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.

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

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

Someone somewhere has created a button generator, to make png files that you can use as buttons. It contains nothing that you could not do yourself in Photoshop in ten minutes, but since it consists entirely of sliders and fields then (in some circumstances) it might prove easier.

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?

A link to two sites that allow you to specify a base colour, and then suggest a range of colours to use with it.

There are a number of different sites offering music and sounds that are made available under a Creative Commons licence. Here is a list of useful links.

All this site is is a page of text about the benefits of properly applied css, with a set of different stylesheets that you can apply yourself. But it is wonderful (and wonderfully useful).

Today I rediscovered the CSSplay site by Stu Nicholls, a man who seems to have spent every waking hour for most of the last decade solving the most arcane cross-browser problems imaginable in css menus. A look at the front page of his site, though, reveals that this is only the tip of a very interesting iceberg.

If you want to have a fixed width web space that always sits in the center of the screen no mater how wide the window is then this is the simplest way of doing it.

Custom scroll bars work in IE but not Firefox. However, it is possible to use javascript to overrule Firefox and force scrollbar changes.

There are many different css-based menu systems available. Here are some I have found useful.

Cascading style sheets come in version 1 and version 2. All modern browsers should work with CSS 1.0, but there is still not widespread support for CSS 2.0.

It is almost impossible to design web pages properly without an understanding of the basis of CSS. Here are a collection of useful links, including a link to the box model; a link to a list of al the css keywords; and a list of 53 key techniques with examples and explanations.

I have had a problem with my menus suddenly disappearing behind a new div that I created. It took longer than it should to fix the problem which is to do with a bug in the way that IE6/IE7 deal with the cumulative effects of declaring a z-pos for elements.

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 is an explanation of the reason for the existence of this page.

Here are the titles of the modules for the digital multimedia course at Arcada (a university of applied science).

Duran Duran have decided to rent an island in Second Life. You might want to know this.

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.

When I first looked at e-books several years ago there was a format war going on to no very great effect. Today, as e-readers seem poised to finally go mainstream, it looks as though there are two formats that are becoming standard: pdf and epub. This article begins looking at the epub format.

Today I found links to two posts by Vitaly Friedman, containing a total of forty four free, professional quality fonts.

A few guides and links for anybody puzzled by using ftp (or by what it is!).

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?

When asked, students, almost without exception, reported that there was something wrong with the virtual worlds they had seen. We asked them to be precise about what they meant. Eventually we got two enlightening answers. One: there is something hollow at the heart of the worlds. Two: it feels like you are wandering around amateur stage sets. The consensus seemed to be that the worlds felt like cardboard boxes painted in one way or another. As one student said, “When I went to the Venice world there was no Venice-ness about it”.

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.

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.

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.

About two years ago I began to ask how the students’ home pages could be used as a pedagogical resource. I began to look at how other institutions fared, with a view to surveying the possibilities and presenting a plan of action; and it was here that this project began.

This concept map addresses this question. It shows the logical components of a dynamic website and looks at the way in which they can be put together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here is a page that has a lot of links about machinima: how to make them, where to show them, and so on.

A regularly updated list of assignments and deadlines for the Managing Information course at Arcada.

I saw a script today in the Second Life scripting library for a script that generates mazes. This was something that I was thinking of doing at some time in the very near future – because solving mazes might just prove the basis of a team sport on Rosario.

A link to a German page that provides a javascript to encrypt plain text as MD5 passwords, with three different versions of encrytion included.

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.

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.

A regularly updated list of the open source software installed in the Multimedia Lab in Arcada.

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

A tool for screengrabbing your Second Life avatar so that it can be stored and used locally.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Sources of information about PuTTY and WinSCP, and a brief clue as to what they are…

A session by session guide to the Rich Media Technology course at Arcada.

A regularly updated list of assignments and deadlines for the Rich Media Technology course at Arcada.

One of the problems with exploring areas like RSS feeds or WP plug-ins is that, quite often, you can only do it through randomly. You google a general query and then follow the links until you find something close enough to what you were looking for.

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.

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 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.

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.

Skinkers is the technological break-through of the week, or not. A pertinent question is whether streaming tv on mobile devices is merely supplier-driven, or whether there is an actual demand for it.

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

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”.

Somebody somewhere has created a stripe generator for you to use.

Structuring Information is next being taught in the Media Lab (Room 323) at 9.15 Monday and Wednesday mornings beginning on February 5th 2007. This course is intended for Year 1 and Year 4 multimedia students.

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.

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

is working on a web site with Eva
is now optimistic that everything is indeed going to plan!
is ready for a gardening weekend

is topping up his iPod with goodies from eMusic and Jamendo
softly curses the way that Elisa wireless keeps dropping the connection – making uploading anything almost impossible

is sitting on a jetty in Pellinki with a laptop and a mokkula, waiting for Ville to phone
has discovered that supervising Auo’s swimming and reading are completely incompatible activities
hardly ever fails to finish a book; but then hardly ever starts a book as dull as the first 96 pages of Nerve by Dick Francis.

is going to cook lunch as soon as he manages to check his mail
says, “Mail checked, Second Life unavailable; food coming!”
has discovered that the girls love tosca cake, despite pretending that they don’t
is checking out www.vivaty.com – another attempt to make 3D ‘worlds’ mainstream
has finished watching the sun set over the islands and is going to bed

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.

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.

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.

Some links to simple guides on VPN tunnelling.

Looking at the raw material from which this site is composed, I find myself asking: which parts are the blog-stuff and which parts are the wiki-stuff?

The percentage of women employed in the field is declining instead of growing. There are other disturbing figures too.

XHTML is a version of HTML that is designed to be a valid version of xml. This makes it useful for dynamic web sites and other database-driven uses.

If a browser accepts an xml document without complaining then the document is said to be well-formed. If the xml document meets your requirements, when it is checked with a DTD or schema then is is a valid xml document.

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?