have the third volume in the trilogy instantly accessible I'd have bitten off my own leg. Pullman: keep writing, you horribly talented bastard.

More than 90% of UK mobile users cannot get through the day without using their phone: "The younger generation puts their mobile ahead of television, with most 18 to 24-year-olds thinking it matters more to them than their TV. The survey also found only 14% of people would turn their phone off during sex. While 75% of people think it is rude to use the mobile during dinner, only 9% of respondents said it was unreasonable to do so on a train."

Leading a Support Career…: "creating a new project is always highly expensive business and such expensive business cannot happen every month/quarter/year, so what usually happens is; a classical software professional gets only dozen opportunities of starting a project from scratch in his/her whole life, otherwise most of the time you find yourself fixing bugs of some old goddamned coders and fulfilling SCRs by bloody clients. "

KDDI ties in partners for new phone OS: "The aim is supposed to be to cut the cost of designing new handsets, although initially at least, it is likely to increase costs, and what this seems to be really about is gaining control over handset designs by one of the major Japanese operators."

Nice. I can only hope that they manage to replicate the success of the au Design team in building customised handset exteriors... though writing a new cellphone OS from scratch seems to be a fairly long-winded way around things,

So, Will tagged me.

My 5 favourite pieces of social software? Probably no surprises here:

1. Flickr. It's increasingly how I publish my personal life - my weblog has gotten more and more work-oriented over the years. I love the way that Flickr hangs social interactions off these rich and frequently deeply personal snapshots. I use it to keep up with close friends, and get a window into the Real Lives of folks I know through work. Shozu used to tease me into using it more when I was a Nokia owner, it's the one thing I miss now I'm on Sony Ericssons (yes I know it's available, but not in its constantly-tempting-me-to-upload incarnation).

2. TypePad, which I used to publish my weblog. The outages are boring but having lost a great deal of writing last year in a server crash I'm happy to outsource that headache to someone else. I use MarsEdit to post to it, so never really see the TypePad site itself.

3. NetNewsWire, for reading the 162 sites I follow. No idea how I'd keep up with all those ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL THINGS without it, and I can't believe that I once did this sort of thing manually.

4. Erm. Isn't email a social media tool? I use that quite a lot, you know. And Adium, when I can handle being distracted (or want to distract... for me IM tends to be about either keeping up personal relationships or long-distance comms with the guys at work when I'm out of the country).

5. And on the subject of this... my phone, of course. It's where my most private messages, my notes on abusive names I've been called, my calendar, my photos, and my call history live. If that's not a social media tool I don't know what is. OK, so it's not *just* software... but to be honest the bits I care most about (UI and functionality) are.

What's not on this list? LinkedIn. I've used it for ages but rarely seen any value. It seems to be great for putting me in touch with people I already know, or people who enjoy building the largest networks possible (which seem to have the weakest links possible).

I'm really interested in checking out Jaiku, but the reliability problems I've read about and this costs sound rather intimidating.

And I'll tag a few folks, (less than 5, cos I think this meme oughta wind down): Mr Falletti, Mr Skinner, and Mr Arkwright.