web 1.0 - playground for the technology, commercial boom

web 2.0 - user-generated, interactivity-oriented

web 3.0 - machine-automation, report-oriented

to save everyone the ‘trouble’ of having to visit my blog to check on my latest del.icio.us bookmarks, I’ve decided to splice that feed into this one. I don’t post there too often and there shouldn’t be more than one entry per day [to this feed], but if it gets annoying let me know.

Some people got all high and mighty how they are unhappy that Google released Android under an Apache-style license as opposed to using the GPL, and how the company is not holding up to earlier promises and hints that they want to embrace open-source even more. Guess what:  «Continue Reading»

Kevin Rose had a marvelous idea when it came to creating Digg: steal an existing idea - social news - and dress it up in something geeks like. Give the impression that users have all the power while you make money off their content. Fine, why not, after all we’ve all come across dirtier business ideas. Though with so many users, some risks were taken and now they’re coming back to bite mister revision3 in the behind.

There are at least to major recorded events where Digg banned some of its top stories, then went back, restored them and Rose apologised. That doesn’t work. It’s biting at the trust that users have in Digg and it’s telling them some of the effort they’re putting in the site goes to waste - especially when it has the possibility of damaging Kevin’s business ventures. An unregulated conversation medium, free of censorship and problems? Nope. More like a site that funnels stories to keep us busy. I always found only proto and pseudo geeks to hang around Digg anyway, so it’s more of a way for webmasters to get some nice traffic surges to their website. “Writing for Digg”, as some have called the phenomenon.

So I would personally hope Kev and co. develop a set of guidelines that covers in detail what kind of things are or are not appropriate, and abide by them. Otherwise Digg will lose even more of its reputation and, with that, mister Rose stands to lose a lot of money.

When most of us begin using encryption, the intended goal is to be able to protect certain types of data from certain types of individuals. You might be interested in saving your trade secrets from would-be industrial spies and I may be interested in hiding unfinished novels from prying eyes. But the strength of commonly-available encryption aims at giving governments some trouble in getting to that data. Well, the technology is available, but now they’ll just force us to hand over the keys or face jail time.
«Continue Reading»

I just came across an interesting project over at FreeRice.com: show off your vocabulary and donate rice through the UN. One word, four possible meanings, each time you are correct the people behind the project donate 10 grains of rice to help end world hunger. It’s also a good way to test out your vocabulary [but don't cheat, even if it's for a good cause!]

This is what I saw while having a cigarette. Freaky, to say the least.

A lot of people seem to be wondering who exactly is behind the radianrss identifier that some of us have been seeing in our webserver logs or FeedBurner statistics¹. Google doesn’t give much information on this topic, so a little detective work gave me the following bits of information:

«Continue Reading»

1. No, FeedBurner does not show any information about radianrss either [↩]

I see that, beginning in September of this year, Firefox has a higher share on the web than any one version of IE. Sure, Microsoft’s browser beats all the rest when taken irregardless of version.¹ What scares me, however, is how many people are still on IE 5. Can somebody please try to explain to me why that’s so? It’s an entirely too large a percentage to be comforting. Do these people realise how much of the web they are missing out on?

1. After all, we don’t see a split of Firefox and its versions in that chart [↩]

Well it’s been enabled for my accounts, finally, so the first thing I did was to see how I can flag items from my iPhone so that I may review at a more convenient time. No further: simply move the mail into the ‘Starred’ folder and you’re done. Granted, it also removes it from the Inbox view, but as far as I am concerned that is quite all right.

Now, if only Apple’s Mail wouldn’t display these IMAP accounts so weirdly. I am uncertain if it’s a mistake on my part or not, though my other IMAP accounts look just fine.