phil's blog

http://www.re-public.gr/en/wp-print.php?p=138

A discussion of whether users of sites such as MySpace are merely being exploited by the owners, by being duped in to believing they aren't doing work.  The argument isn't new but the bit I actually found more interesting was the comment at the end about sites that have resisted the corporate take over and the idea of some artists subverting more explicitly commercial sites to use them as a platformi for their creative work.

A story in the The Register raises yet another warning for those wanting to protect their Internet 'face'.  In this case a reputable security consultant moved his blogi from Blogspot to his own website, and closed down the original journal.  Someone peddling dubious 'security' software spotted this, reregistered the name and then started using it to sell said snake oil.  The point here is not restricted to blog sites.  Anyone who buys multiple domains for projects etc needs to consider the possible consequences of later relinquishing them when no longer needed.  How closely associated are you to that domain name, perhaps on other people's websites?  Is there a possibility that someone could make capital out of your reputation  by association or even by passing themselves off as you?  It may be the case that it is necessary to retain defunct domain names for a number of years until you're satisfied that they are not a liability if someone else registers them.

In this posting I poured some scorn on Google's brilliant reinvention of the offline spreadsheet.  I know it's very kind of Google to offer to hold all my personal data on their very large servers, but here's another angle on the whole idea of storing your data handily online.  The authori, Mark Rasch, is a respected writer, especially in the area of technology and the law.  As ex US Justice Department he can hardly be called anti-establishment, but seems to treat all the subjec

This article has nothing to do with digitali art or culture.  It's about statistics, semantics and cancer treatment.  The reason I've chosen to highlight it is that I think it is an excellent piece of writing about science and how technical language can be misused.  It's also, I'd suggest, a good example of how a piece can open up a specialist subject for non-specialists and make them think more about the issues involved.

Plugin cinema  is a site dedicated to the creation, distribution and exhibition of films on-line.

Microsoft's fanfare launch of it's Surface computing initiative may be more of a triumph for the fabled MS marketing machine than a technological break through.  It's interesting to compare Philip's existing product (note: MS's is three to five years away), but perhaps more interesting is the work being done by a UK firm on flexible multi-touch input surface:

http://www.plasticlogic.com/products.php

One of them is free in both senses of the word, and one is free as in money.

I recently came across Firebug, a Firefox extension that tells you everything you might want to know about how a webpage is constructed and why it displays like it does in Firefox.  Since it is more common to have unexplained behaviour in IE I went looking for an equivalent for that and found the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.

So, Google have had a good idea.  SInce we can't all be connected to the Internet all the time, they are developing the technology to store and use online data offline.  So far so good, (leaving aside the fact that most web browsers have been able to cache pages for offline usage for years).  The particular breakthrough has got to be:

"Initially, Google's RSSi feed reader application - for reading news and blogs - will work offline, but the company plans to add other programmes, Mr Huber said.

He said Google's e-mail, calendar, word processing and spreadsheet programmes were logical candidates for offline access."

I knew there was something we'd been waiting for.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/23/manchester_second_life/

"The online landscape is shifting as 18-34 year old women are now the most dominant group online in the UK – accounting for 18% of the UK Internet population and over one-fifth of all UK computer time"

Headlines from a report on UK Net use demographics from Nielsen//NetRatings, full report here.