False Positives

• Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows, now that Ubuntu 8.04 is out.

  (tags: Linux ubuntu windows)

• Explaining the Semantic Web. 2 things are missing for the “wrb 3.0″ to happen : 1) more micro formating, either top down (i.e. “this looks like a date or a place”) or bottum up : better tools (wizards?) to add data in mircoformated fashion. 2) adding more meaning to folkonomy / tag metadata (the “do you mean paris ther person or paris the city” problem). see Moat : Meaning Of A Tag project

  (tags: SemanticWeb web3.0)

• Global Nerdy | Learning Curves for Text Editors

  Editor Wars are only just behind Language Wars for there viscousness

  (tags: Humour geek)

• Tripharbor.com (also tripharbour.ca) a travel site is that it is focused exclusively on cruising

  a startup led by former Chief Marketing Officer of Expedia.com and Founder of Expedia Canada, Stuart MacDonald.

  (tags: Startup Canada travel)

• 30 Exceptional CSS Techniques and Examples | Six Revisions. some very cool stuff in there.

  (tags: css design)

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This is what is Weird Wonderful

• Six Principles for Making New Things - find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

- Startup web work paulgraham paul.graham

• Wikileaks - Wikileaks (the IP version) - accessible by IP address.

- censorship internet Law media politics reference Wiki

• Global Nerdy | Ideas to Steal from Silicon Valley and Seattle - for making a better Toronto..

- Toronto Tech Startup web

• globeandmail.com: The venti idea- (by David Crow ) “Companies today know that user experience is more than just a visually appealing environment. it’s about meeting customer needs, preferences, behaviours, attitudes, and more. That’s because a stellar user experience is not quickly forgotten.”

- usability david.crow

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I’m off for a week of skiing in Utah. Until then, take care of the net for me.

• Where and when to use Ajax in your applications - Get rid of the refresh; doesn’t need to be real-time;Small changes can be big;Big changes can bring big difficulties; Unleash information; Ajax can save/ruin your site; Finding an Ajax-powered balance.

- AJAX

• Heroku Lifts Ruby on Rails Development into the Cloud - a) completely in-browser development b) will allow RoR developers to host and scale them using Amazon Web Services to provide automatic scaling of its hosted apps and plans, like a utility. Kewl

- Amazon cloud development rails Ruby ror

• Amazon Quietly Launches Product Ads; Secretly Wants to Become a Shopping Search Engine. - lets any Web merchant buy cost-per-click ads on Amazon linked to specific product searches.

- advertising Amazon ecommerce

• SHINTARO KAGO ON THE COVER OF VICE MAGAZINE - I hate it when my head does that.

- manga Asian art

• A Photo Editor - How to Manage People - Taking someone else’s idea and increasing the quality by 5% occurs at the price of a 50% decrease in their commitment to execution

- management

• Neatorama » The Evolution of Tech Companies Logos -

- Art business design geek graphics History Marketing fp

• Better Than Free - eight categories of scarce goods associated with digital goods, noting that each one is “better than free.” : Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage and Findability.

• Three Rules for Database Work - 1. Never use a shared database server for development work.; 2. Always Have a Single, Authoritative Source For Your Schema; 3. Always Version Your Database;

• Toronto’s Best Web and Tech Evangelists : and the Winner is David Crow & Toronto - a big thank you to David and all his Fellow nominees! David is the heart of DemoCamp - Toronto’s Best Unconference

- for:davidcrow demoCamp Toronto web

• Amazon Web Services: Bigger Than Amazon - ReadWriteWeb - bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.comâ��s global websites combined!!!

- Amazon cloud Enterprise2.0 web2.0 web Startup

• Yahoo Users, You’ve Got OpenID - As promised, Yahoo has launched its new OpenID provider service which means Yahoo’s 248 million users worldwide now have a way to login to any site that supports OpenID. Now with Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and more!

- yahoo development Security

• Plot Your Schedule on a Google Map - Blogger Tony Hirst mixed an RSS feed from Google Calendar with some KML generated using Yahoo Pipes as a middleman, to come up with today’s best mashup: your Google Calendar plotted on a map.

- mashups google gmap calendar fp

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This is what is Weird Wonderful Web for January 29th through January 30th:

• Beyond Vertical Search to Business Networks - ReadWriteWeb - going beyond “the search space that Google has not yet grabbed and that does not require a major technology breakthrough such as natural language search”

- google advertising

• Dear Google: 2000 Called, It Wants Its Ad Format Back - ReadWriteWeb - Google does Cue”Less”Cat. see also http://www.google.com/adwords/printads/ads/barcode/

- QRCodes s advertising google Semacode

• Beware Google Map’s Surveillance Death-Ray - I for one welcome our new Google Map Masters…. with pretty red lights!

- google maps movie parody privacy video youtube Humour gmap

• ‘We’re Huge in Finland!’ Firefox Hits New High as IE7 Lags | Compiler from Wired.com - Mozilla Firefox continued its slow but steady march against the worldwide dominance of Internet Explorer in 2007. Though in second place behind IE, where it’s been for years, usage of Firefox is still on the rise.

- firefox ie7 microsoft Mozilla web internet

• Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you. - Googling “find Chuck Norris” and hitting “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

- google fun

• overhaul copyright law to distinguish between commercial and cultural uses - We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the

- CopyRight CoryDoctorow Culture Law fp

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• The Third Bit > The Wheel Turns >> a mechanism for “just in time assembly” of Ajax pages - Greg links to a paper that describes an automatic mechanism for splitting and stubbing JavaScript, sort of an “on-demand loading of dynamic libraries started to matter for desktop performance about fifteen years ago ;-).” The worm/wheel turns.

- AJAX Javascript web2.0 development

• Canada, The Scariest Place On Earth? (or why does the government of Australia hate us) - I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding. Nothing to fear I have a crack team flying back to Australia to sort things out. (Have a safe flight J & R!)

- Canada Australia

• Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp - The HBR has a article how community and a public agency cames together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework.

- camp Toronto socialsoftware business

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• How to stop comment spam [bjorkoy.com] - some unusual and interesting techniques to stop spam comment bots. (Thanks Drew!!)

- blogging HOWTO

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• British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards shortlists announced | Futurismic - Looks like I have a few new books to add to my “2 read” list and some short story goodness to track down,

- SciFi

• 101 CSS Techniques Of All Time- Part2 - more handy css techniques that you can incorporate into your web designs : Block Hover Effect Links; Style an A to Z Index; Typography Techniques; Pagination; Tabs; Pullquotes; Blockquotes; H & V Centering; Sitemaps; Image Pop-Up; Star Rater Techniques

- css design webdesign

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• Stephen Chow’s CJ7 - the excellent Twitch has the English trailer for Stephen Chow’s (known in NA for Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle) new scifi comedy CJ7 (out in March). looks very ET-ish and lots of fun.

- Movies HongKong SciFi

• Go2Web20.net - The complete Web 2.0 directory - which is, itself, very web 2.0, although also very flash heavy, a nice gallery interface.

- web2.0 Flash

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• Dilbert.com >> I’m Incubating my brain out…
  
  - and it hurts

- Startup Humour

• CSS Floats Without Text Wrap - Understanding floats is extremely important when creating CSS layouts. One of the trickiest issues when dealing with floats is stopping text from wrapping underneath a floated element.

- css webdesign

• The best free web development add-ons for IE 6 and 7 - because I can’t always pretend to get my way …. and ignoring it doesn’t (always) make it go away.

- IE ie7 Javascript web development

• idea jam - A “Deleters” field for Lotus Notes - a idea from 2006 is picked up. Kewl.

- LotusNotes

• Wubi: Install Ubuntu on Windows like installing an app - Boing Boing - Windows users install Ubuntu Linux like any other Windows app, without worrying about disk partitions and whatnot. What could be easier?

- ubuntu Linux opensource

• Canadian Privacy Commissioner rejects DRM: don’t give spyware legal protection! - Boing Boing - Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, has published an open letter to Industry Minister Jim Prentice, The Privacy Commissioner is understandably alarmed at the prospect of changing Canadian law to make it illegal to tamper with this spyware.

- privacy CopyRight Canada

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• Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing - If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best - and perhaps only - place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.  (see also my own Utopian ideas hidden inside Dystopian sf)

- SciFi Books philosophy CoryDoctorow

• A List Apart: Articles: Designing For Flow - this is something that few graphic design companies seem to be very good at. I’m not saying it easy, but they don’t build for (non static ) flow or meta-design.

- webdesign usability design development

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