Peter Cochrane's Blog: Trying to explain

Written at my home in Suffolk UK and dispatched to silicon.com from the Wild Strawberry Café in Woodbridge which combines great coffee and cookies with free wi-fi

Throughout my life I have stumbled upon wonderful teachers and experts who combined a deep understanding with an ability to explain and communicate clearly and plainly. My big problem has been that they are a bit like policemen - never around when you need one.

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What I would give for a clear exposition on a part, or whole, of some problem that confronts me and prevents all progress toward my end goal. Before the WWW I struggled an awful lot more than today. Email, social networks and the sheer wealth of data available online have changed everything.

Now the big problem is finding the good stuff, or at least the stuff that is at the right level and readily digestible. There are school, college and university sites in abundance with lectures and lecture notes, and TV programmes from the likes of the BBC, all of which I frequent.

But I just feel there is a need and a market for more byte-sized chunks that fit this new, more frenetic world far better than the old hour-long, chalk and talk derivatives.

Right out of the blue such a format popped onto my screen this morning. It doesn't necessarily cover the material I would like but as a format it is really interesting. Just give it a try and see what you think: www.commoncraft.com

From now on when my silver surfer friends ask me what a wiki is or about photos online, file sharing and more, I'm just going to point them at this website. It does a better job than I can.