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.

Jutta sent me a list of links for videos at YouTube that show aspects of SL.

Jutta found a clip on YouTube that documents (or more likely recreates) the creation of the acoustic guitar that Suzanne Vega used when she gave a concert somewhere in Second Life.

At the end of an interview Honor Blackman tells an anecdote about Irene Handl, for years a star of British film comedies and later a mainstay of television comedy.

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.

According to Edward Tufte’s web site, this book “celebrates escapes from the flatlands of both paper and computer screen, showing superb displays of high-dimensional complex data”. The site also points out that it “shows maps, charts, scientific presentations, diagrams, computer interfaces, statistical graphics and tables, stereo photographs, guidebooks, courtroom exhibits, timetables, use of color, a pop-up, and many other wonderful displays of information.”

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.