The Public Wiki section on this domain

ome months ago I decided that only urgent messages are worth the use of E-mail. Somehow I just got fed up, even though I was spam-free.

A couple of days ago I took what I hope to be a step towards life without E-mail. I set up a Wiki where most of my correspondence will take place. Wikis are a collection of pages where content is editable by everyone, given access privileges of course. Why not use forums or bulletin boards for rapid communication? Here is a short comparison:

*Dependent on the package

s some reader may already know, Flickr are among the most popular services for on-line photo sharing. A Yahoo takeover was announced yesterday.

This, in my humble opinion, will mark the end of ‘cleaner’, more decent photo galleries. It is only a matter of time until cherished Flickr will be ‘decorated’ with mugshots of Britney Spears and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. I am also worried that Yahoo will do to Flickr the same type of damage they did to Geocities, of which I was a member at the time. That acquisition, which goes back several years back, prevented me from making further changes to content and my pages were flooded with advertisements, from which Yahoo profited.

According to the sources of Slashdot:

This is the third high profile Blog/RSS related buyout of 2005. Live Journal was bought by Six Apart, while Ask Jeeves snapped up Bloglines.

Eric Meyer pointed out the strange policies that some corporations instate:

We reserve the right to require you to remove links to the Site, in our sole discretion.

Linking to any page of the Site other than to the homepage is strictly prohibited in the absence of a separate linking agreement with Orbitz.

About a month ago I heard that Sainsbury’s require you to apply in order to get a permission to link. The only worry one can think of them having is a link name with an unflattering title, which then associates them with inadequate words in search engines. Try for example, ‘f**kwit’ in Google and the first result (as of the time of writing) will be John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister. Ironically enough, the top SERP for this site is Teresa May, the Tory MP, though most visitors are after a porn star with the same name.
 
 

Numerous people argue that Web browsing will be replaced by feeds of information. one can get everything from film reviews, weather, and the news to photo galleries of friends, all in a matter of seconds. Heavy pages with varying design and navigation methods are cumbersome. Consequently, content becomes king.

Here is the word from Robert Scoble, a popular Microsoft evangelist:

…RSS news aggregator. That’s where I spend 90% of my Internet time now anyway. Are you still using a Web browser? Good. I’ve been telling audiences that those of you still using Web browsers are wasting your time…

…Think I’m alone? Audiences at SXSW and Northern Voice have been very heavy RSS users. So much so that at SXSW there was a panel discussing whether or not design mattered anymore…

If you do not know where to start, visit RSSOwl.org where free software is available. You can find links to feeds in extensive directories, or maybe among the local links.

If you have worked on more than one computer, you probably had difficulties in keeping bookmarks (favourites) synchronised, or at least keeping them all in a single location. There are at least 3 ways to tackle this problem.

Method #1: Merge

Synchronise with the aid of tools, e.g. BookmarkSync, which is free.

Method #2: Upload

Use an on-line bookmark service like Yahoo! Bookmarks. It makes a single bookmark accessible (and modifiable) via the Internet.

Method #3: Centralise

Is you have Web space available, this method will suit you well. Upload all your bookmarks to the server and create links to them. This essentially builds a portal, which you probably want to make password-protected.

Part of an on-line bookmarks collection; click for full view

icrosoft are beginning to see information about Internet Explorer 7 leak. For those who have not followed recent events, Microsoft decided to make the exception and release a browser that is not bundled to a particular version of Windows. This is due to the threat of Firefox, which now accounts for the majority of traffic on some sites. Internet Explorer 7 is expected to have improved security (presently a predominant flaw), tabbed browsing, a built-in news aggregator and more. Plenty of details are to be found in this article.

According to Mishoo, Internet Explorer leaks memory.

The problem I’m discussing here is that Internet Explorer leaks memory on certain occasions. If your script complies to this behavior, you will usually notice an abnormal slowness when IE executes it, usually after 40-50 requests made within the same browsing session…

This comes as a surprise to some and nonetheless it gives another reason to upgrade to Firefox.