EB statistics/tracking services share some very encouraging figures which suggest that Netscape and Digg lead the pack of social-driven news sites. As I am active on both sites, I am more than pleased to see this. Some time this weekend I will have submitted my 10,000^th story to Netscape.

Knowing that Netscape attracts roughly 5 million unique users per month, I am certain that my contributions have an impact. They primarily promote digital freedom — something which I passionately believe in and therefore perpetually promote.

Photo from around 1984

AST week I mentioned the rowing competition, which I completed quite some time ago. I can finally say with certainty that I have won. The time it took me to complete one mile (ergo, level 10, 1600 meters) was 5 minutes and 23.8 seconds. This is apparently a little step back, however, because I completed the same distance in just 5 minutes and 13 seconds when I was 20. Back then, however, I practised throughout and beforehand, making sure I was prepared for the challenge. I was possibly in a better shape as well, although I tend to doubt it. In any event, I have finally modified the sports page to mark the achievement.

According to a new report, Palm is going to be acquired this week. Whether the absorber will be Motorola, or Nokia or somebody else, there’s no way of knowing yet. Apparently, several large companies are bidding to snap this stagnating giant. As a long-time Palm user, I wonder what the implications will be. As a Linux users, I am relieved to know about ALP, which is Linux-based, is also able to run legacy Palm OS applications. So Palm as we know it is unlikely to vanish. And old applications will continue to run.

NTERNET radio is still in danger. The major record labels cannot cope with or accept disruptive technologies, so they decide to use money and power change rules (or more more precisely—rewtrite the law).

This is an interesting debate because the same thing has been happening with proprietary software vendors (even though it’s a lost cause). In the case of radio, broadcasters unite and fight back.

There is no greater enemy of the music business than the music industry itself. Never before in the history of mass entertainment have we witnessed an industry who worked harder to destroy itself. Maybe once upon a time, music companies tried to expand their business and reach wider audiences, but those days ended long ago…and if the RIAA has its way, they’ll be gone for good.

Good luck beating the RIAA. I bet they know many people in the Establishment, so this battle will be a hard one to win.

Image of Googleplex in London (from ZDNet gallery)

As you have probably heard by now, Google has taken baby steps towards not being quite so evil. Privacy concerns will be addressed by anonimising log files.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Google, the world’s largest search engine, is dramatically changing the way it treats personal information.

I am having some bitter-sweet feelings as I make a certain change. And this change is an easy one to make. Apart from taking my Web-based mail back to the desktop, I have also begun migrating my RSS feeds from RSSOwl to Thunderbird 1.5.x. It saddens me. I have been with RSSOwl for almost two and a half years. I contributed a little bit to the project, wrote about it, and recommended it to people. Having just tested some things in Thunderbird I came to realise that, as a feeds reader, it boasts several features that would greatly help my reading routine.

While I still have RSSOwl (and I might occasionally use it), the move to Thunderbird seems inevitable. But I am only having second thoughts because of export/import issues. Kudos to Benjamin Pasero for a wonderful tool which I may still regularly use. RSSOwl Development has been slow in the past year and I have remained loyal nonetheless. Now I’m just too tempted to ‘change teams’.

Update (the ‘morning after’): After a while of careful consideration, weighing the pros and cons, I decided to use the best of both worlds, at least for now. RSSOwl is good for quick opening of many pages in new tabs, whereas Thunderbird offers nice HTML previews. It also sports retention of old items which otherwise ‘leak’ out of sight. By mixing and relying on the traits of both applications I will probably get the best overall experience. Unless of course they mature to the point where one becomes obsolete and replaceable… let’s just wait and see.

HE “what you see is what you get” paradigm is a fine idea. This term, abbreviated WYSIWYG (and sometimes pronounced Wisi-wig), aptly describes the way we print our documents. From a particular image on our monitor we are able to produce paper replicas. But should the same paradigm be used for composition of our documents? Should layout itself be manipulated and controlled by the user in real time? Scott McNealy weighed in.

Scott McNealy, who used to like to style himself “chairman, president, founder, chief cook and bottlewasher” of Sun Microsystems, is not known for his affection for Microsoft. Quite the opposite. Speaking to the National Press Club of Australia way back in October 1996, he pronounced that “when the anthropologists look back on the 1980s and 1990s and do the archaeological digs, and get their callipers and brooms and microscopes out, they will blame the massive reduction in productivity during the 1980s and 1990s entirely on Microsoft Office.”

Indeed, there is too much emphasis on presentation at the writing phase. Instead of creating high-quality content, the writer can often be distracted by the desire and ability to turn text into its form in ‘output mode’. This is wasteful. It’s a case of jumping ahead too early and, in fact, spell checkers and grammar checkers which involve false positives lead to similar distractions. The composition, if done properly, should be a staged process. At each stage, full attention should be given to the task at hand.

Writing of good material can be handled in plain-text mode, only later to have the mind occupied with structural layout (as opposes to structure, which requires shallow preparation and planning, without diving in). A similar issue comes up when people prepare presentations in a way that concentrates on looks rather than delivery of concise and important messages. Here is one among many writings on the dumbing-down effect of tools like Astound, PowerPoint, Keynote, KPresent, and Presenter.

In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship’s foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft’s well-known ”slideware” program.