MaisonBisson

My Treo rocks. Part of my love for the new gadget is how I can now AIM on the run without SMS. Sure, I risk frostbitten fingers as I walk across campus and I’d probably be a lot better off if I just called the person, but…but…

Anyway, Everything Treo was near the top of my Google query with a roundup of three commercial IM apps for Palm. But none of the reviewed apps seemed all that great, and I sort of expected to find a free client. The Treonauts review wasn’t much help either, and I was about to give up when I found Atomig Cog‘s Toccer, a completely free, still-in-beta AIM client. It’s plenty capable and seems to be in active development (five releases since mid-August).

A couple features I didn’t think about before I started looking include directly connecting to AOL (some clients use a proxy), background receiving (because fully-synchronus IMing is frustrating), and support for the five-way nav clicker.

You don’t like the “2.0” moniker? So what. John Blyberg reminds us that “if we’re arguing over semantics, we’ve been derailed.” And Stephen Abram is said to have cautioned us: “when librarians study something to death, we forget that death was not the original goal.”

SimpleSearch – a Full-Text solution | Beau Collins

Fresh from Nature: a peer reveiw comparison of Wikipedia’s science coverage against Encyclopaedia Britannica:

One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems. One article was revealed as falsely suggesting that a former assistant to US Senator Robert Kennedy may have been involved in his assassination. And podcasting pioneer Adam Curry has been accused of editing the entry on podcasting to remove references to competitors’ work. Curry says he merely thought he was making the entry more accurate.

However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule. (link added)

Go read the whole story.

No, I don’t mean that they’re disrupting it, I mean they’re getting it. And in saying that, I don’t mean they’re figured it our first, but they they’re making some damn good acquisitions to get it right.

Mostly, I’m speaking of they’re purchase of Flickr last year and their acquisition of del.icio.us Friday. But in a somewhat lesser way I’m also speaking of their announcement Monday that they’ll be offering blogs as well.

Yeah, Google rocked this picture a good long while ago with their purchase of Blogger long before most people could understand what value it offered, and even Microsoft beat Yahoo! to this. But the better way to read this is as the final piece to a rather impressive array of social software.

And where perhaps only ten percent of internet users will likely ever be regular bloggers, it’s a safe assumption that nearly 100 percent of internet users will create bookmarks and almost as many will have reason to post a photo online. And with Yahoo! controlling the leading services for both, it sort of rearranges the picture.

I just received this email from the A9 OpenSearch team:

We have just released OpenSearch 1.1 Draft 2. We hope to declare it the final version shortly, and it is already supported by A9.com. Uprading from a previous version should only take a few minutes…

OpenSearch 1.1 allows you to specify search results in HTML, Atom, or any other format (or multiple formats) in addition to just RSS. In addition, OpenSearch 1.1 will be supported by Internet Explorer 7, among other software, so we strongly recommend that you upgrade. Also new is the ability to specify suggested searches, such as spelling suggestions and related queries. (link and emphasis addded)

Woot! I’ll be doing something with this soon.

I wish I could admit the provenance of the following, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy. Here goes:

Donald Rumsfeld is briefing president Bush: “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.”

“Oh no!” exclaims the president, “that’s terrible!”

His staff is stunned at this unprecedented display of emotion, watching as Bush sits, head in hands.

Finally, he looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”

We’re looking at the Sungard/SCT Luminis Content Management Suite (sales video). The real demo comes later, but the sales rep thinks Pima Community College and Edison College show it off well. Hmm.

People like to topple dominos, and some people like to topple great long snaking lines of them. So TV crews get involved, people spend a month or more lining the damn things up, and Domino Day becomes an annual event.

Enter sparrow. Sparrow menaces dominos, topples 23,000 of them. Enter exterminator. Exterminator shoots sparrow. Enter news media. Enter public outcry. Enter death threats.

Result: a record 4 million dominos, the sparrow incident is being investigated by a reported seven agencies, and the martyr sparrow has been preserved for display in 2006.

Zone Erogene has ten fonts available for free download, including Migraine Serif and the faux-cyrillic Perestroika.

Tip for Mac OS X users: rename the font to remove the “.txt” extension that will get added to the filename, then double-click it.

Yes, there are some parts of the continental US not yet served by DSL or cable modems. That’s why I’m looking for a dial up ISP. Nationally we’ve got AOL and Earthlink, followed by budget operators NetZero, PeoplePC, and Netscape Online. But here’s the thing, and forgive my ignorance, why do all these services suggest you need to download and install software just to dial in?

I mean, hasn’t dial up networking been a standard feature of various releases of Mac OS and Windows since 1995 or so? Why the extra “dialer”?

Anyway, my search for a bare-bones ISP lead me to FreedomList‘s ISP directory, and the list of providers offering service in New Hampshire. That’s where I found VT Rocket, which offers plans ranging from $2.90/month (for 30 hours) to $9.95/month (unlimited).

Somebody at Gizmodo found this Agence France-Presse story about the intersection of American surfing and bathroom habits in The Hindustan Times. It’s based on a report by the USC Annenberg School‘s Center for the Digital Future. For five years running now, the center has tracked internet use (and non-use) in a 2,000 household representative sample of America (choosing a new sample each year).

This year, researchers found: “Over half of those who used Wi-fi had used it in the bathroom.”

Gizmodo is going a little farther than I’d initially care to by asking readers to comment on their behavior, but I found this gem that reminds us that this may just reflect the evolution of our media: “The laptop in the john is the new newspaper for the millennium.”

I apparently have too many neatnik issues to go down that path, but rather than devolve the discussion, I’d like to point out that this Center for the Digital Future report appears to be a good complement to OCLC’s latest report and the regular stream of reports from the Pew Internet Project.

Now back to the funny: RSStroom Reader.

Via an IM from Ryan Eby: a pointer to Andrew Escobar‘s directions on how to install Apple’s Front Row.

Engadget and Gizmodo both have the skinny on a USB turntable.