Wednesday 11 June 2003

Bath's Mark Foster bettered his own British Record of 23.62 for the 50m Butterfly at an open meet in Zagreb. He took gold in a time of 23.51 to finish just outside Fin Jere Hard's European record of 23.50 and Australian Geoff Huegill's World Record of 23.44. Foster was also given a Barcelona boost with an impressive 22.48 to take silver in the 50m Freestyle. Alex Popov took the gold in a time of 22.42. [Western Counties ASA] 5:45:19 PM

Provincial cities' economic underperformance forces the country to depend too heavily on south-east, says John Prescott. Full text: John Prescott's speech to the Core Cities summit Businesss urged to lead urban revival [guardian regeneration news] 5:42:15 PM

All pervasive Wifi? Check. Dave Winer? Check. Doc Searls? Check. More Apple PowerBooks and iBooks per square foot than anywhere else on the planet, apart from (perhaps) Cupertino? Ah - we have a problem. It is a weblogging conference, but it's a weblog conference with a twist: it's about bringing the joys of blogging to business. So there are rather more corporate PCs on show than is normal at such events. Update: Someone's just hauled in a 17" PowerBook - this upsets the balance, a little. [onlineblog.com] 5:41:35 PM

Jason Shellen, associate program manager at Blogger, is delivering a keynote here in Boston. He's just made very clear what some of us already knew: any suggestions that Google will remove blogs from its main index is simply not true. "We are not removing blogs from Google," he said. Doesn't get any clearer than that. What Google is going to do, btw, is create a weblog search tab, in the same way they do specialised searches of newsgroups, shopping sites and so on (Update: Jason fact checks my ass in the comments box attached: not a search tab, something else :-)). There are some semantic arguments to be had about what goes in that blog search, but they appear to be working on that... [onlineblog.com] 5:39:06 PM