A possible starting date for the internet, plus a few interesting facts.

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

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.

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.

Headlines of the week: the blindingly obvious and the creepily unamusing. That sort of thing.

According to Yahoo News today “Mainland China has opened its first halfway house for Internet addicts, offering shell-shocked teenagers counselling, books — and the use of computers.”

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.

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.

Tim O’Reilly talks to Wired magazine, just before the Web 2.0 Expo.

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.