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.

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.

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757 in London, where his father was a hosier. He was a poet, painter, visionary mystic, and an engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. He managed to remain extremely poor all his life. He died on August 12, 1827, and was buried in an unmarked grave at the public cemetery of Bunhill Fields

William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865 in Dublin, where his father was a lawyer who then turned into a Pre-Raphaelite painter. Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He died on January 28, 1939, at the Hotel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France.

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

An overview of the earthG and wpnooza projects.

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 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.

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.

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.

I read an interesting piece by Bruce Schneier in Wired in which he talks about the ways in which governments and the media are doing terrorists’ jobs for them.

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 arrived back yesterday evening from fifteen days in Agadir, on the coast of Morocco. Upon arrival there we had been equipped with a rock-festival-like wrist band which entitled us to unlimited food and drink.

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.

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

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

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yesterday British Telecom announced that they were investing £100 million in a new service to be called BT Vision. This has been misleadingly described in some reports as “BT’s new television service”. It would be more accurate to say that this represents BT’s calculated bet that, like radio, television is in terminal decline.

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.

Eeva Melvasalo has sent me a list of online resources about blikis, which I have posted here.

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

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.

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.

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…

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

In this essay I will look at several aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking and seek to relate it to the current cultural environment: one in which information is transmitted and received instantaneously, and stored at a distance, in amounts unthinkable even two decades ago. I will briefly attempt to place McLuhan’s cultural commentary within a political framework drawn from the writings of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire.

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

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

A shopping trip to Porvoo today yielded a couple of unexpected presents in the form of two old Saint books from a junk shop. I have been trying to find some for the last year, but they are not available…

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.

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

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.

This is a complete list of the winners of the Eurovision Song Contest, including the names of the songwriters (whom I was moved to include when I realised that Serge Gainsbourg had written a winning entry for Luxembourg).

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.

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…

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.

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

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.

Polly Toynbee discussed the fact that, despite strong indications that crime is steadily dropping in Britain, fear of lawlessness is a major factor in the then-current general election campaign.

YLE, the Finnish state broadcasting company, has published some statistics about finnish television viewing habits in the first quarter of this year.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

This is the outline for a project for the course ePedagogy: Issues Management / Strategic Specialisation. It was written by Owen Kelly & Camie Lindeberg in June 2006, and revised in August 2006.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Lev Manovich argues that the database is replacing central perspective as the dominant symbolic form by which we make sense of our world. This essay is simply me thinking aloud about some of the issues and questions that this raises: issues that I may want to think about more deeply sometime soon.

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.

From Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, by Jerry Fodor

Jimmy Campbell died on February 12th.

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”.

John Stewart died last Saturday.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

A page of notable or useful quotations.

A mixed bag of quotations found online at DidYouKnow, with a link to the source.

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.

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

…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Eeva Melvasalo sent me a list of online resources about blikis, including definitions, discussions and examples.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While I was in the Bookmark in Charlotte last Saturday I picked up a bargain book that was waiting temptingly at the counter.

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

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:…

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.

I purchased a copy of Richard Stark’s novel Lemons Never Lie, one of the few that I have not read. Today I googled his name and found a site that lists the opening sentence to every one of his books.

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

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.

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…

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a powerful book that takes a wide-ranging, historical approach to concerns about intellectual property in the information age. It was written in 1996 by James Boyle, but its arguments are still valid ten years later.

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

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

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

There are a growing number of designers who claim to be making most or all of their living working with clients in SL. Some work with real life clients to build content for them that they can place in SL. Others work entirely inside the world, where their avatar makes objects or runs services for other avatars.

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

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.

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.

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”.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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”.

In an article in today’s Observer, Stephen Bayley wrote an article about the furore over the Olympics 2012 logo. In this he described what, in his opinion, a brand is.

A catty, but accurate, question to Leonard Bernstein.

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.

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.

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 had a conversation as a result of the post I made last week. I was asked if I was subscribing to knee-jerk conspiracy theories.

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”.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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…

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.

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.

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

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the interesting things about the web is that it usually makes no distinction between the important and the trivial. This means that there is a wealth of detail available about almost anything.

Once upon a time Tim Bell dismissed the idea of 24-hour news channels. Now I dig up the quotation.

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.

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.

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…

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

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.

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.

I found an interesting online paper called Unconventional Reading by Jason Craft, which looks at what comics can teach us about reading hypertexts.

According to the BBC web site, Patrick Chinamasa, the justice minister in Mr Mugabe’s last cabinet, said that “Zanu-PF would not allow an opposition victory, as this would be what he described as tantamount to slavery”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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”.

Some well known lines

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Some quotations from the immortal Yogi Berra, plus some links to more of the same.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.