Aviary is a set of online editing tools that allow you to edit images, vector graphics, and sounds. The tools include a Firefox plugin that allows you to screen-grab directly into your Aviary library. And it is now all free.

James sent me a Tweet the other day and I finally got round to checking out the link. It led to Fox @ Fury, an interesting blog (by the owner of fury.com) that I added to my Bloglines feeds. However James wasn’t just linking to the blog in general. He was linking to a post about Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE 2010 called Design Outside The Box.

This morning I found out about the new beta version of the Second Life Viewer 2. It is now available for download. I have played with it for about an hour and (so far) it seems as stable as the allegedly stable “stable version”. It also has several important new features, including Shared Media. I shall continue to use it as my viewer until I find a reason not to.

David Cameron is the Conservative Party leader in England. There will be an election in summer. The election campaign has already begun, even though the election has not been officially announced yet. He is in danger of looking ridiculous before he gets a chance to look serious, courtesy of a series of advertisments that are attracting the parodies they invited.

In 1967, after his near-fatal car crash, Jan Berry attempted to record a new Jan & Dean album using a variety of guest singers. Although he was suffering from both aphasia and dispraxia he was still able to write music. The album was finished but then rejected, and now finally it is being released. With a cover by Dean.

Last Saturday, after forty years, Tunnelin Levy closed forever.

According to All Things Digital, Acer President Scott Lin has changed his mind about building a competitor to Apple’s new iPad – because Acer doesn’t have anything like Apple’s iStore ecosystem in place.

Although many people think that Finns are unavoidably wacky as a result of cultural artifacts like The Leningrad Cowboys and the record-breaking Eurovision entry that was Lordi’s Hard Rock Hallelujah, the cultural climate is quite often conservative. We saw this quite clearly tonight in the televised finals to choose this year’s entry for the contest that will be held in Oslo sometime in summer.

I am in London for a one-day conference at the London Knowledge Labs. I have been staying in a hotel in Clapham, where I have been surprised by the stuffy heat of the room, and the sheer amount of people available to bump into me.

Yesterday Lego revealed some more about their long-delayed multiplayer online world. It is now promised to launch “sometime in 2010″. What’s more, they have released a series of screenshots, and a very impressive trailer, so there are reasons to believe that it will actually launch this year.

The official opening ceremonies for Helsinki’s new Aalto University are being held today at Finlanditalo, and they are being broadcast in Second Life.

Over Christmas my eight year old daughter decided that she wanted “her own web site”, which turned out to mean her own virtual clubhouse, where she and her friends can meet, hang out, play games, and live the kind of life they live when they hook up their DS Lite Pokemon or Nintendogs games.

In 2008 I decided to take a photograph every day of the year. This became a project called One Place At A Time. Last year I didn’t do this, and half way through the year I regretted it. The 2008 project had been a neat way of keeping a photographic diary, even though that had not been its original intention. I therefore decided to do just that for the entire next decade.

I got an email today fomr the people at Metaplace, a virtual world that started a few years ago with high hopes of making a platform that would make the 3D web mainstream. The email said that over the last several years, we here at Metaplace Inc. have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a website and create a virtual world of their own. They failed.

Sugar is now available for download in a form that can autorun on a one gigabyte USB stick. If this sounds like gibberish to you then you should probably know that “The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software.”

I found a website yesterday which claims that in another dimensions the Beatles never broke up. It has been started by a man who wishes to be known as “James Richards” for the moment.

About a week ago Linden Labs announced the availability of a beta version of SL Enterprise, a product that had been rumoured for some time because people knew something was being developed under the code-name Nebraska. This has implications for our work.

A series of random hops over the web left me realising that I had no idea what the cbr file format was. I had been researching e-book formats for a course I am about to begin teaching. I had thought that I had the winners nailed down. They were pdf and epub. Then I found mentions of CBR, and wondered: what the hell is that?

I came across a nice site today that showed (amoing other things) that it is still possible for one person to do something interesting and useful on the web. This one is concerned with desktop wallpaper that is simple to the point of starkness.

So, here we are. The first snow of winter, with a picture to prove it.

According to Mitch Ratcliffe at ZDNet.com, “there are approximately 52 e-reader devices coming to market in the next 12 months”. I am therefore about to embark on a quick research project, with a group of students, aimed at creating a simple workflow for getting a range of material online in epub format.

A few minutes ago Johnny Bistrom pointed out to me that the new version of Unity 3D has been released – and that it is free. Unity 3D is a game engine and development platform that can be used to build games & worlds online, on iPhones and on the Nintendo Wii. It has been around for several years and we have both noticed its existence, but done very little more.

What follows is the opening of an article in Smashing Magazine that is extremely useful, whether you already know the information it contains or not.

Apparently there is a Zombie Walk tradition in Denver that takes place on the Saturday evening before Halloween. This year it took place tonight, and I was there to watch it

I have just spent a week at the 21st Annual WCET conference, where Steve Bronack and I did an afternoon workshop on virtual worlds and education. The workshop was co-sponsored by Innovate, which sadly closed its doors to…

KZero is a British virtual worlds consultancy who are specialists in connecting real worlds brands and companies with the residents and environments of virtual worlds. They have been collecting data since 2006.

If my calculations are correct the journey I have just been on took twenty hours from door to door. I left the house in Helsinki at 06:45, to walk to Itäkeskus where I caught a bus to the airport. At this time on a Saturday the 519 only runs once an hour so 06:45 was just right to catch the bus but too early to catch the plane.

Redesigning this site has taken a lot longer than I thought it would, but then I have been a lot busier than I expected. Relaunch date is August 1 2010.

The move from my Sony Clie to my Asus eee PC 900 meant leaving behind some old friends: applications that I had used on a daily basis. Some of them, like the Suduko program, were replaced easily enough. Not all of them were so easy, however.

I waited for a couple of months to see which programs I really missed, if any. It turned out that I missed Daynotez and SplashID. Neither had Linux versions, and neither would install under Wine. I therefore spent some time looking round for alternatives, and found several, some more suitable than others

Gnome-Blog is a small applet for my eeePC that allows me to post blog entries directly from the desktop.

If you were me you might ask: why is this any better than typing entries directly into the ‘New Post* page…

At the end of September there was a world premiere for the Tiny Nation machinima. This has since been gathering a lot of praise and laughter from the many Second Life blogs and web sites.
The machinima was shot entirely inside Second Life using avatars from Loco Pocos.

The Signalnoise site has published a wonderful collection of twelve logos by Saul Bass for companies ranging from Bell Telephones, Kleenex to Quaker Oats.

Edmodo is a new micro-blogging system designed specifially by educators for educators.

The other week I was looking for a reliable source of creative commons licensed music, and today I found one. Jamendo is a social site based around the uploading, downloading, sharing and reviewing of free albums. It recently celebrated having 10,000 albums available.

Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake were the founders and creators of Flickr, which began in Toronto and was later bought by Yahoo for $35 million.

They can be seen here in a photo streamed – of course – from Flickr:…

This is the abstract and explanation that I sent to Steve Bronack this morning. It is my submission for the LoW conference (number five in the annual series), to be held in Hong Kong this Ocotber.

Keeping a personal diary is a useful exercise, for several
reasons – Robert Fripp

Observers such as Nicholas Carr believe the move from PC-based computing to Web-based computing will be one of the most important technology trends.

This morning I found an old post by Bruce Schneier about security theater, which seems a very useful phrase to use to describe those official actions designed, not to increase security, but to reassure or frighten innocent bystanders.

The Wu Tang Clan have always had divergent interests. They have never just been about hip hop. Today they launched their newest project wuchess.com, which aims to be “the world’s first online chess and urban social network”.

Mozilla Labs have a simple starting point: “a virtual lab where people come together to create, experiment, and play with new Web innovations and technologies”. They have a number of active projects, designed to improve the web. One of these is Prism.

Michael Krigsman has written an interesting article on ZD.Net about Twitter’s problems. He uses a very useful diagram taken from a Forrester research report about rescuing software trainwrecks.

Ralf Apelt has just posted an entry in his blog that leads to an interesting slide show about personal learning environments that he found at Slideshow.

I have just been to see Don Slater give a lecture at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. It was based on a section of his forthcoming book New Media, Development and Globalization, and was intentionally anecdotal rather than analytical – although the anecdotes could have fairly been said to add up to an analysis.

In March, while we were in Mumbai, the rest of the family each bought an Asus eeePC, and they have proved very easy to use and very reliable. I decided to wait because I suspected that the screen (which is 800 x 400) would be too smal for my needs. Now I am spoiled for choice.

Smallworlds is a “casual virtual world” that has been designed and developed in New Zealand, using Flex. This means that it will run in any browser that supports Flash Player 9. It “integrates YouTube, Flickr, and a number of other Web 2.0 services”.

As part of my ongoing project to move everything into the cloud, I have been looking for powerful and reliable online financial organisers and password protectors.

Pluti asked me something interesting about GMail last week. He asked me if I had an easy way to transfer all his mail, from all his accounts, onto Gmail. Of course, I thought. I should do that every month, and use GMail as an available-anywhere archive of every post I sent and received from anywhere.

I had been under the impression that this version of the site had a new, neat feature. When writing a post you only have to categorise it under its final child category. This, it turns out, is only true up to a (not very useful) point.

I think that the new version of the memi theme is now complete. The look and feel of the site is now almost completely as I intended it. The layout has a consistency that is based on the concept of doubling doubles that I may have mentioned earlier, and will certainly write up in a few days. I am ahead of my self-imposed schedule.

I discovered that there is a project to translate the complete bible (both old and new testaments) into LOLCat, a kind of made up gibbersih with a cat-like flavour.

Crabgrass advertises itself as “a software libre web application designed for group and network organizing, and tailored to the needs of the global justice movement. Crabgrass is the next generation of social software”.

Today Wagner James Au discussed his appearance on two Second Life television shows: SLCN.TV’s Tonight Live, and Metaverse-tv.com’s Late Show. Both of these are machinima-based, and his blog entry includes links to clips from the shows.

The limits of what can be trademarked, and what can be dismissed as “generic”, are blurred and seemingly dependent on power and money. Out-Law reports on the success of Adidas in defending their three stripes.

The collapse of an RSS stream caused my FBFriends plug-in to scream a php warning error message that spilled out of the sidebar and made everything look icky. This caused me to hunt down a way to suppress the message. I found one.

I have been trying to develop the structure of this site into a robust version that is complete enough to no longer require my explanations about its purpose to begin with an apology. I am now close to ready to bring out the sparkling wine. My current deadline for a version that will need no more designing and programming is Wednesday May 21 2008.

Arguably games of one sort or another are at the heart of most social networks. Sometimes the games are explicit, like the ma.ny games available on Facebook. Sometimes they are implicit in the social interaction. Feeling smug about having the most friends on Facebook of anyone you actually know would be an example of an implicit game. The one thing all these have in commons is that they are pieces of a larger puzzle. They are party games, not the party itself. From this perspective Kongregate is an interesting experiment.

In February, when I was in Chennai visiting Zoho Arvind showed me Bloglines, which I subsequently explored and wrote about. It is essentially a reworking of a traditional RSS reader as an online service. Like Remember The Milk it does one thing, and it does it very well.

Today is my birthday, and I have been surprised by a bombardment of Skype messages, emails and writings on my Facebook wall. An interesting and very pleasant experience.

While I was in London Luke, Jack and I were talking about classic television ads, and we remembered the Tango campaigns. I looked at YouTube and found they had a series of them there. This is the best one of them.

Recently Ralf pointed me towards the idea of barcamps, which have their own web site and their own online rules. This has the great merit of providing a reference point for what we have been doing in an unlabelled way.

John Connell has written an interesting piece about the relationship between pedagogy and technology. He posits the existence of something called Learning 2.0, which he decides is “an inadequate term in many ways, but useful shorthand nonetheless”.

While I was at Zoho recently, Arvind showed me something in passing that has already completely changed the way I work: Bloglines. This is simply an service that enables you to store RSS feeds, sort them into folders and then view them online. Described like this it sounds like nothing special. But it really is.

I had been discussing our uses of Zoho with Arvind, and he (and various blog postings) had been offering glimpses of an all-new, all-shiny future at Zoho. They had promised that they were introducing two new services called Zoho Business and Zoho Education, and both seemed to be applicable to what we have been doing at Arcada. I wanted to see them in action.

I saw an article about turning WP into a contact manager last Friday. This is interesting and is in some ways a parallel effort to the Prologue theme in that it seeks to extend the WP engine into another area.

Identity on the web is an issue in many different ways: can he be trusted; will she misuse my details; is YahooBob the same person as YB_google; and so on. Once there was widespread celebration of the fact that anyone could be whoever they chose. Today there is widespread concern about authenticity and verification.

This is a short piece that I wrote for the first session of the epedagogy course called Epedagogy, Learning and Second Life. It contains a set of useful links.

Automattic, the people who make WP, have introduced an extraordinarily interesting new theme that is available both on Wordpress.com’s free hosting services, and as a downloadable file for people who want to use it on their own sites.

Sparks are releasing their twenty-first album this summer, and were asked what they intended to do to promote it. This is their reply.

Try as you might at the beginning of a project, you are bound to get some detail wrong. Often this doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does. I got the permalink structure on this site wrong at the beginning, and the longer I left it the harder it became to fix. Today I finally fixed it.

I noticed this morning that the Google logo has gone through one of its periodic temporary changes. At Christmas, it is covered in snow, at midsummer it has flowers, and so on. Today it looks as though it is made from Lego bricks.

I asked Nicke, who is masterminding the technical development of Arcada’s DINA and Stadi-TV cable/mobile channels, about suitable cameras for the podacasting project, and he reached over to a box on a shelf, and lent me one.

In a comment on a blog that commented on Zoho’s recent successes I found a link to Wrike, which offers free or paid-for online project management software. I looked through their site, although I have not tried the software yet.

John Stewart died last Saturday.

This was on YouTube, and represents a fake attack warning delivered to a fake religion. The only question I have: what does Garner Ted Armstrong think of all of this?

Pluti has been talking about using mobile codes to do interesting projects for several months now. Aleksi has been using them to create urban poetry apparently.

Jutta and I have been talking with Pluti and others recently about the idea of moving some of the technical teaching we do from face-to-face lessons to podcasts. Now Neulio has appeared, offering us both a wide range of existing material and a publishing platform for our own.

Yesterday I spent many hours installing NextGen here to very little effect. Fortunately I discovered Awsom Pixgallery this morning, which worked perfectly within about thirty minutes.

In an article about Desmond Morris, the writer, artist, zoologist, television presenter, and so on, in the Guardian Stephen Moss is fascinated by his insistence on the importance of playfulness.

I have recently read about four books about Second Life that I should probably ask Santa to bring me.

A film has been made of the lives and times of the Holy Modal Rounders, and it is shortly being made available on DVD. The trailer is here.

In his column in today’s Guardian, Marcel Berlins wrote that he had just discovered that “one of my favourite endings, to one of my all-time favourite short stories, written by my second favourite short-story writer ever, had not been written by him at all”.

Over the weekend I found out about Tabblo, a service from HP. Although it is advertised as “a place to make cool stuff with your photos”, they have something much more interesting in the back room.

I came across Fuser while bouncing around the web the other day, and I bookmarked it to look at in more detail later. I have taken the tour, and been round the site now, and my reaction is a simple question. What is it for?

Today I found iFoods.tv, which is a site about cooking and cookery. The content is supposed to be user-generated and it will be interesting to see if enough users actually do generate enough content to keep the site lively.

This morning Reidar Wasenius is back on Facebook. The management has apparently become convinced that it is better with him in than out.

Many people have a fear about “where” their data is. The questions that they should be worried about, in my opinion, are not about who currently owns the physical machines where the zeroes and ones that represent their data are stored, but rather who has control over the right to look at, or distribute that data.

In today’s online version of the British newspaper The Independent, there is an interesting article called Internet TV: let’s do the show right here.

I have had a Box.net account for some time now. It hasn’t been very useful really. Not that there is anything specific wrong with it. I just haven’t ever really for a purpose for it. Now, with the new OpenBox system, I think that I have…

Google doesn’t have a social networking site, and there has been a lot of talk recently about what they would do about this. Yesterday Google announced their intentions, and it was a swerve of astounding cleverness.

Two Dutch students, Sebastiaan Schelfaut and Matthias Buyle, who are studying architecture at the University of Ghent, Belgium, wrote to Arcada last week to ask if we would take part in a survey about our use of…

It all started with Prince, who gave away one million copies of his album Planet Earth cover-mounted to the Mail on Sunday in Britain on July 24th, but now that this strategy has apparently spread like wildfire, it is worth stopping to consider what the strategy actually is.

This afternoon, when I met with Stefan, he showed me the 0100101110101101.org virtual version of the Joseph Beuys project 7000 Oaks, which they had enacted in Second Life.

I had first heard of the SecondLifeLink application about a week ago and had determinedly ignored it. Finally, however, I had three invitations in Facebook to install it and “meet my friends virtually! see my friends’ avatars! share my favorite destinations!” So I stopped to think about it a bit more.

This afternoon I was chatting with Roberto Muffeletto on Skype. Roberto was at the LoW conference last week, and is now in Amsterdam. e sent me a (moderately) interesting photograph.

I have spent a good deal of time in the last couple of months searching for the kind of online scheduling tools that I wanted; and I think that I have finally found them. Or, more specifically, I think that I have found a set of tools that will form the basis of what I need: AirSet.

Two themes emerged at the LoW conference last week. Neither had been planned in advance, although some people who attended suspected otherwise. The first theme was Second Life as an educational tool. The second was identity.

Yesterday, at the fourth League of Worlds conference, I made a presentation entitled Augmentation, Immersion and Identity in Rosario: the trading card game, and the slide show is available at Zoho.

The makers of Plopp, modelling software designed for children have released PloppSL, which “allows you to create intriguing Sculpted Prims for SecondLife™ easily”.

I have tried three calendars over the last two weeks. The first, 30Boxes, is easily the trendiest. It is designing itself to slide seamlessly into Facebook, and its interface is cool and minimalistic. It is also well thought out, and loads extremely quickly. I loved it until I tried to get my information from my Palm Desktop into 30Boxes. Not only didn’t it work, but it took a fantastically long time to fail to work.

Aimee Weber is the name of the avatar of one of Second Life’s best known clothes designers. She (or the person behind her) is, I believe, one of the thousand or so people who now earn their full-time living in SL. Today I saw an article on New World Notes pointing out that she is the first person to apply for a US registered trademark on her Second Life name.

According to an article on Yahoo News, taken from Reuters, this morning

Europeans’ interest in watching mobile television is as tiny as cellphone screens, a new study showed on Monday, even though

…

Facebook began as a way for college students to share information and remain in contact. In the last six months, however, it has expanded in innovative and unexpected ways. It is moving to become a fully fledged platform.

The ascii smiley is officially twenty five years old today. How do we know? The man who invented them has a note to this effect on his web page.

Having more or less seen off most of their original competitors (ActiveWorlds, There, Moove, and others), Linden Labs now also face attack from a second direction. There are a number of other groups who have declared that their mission is to provide the de facto standard framework for 3D online.

There are crucial differences between MySpace and Bebo on the one hand, and Facebook on the other. Although the three are often lumped together, I have come to think that Facebook has very different possibilities – ones which could be usefully used in educational contexts, and particularly as a background platform for immersive learning.

I came across Ligit this morning. This seems like an interesting idea, and I shall explore it when I finally upgrade WP. (I am still waiting to see how the WordPress / Ultimate Tag Warrior clashes work out.)

This is an almost impossible question to answer, if only because the term was created by Tim O’Reilly as a way of reaching out towards a cluster of phenomena and pointing out their links. In other words it was originally a rallying cry rather than a definable term.

In his letter to me today, Ed Colligan claimed that “Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential”.

This morning I got a letter in my inbox from Ed Colligan, the CEO of Palm. who doesn’t normally write to me. It turned out that he was writing to all those people who had asked to be kept informed about the launch of the Foleo, Palm’s secret “third business” come to life.

The site has scarcely been updated since the end of June. I managed to upload several posts from India but none of the accompanying photographs – and indeed none of the re-edited prose. Early this morning I reloaded the amended versions of the Goa pieces, so they make at least some sense now.

There were many reasons why leaving Goa was difficult other than the zen of scooting. We had all really enjoyed ourselves, and we had met some very interesting people that I hope grow into real friends.

The rain comes and goes. One day it rained and rained almost all day. Irma went to Chaudi to do some shopping, and took several hours, because she had to hide in various shops as sudden downpours caught her by surprise. The good side of this was that she came back with a large and unusual collection of purchases ranging from Maggi Vegetable Masale magic cubes, to a traditional metal teapot.

We have discovered that there are actually six, and possibly seven, restaurants that are almost open in Kindlebag. There is no end to what we know now.

Broadly speaking, there were three topics that I wanted to explore today. Firstly I wanted to talk to the Zoho Writer developers to see if they really intend to implement the changes that I have suggested. I wanted to explain why I thought they were important, if I needed to; and to lobby for their inclusion. Secondly, I wanted to see what was in store for the other Zoho services that we are using, and find out if there are anymore that we should be using. Finally, I wanted to find answers to some of the questions that I have been asked in Finland about Zoho: will it last, can we trust it, why should we prefer it to Google, and so on.

The village we are staying in is actually called Kindlebag. It is very small and dominated by the Intercontinental Hotel, which is both good and bad. It fills the place with package tourists during the season, and Indian business conferences during the summer; but it ensures that almost everyone in the village is employed in one way or another.

Sensible Finnish people are in their summer cottages mending their boats, cooking sausages and drinking beer. Last weekend we were in Pellinki doing all this, attending the midsummer market and allegedly leaving somebody mending their boat after ours grazed it while they were both moored; which means that we, allegedly, owe them a lot of money. While mulling this over, we are in Goa. There are several reasons for this, other than mulling over boat catastrophies.

It has been a long time since I have had time to delve into the area of online conspiracies. Today, as part of the final research for my Memi thesis, though, I looked at some of the articles at Hidden Mysteries.

The MaMaMedia site is a very interesting example of a visionary resource. Among the many and varied contents are a series of articles by Seymour Pappert. In one of them entitled The Wonderful Discovery of Nothing, he wrote about a girl discovering the power of zero.

On the BBC news web site Michael Geist (who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law) has written an…

Henry Jenkins offered a plethora of examples of convergence in mass media as networked culture becomes the way most people live.

Ralf A posited ELGG as an interesting alternative to VLEs, in answer to a point that I raised about whether VLEs should be replaced by VLNs (where the N stands for network).

Yesterday I saw that Yahoo have two applications directly related to geographical tagging. I mentioned these to Alex thirty minutes ago, and his response was, “Do you use Plazes?” Well, I don’t but I might do by lunchtime.

This afternoon was a time for group tasks. The group that I joined consisted of Christina, Ralf, and Suvi. Our given task was to discuss the topic “Scale-free networks: the realm of the social”; decide what it meant and how it related to the overall themes of the seminar; make a presentation to the whole group on our thoughts; and finish with a proposal for a future project based upon these thoughts.

We have just had a two-way video conference with George Siemens in Manitoba. He gave a talk that I need to think more about. It seemed to me to be very problematic in some key areas, particularly in the area of truth.

A four-day seminar in Helsinki, for students on the European epedagogy masters course.

Today, the logo and “branding” for the 2012 Olympic Games in London were officially launched. Apparently the logo has already been the source of much derision.

Today Google announced Google Gears, and articles have sprung up like mushrooms explaining why this is a truly historic day. If this works as claimed then the articles may all turn out to be right.

This morning, Californian time, Jeff Hawkins unveiled the “secret third business” he has been dropping teasing hints about since the middle of 2005. It is the Foleo mobile companion, a product that sounds stupid when you first hear about it but might have a compelling underlying logic.

I just finished my first working WP plug-in, as a result of thinking through a bunch of problems while helping Sean, the Geek With Laptop, with a very minor issue concerning the Clean Archives plug-in, that I have discussed here. I am calling the plug-in Front Page News, because that describes its intended purpose.

A couple of weeks ago, in one of my periodic trawls through the lists of available plug-ins, I came across a mention of SRG Clean Archives which had recently been taken over by the Geek With Laptop. I looked at it and it seemed to answer some of the problems I was trying to think through.

For the second time in about two weeks I accidentally found a link to a one-page web site called Polaroize. This time I explored it, and (although I am not sure how useful it actually is) it seems like an interesting one-trick pony.

Free games for my Clie TH55: that is what I decided I wanted. Today I spent most of the day in a large meeting, at the back of a room where the wireless access was good, and so I was able to find what I needed.

L’angelot made a video for the Eurovision Song Contest. It was banned. Here it is, along with a short biography of the man himself.

We have just completed a forty hour festival in Rosario, our virtual culture experiment in Second Life. It was a night-time festival that lasted for ten consecutive nights and, because SL has four hour “days”, this meant that, in reality, it lasted for ten one-hour sessions, which took place every four hours.

The annual Eurovision Song Contest was held in Helsinki this year, and took place yesterday after a week of special events, street parties, and Arcada’s hugely ambitious DINA Host City broadcasting extravaganza.

Vanderwal has six slide shows available at slideshare.net about the purpose, practice and development of tagging. These have been used as presentations at various conferences and are a useful resource.

Apparently there is a growing movement to clean up rap. Apparently there has been a march today in which numbers of people, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, marched from one place to another to demand that bitches, hoes and n*ggers be referred to more politely in future.

Originally Transformers were Japanese puzzle toys, three dimensional jigsaws where children were supposed to work out how to turn one object into another. They were odd cousins to rubik cubes. Then they got a back story…

Charlene Li at Forrester Research has written a report with Josh Bernoff, Remy Fiorentino, Sarah Glass entitled Social Technographics® Mapping Participation In Activities Forms The Foundation Of A Social Strategy.

BoingBoing have published a link to a WP theme that Cory Doctorow has called “endlessly fascinating and deliciously pointless”.

There is an article in today’s online Guardian that is entitled “Olympics can help UK rebrand itself”, says new cultural chief. I am surprised that people can still say this kind of stuff with a straight face.

Yesterday I found BugMeNot, which provides a very simple and potentially very useful service.

I have been wondering about the limits of the memi, and the limits of my pda. So far I have been concentrating upon developing the memi as an enhanced information storage tool for housing thoughts and ideas, and found material. Logically, though, there is an argument that it should also replace the suite of personal information management tools that currently live on my Sony Clie.

I finished reading an article about the twenty fifth birthday of Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum – the tiny computer that most of Britain (including me) bought to begin their video-gaming experience. This set me thinking about the now almost-forgotten PiMan.

Is ownership the same as access, and if there is a clear difference then which is more important? This is a question that has been bothering my for weeks. It is concerned with what we can mean when we say that we “have” something. When we say, for example: “I have the information you need right here.”

While working my way through the various WP files I have been wondering about the historical decision to add a “no follow” to all the links in comments. I assumed that it was an early attempt to stop comment spam, and indeed it was. However, SpamKarma is supposed to stop all my comment spam, and it has only missed one in nearly six months. So, I wondered: what is the point of stopping the links that do appear?

Today the Guardian online has pointed out Justin Kan has strapped a video camera to his head and is broadcasting the results twenty four hours a day.

I followed my own advice and decided that Clipmarks would be most useful to me at the moment as a way of grabbing short facts (statistics, quotes, predictions, announcements) that I might want to remember later.

This week I have added two services to this site and one to Firefox. What they have in common is an alleged ability to make my life simpler by linking things together and saving me work.

For over a week now Tim O’Reilly has been writing and talking about the desirability of a Blogger’s Code of Conduct – a proposal that arose out of an attack on Kathy Sierra. I felt from the outset that this was a worse-than-bad idea.

Having spent some time evaluating the Structured Blogging plug-in, and discussing it at length with students, I have become less and less certain that what it offers is worth the price. At first sight the ideas behind it, and its implementation, are impressive and thought-provoking. The fact, however, is that in fifteen months the plug-in has signally failed to set the world on fire.

I decided a week or so ago that the experiment with my so-called WeeMe in the sidebar had gone on long enough. Accessing my WeeWorld account had proved less interesting than turning my computer off.

As I pointed out recently Zoho Writer has the potential to usher in a new way of publishing on the web. I have termed this distributed publishing and I believe that it offers considerable advantages for many tasks and for many people. However, for this process to work effectively Zoho Writer would have to output clean, standard, valid and predictable html, and at the moment it does not do this. Here is a list of what is wrong.

Tripod are from Australia. They sing. They are funny.

Recently I have found four pieces of free software which seem to me to merit some attention: Portable Apps, AbiWord, The Filter and The Lifehouse Method.

On Sunday evening I got my first chance to look inside the Structured Blogging plug-in, and so I started to poke around. In this kind of situation my technique is usually task-based. In this case the process was made easy because there were at least three features that I really did want to change from the moment I installed the plug-in.

In yesterday’s Guardian, Simon Hoggart wrote about The Halo Effect, a book that looks at how well companies touted by business gurus actually did. Not very.

I have just added the structured blogging plug-in to this site. It is available from StructuredBlogging and I am in two minds about it, even before I have used it. The idea is impeccable and important, but it feels as though the crew may be preparing to abandon ship.

News travels slow round these parts. I have only just found out that there was an Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco last year.

3D is better than 2D because people are not frogs. That is something that Jakob Nielsen wrote in November 1998, and I still think almost everything he wrote is valid today.

The Scratchware Manifesto was began during the summer months of 2000. Written in collaboration, and inspired somewhat by the Cyberpunk Manifesto, it is meant to be a living organ; a message in a bottle; a battle cry. Here it is in its entirety.

My decision the other day to investigate the applicability of software as a service for the memi project has had some interesting preliminary results. Zoho, Omnidrive, and Adobe Remix are just some of them…

Jane McGonigal gave a keynote speech titled “The future of collective play: Fostering collaboration, network literacy and massively multiplayer problem-solving through alternate-reality games,” at the Serious Games Summit of the Game Developers Conference yesterday.

Somewhere yesterday I found a link to the web site of Andy Rutledge. So should you.

The LEGO Group today announced it has commenced a working relationship with NetDevil to develop a massively multiplayer online gaming experience to further engage its dedicated and active community.

Google is free and so Google is wonderful. Camie and I have began using Writely a year or so ago, and it worked very well indeed. We could both access each other’s files, and we could both work on the same report at the same time. Oddly, the idea of the memi militates against this in a subtle manner.

In August 2005, Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot and the Treo smartphone, claimed that Palm had a “secret third business”. Since then he has single-handedly redefined neuroscience through some personal research that culminated in a book On Information and the founding of a new company Numenta. Now he has given an interview to PalmAddicts, in which he ties these together, and promises a big announcement sometime this year.

Harold Jarche posted a short but interesting piece yesterday entitled The Future of Learning is DIY.

Virtual Worlds 2007 is a conference in New York at the end of March that is billed as the future of marketing and media. The keynotes speakers are from MTV, IBM and Nickelodeon.

I just received the details of a workshop in Helsinki called Remote Presence: Streaming Life from John Hopkins, from whom I have not heard for far too long

I looked at WeeWorld a few months ago, and I have to admit that I was neither impressed nor unimpressed. I was just puzzled. There are not many things that I can genuinely say I fail to see the point of, but this was one of them.

This site promises the impossible, since there is no way that they can remove material from the Internet Archive, to people who don’t know any better. In its tone, and its appeal to the clueless, it reminds me of government anti-drug propaganda from the nineteen fifties.

According to Yahoo News sometime yesterday afternoon, Electric Sheep have just scored a major financial success.

The question about how notions of privacy can be maintained, in what some are calling a “surveillance culture” and others (including me) are not, is both interesting and complex. It has permeated some of the discussions on the ePedagogy course, and indeed Christina and others are currently working on a project that looks at this topic.

The other day I was thinking about the fifties television western series Wagon Train. I was thinking about it because I remembered that Gene Rodenberry had pitched Star Trek to the television networks by describing it as “Wagon Train in space”.

Will Wright is the man who invented Sim City and then went onto make numerous variations and elaborations of that, culminating in Sims, Sims 2 and Sims Online. He has given a lengthy and detailed interview to the Popular Science web site about his new game Spore, which he describes as a “massively single player online game”.

Jimmy Campbell died on February 12th.

Ralf skyped me yesterday to point out that I was being blogged about.

Stefan mentioned the ideas behind wikimap this afternoon, and I had to confess that I had never heard of it.

The BBC reported today that a picture of pensioners bowling with bombs by graffiti artist Banksy has sold in London for £102,000, breaking a record for his work.

Several Web sites are now providing free online editing tools, nurturing a new generation of filmmakers.

According to the BBC news site, Sweden is opening an embassy in Second Life.

In today’s online version of The Independent Ian Burrell interviewed Jamie Oliver. Most of the discussion was about his television plans but there was a small snippet about his website.

Sometimes I look around and see things, and I am not sure what to say. This is one of those times.

This month’s Uncut has a review of Hellzapoppin’, possibly the funniest film every made.

I read an interesting article this afternoon about the recent round of hype around the Second Life economy at Capitalism 2.0, a blog written by Randolph Harrison.

For about a year and a half Linden Labs have been planning to run Linden Scripting Language on the Mono runtime embedded in Second Life.

Today I stumbled upon Squeak. I also found Scratch I also found Scratch, which is “a new programming language that lets you create your own interactive stories, games, music, and art”.

The current British series of Celebrity Big Brother has caused international anger as three of the “contestants” ganged up on another resident, Shilpa Shetty, the Bollywood star.

Kevin Rowland has a MySpace account where you can find a demo version of a song, Oh Johanna, from the album a reinvigorated Dexy’s Midnight Runners are working on at the moment.

Interacting with Immersive Worlds will be held on June 5-6, 2007 at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Later that same year, E-Learn 2007 will be held on October 15-19, at the Quebec City Convention Centre in Quebec City, Canada.

According to The Register the Pirate Bay is making moves to raise sixty five million pounds to buy Sealand, the independent fortress off the British coast.

The Slamdance Guerilla Gamermaker festival has withdrawn Super Columbine Massacre! from its 2007 show because, in their words “Slamdance does not have the resources to defend any drawn out civil action that our legal council has stated can easily arise from publicly showing it”.

Today I learned that Robert Anton Wilson had finally died after a long illness brought on by his childhood polio

Here are two sites I have found recently that may be of use in a number of ways.

The Entropia Universe is another online synthetic world that claims to have a “real” economy. Currently it claims to have about half a million members.

There are now two interesting videos available via either YouTube or Richard Dawkins’ own web site.

How do psychics work? How do they manage to convince people that they are receiving messages from “the other side”, from loved ones who wish to communicate or console?

Today Alan Freeman died. Fluff is no more. Not ‘arf!

While catching up with the weekend’s backlog this morning I found a link that led me to the website and blog of the Second Life Liberation Army.

This week the magazine Real People accidentally sent every reader the winning scratchcard in its weekly competition. Chaos ensued. This serves to remind me of the Great Hoover Disaster of 1992.

Yesterday I had my first Skype spam. Call me blinkered, but I wasn’t even aware that there was such a thing.

Yesterday Rupert Murdoch reacted to the growing public anger about these festive OJ Christmas specials, by personally intervening and cancelling both. Judith Regan then issued a long (2,000 words and more) statement in which she defended herself and her decision to create the book and tv show.

Having succumbed to an ipod, even though I have huge reservations about the installed DRM, I have begun to look for applications that will help me do the kind of things I feel that I ought to be able to do.

I was going to write a long essay about copybot, relating it again to the uncertain nature of a world founded on false premises. However, this post by Raph Koster seems to sum up most of my argument without any need for me to pause and pen it

There are two controversies currently causing apoplexy and distress in Second Life. The lesser controversy concerns so-called mega-prims, which are now available for sale or for free. But should they be?

OJ Simpson writes an unusual kind of book. Read it and weep. Etc.

In the past few days there has been a spate of announcements by businesses of one sort and another to the effect that they are opening branches in Second Life. This has given “residents” something to do while Second Life crashes and burns, and generally acts as though it has been bound, drugged and beaten.

Yesterday the recent instability inside Second Life (rule of thumb: anything not crashing will crash in the next two minutes) led me to look around at its possible competitors. I looked at Croquet, a heavy-duty open source 3D platform being written by Alan Kay, among others.

This is an overview of the software on my Sony Clie TH55, and why it is there. During the time that I have had it, I have experimented with a lot of things. Somethings that seemed useful weren’t and some that seemed dopey at the start have proved vital.

Camie and I have spent the last week at the LoW3 conference at the Appalachian State University
in Boone, North Carolina.

Some interesting figures about the relative costs of broadcasting conventionally as opposed to the costs of streaming via YouTube.

Perplex City has a cross-media approach to a narrative entertainment that embodies a lot of what Camie and I have been discussing for the last two years. The only difference is that they have actually implemented it.

I looked at Netvibes again, and found it interesting, and potentially very useful.

Daniel Livingstone posted to the Second Life Educational Mailing List about a snippet he had found concerning the legendary inventor of hypertext himself.

Giving out your email address and work details as part of an attempt to solicit sex from a stranger is not necessarily a good idea.

Amazon have recently begun a service in the United States “selling” downloadable movies. It has been drawing criticism from several sources, including Cory Doctorow.

Access appear to be making genuine progress with the next-generation Palm OS, which reminded me that Jeff Hawkins has a secret third business. Or not.

Some passing thoughts about the choices we have made to use social software as the basis of our own administration.

Follies and Fallacies in Medicine has been unfairly forgotten, but it is available as a free download from the Skrabanek Foundation.

I was very interested in an article I googled across at SearchEngineWatch just now: an interview with Dr. Gary Flake, the Principal Scientist & Head of Yahoo! Research Labs.

Huge forest fires in Russia remain untouched and the smoke is causing problems across the Baltic region.

Earlier this morning I added an opening screen to this site, and in order to do this I needed to find out the date on which I died.

E-merl is an interesting experiment in online narrative that isn’t the usual hypertext bollocks. In fact “not the usual hypertext bollocks” could well stand as its motto.

Recently I have been inundated with scam-spam offering me millions of dollars if only I help someone unlikely steal an even larger amount of money for themselves.

Mojo arrives a month late in Finland, which means that the edition labelled August actually arrives at the beginning of August. That is why I have only just found our about a certain Cold War music paranoia web site.

A virtual plague has broken out in the online game World of Warcraft. Although limited to only a few of the game’s servers the numbers of characters that have fallen victim is thought to be in the thousands.

GMail, and the work of Jeff Raskin, both point towards a user interface that differs radically from the desktop that we have beome used to. Raskin even had a term fo it: the humane computer environment.

In Petersburg, Kentucky, USA, just 4 miles west of the Northern Kentucky/Greater Cincinnati International Airport, a Creation Museum is being built. This walk through history museum will, it says, “be a wonderful alternative to the evolutionary natural history museums that are turning countless minds against the gospel of Christ and the authority of the scripture”.

The Guardian asked a number of arts “luminaries”: what would you do for culture if you were running the next government? One interesting answer was: have less policy.

Last year I remember reading something about somebody backing up the entire internet a few months ago, but I noted in passing and then promptly forgot about it. This morning I found another reference to it, and followed it to archive.org where the Wayback Machine does indeed give you access to the past of the internet.

Starbucks have some frothy patent applications up their freshly laundered sleeves. They are worth reading in some detail because they are no more unlikely than attempting to patent froth.

Boston.com posted an article on Tuesday 19 April 2005 which looked at the reason the open source software movement has been successful. The reason, it argues, is because it taps into the power of user innovation.