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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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”.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.