UserLand: The next weblogging buyout?. Roland Tanglao writes in a comment to Workbench, "Too bad UserLand doesn't seem to have the money to hire one developer for each platform (Frontier, Manila and Radio) and the right number of support people, because if they did there's no way MovableType or anybody else could keep up with them."

After Google bought Pyra and Moveable Type's developers secured venture financing, UserLand Software is the last chance for an outside company to buy their way into overnight credibility in weblog publishing.

Lately, I've been expecting to fire up Scripting News and learn that Microsoft, Adobe, or Apple purchased the company as part of an aggressive push to get into the space. Microsoft certainly has at least one employee who knows what UserLand has to offer. [Workbench] 
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ALA 158: Accesskeys - unlocking hidden navigation. In Issue No. 158 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: All your favorite applications have shortcut keys. So can your site, thanks to the XHTML accesskey attribute. Accesskeys make sites more accessible for people who cannot use a mouse. Unfortunately, almost no designer uses accesskeys, because, unless they view source, most visitors can't tell that you've put these nifty navigational shortcuts to work on your site. Stuart Robertson unlocks the secret of providing visible accesskey shortcuts. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 
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Brad DeLong's prodigious sidebar ... all I've got to say is check out dude's sidebar. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. Lots of stuff to click on. Makes me swoon. I gonna lie down now cause concussion has me sleepy ... [disconnected] 
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Europe To Force Right of Reply On Internet Communication. [Slashdot] 
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The Internet and Chinese Ravers [Ars Technica] 
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The folks at the MacGPG project have set up a MacGPG Store for all your crypto-wear needs (someone buy me the clock!) . Says Gordon Worley, the project's admin: You can buy logo t-shirts, hats, mugs, bags, and other goodies. We offer them to you `at cost'; we earn no profit on them, so you get the lowest price possible. Check it out and support them - the MacGPG project is pretty damned cool. [Forwarding Address: OS X] 
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Who What When 
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The Post-it Note Story Told by Art Fry 
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Conspiracy theory. Dave Winer puts the death of IE5/Mac into context, concluding it took Bill Gates ten years to erase the web as a threat. The timing of recent events bears out Dave's thesis, at least as far as Microsoft's INTENTIONS are concerned. A blow by blow analysis of who did and said what when. Were standards-oriented Microsoft developers dupes? Did the company tolerate their actions because implementing standards pacified the developer community? What happens next? Do consumers have a choice? [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 
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Worth your time. Truly engaging websites. Beautiful redesigns. CSS mini-tabs. Great reads on the use of weblogs for marketing and PR; design basics, from fonts and color to white space and alignment; how fonts really work in Mac OS X. Desktop backgrounds. Swedish pop bands. And so much more. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 
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Apple's Net-Sharing Smarts Overcome Apple's WiFi Woes. So a bunch of us sit down in a WiFi-equipped conference room to talk about software, community and other such... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 
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DaveNet: NY Times Archive, Weblogs and RSS. [Scripting News] 
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JournURL: More BBS/Blog Fusion. »Another entry in the fusion of the BBS and Blog patterns, JournURL, an attempt to create a CCMS (that'd be Community Content Management System to you and me.) The focus here is improving on the model of simple comments for supporting real discussions in weblogs: "Robust threaded and linear discussion that encourages extended conversations and debate. No simplistic comment system here, folks. No anonymous spam."«

As I've said in the past, blog comment systems generally suck. They're fine for "me too" responses and the occasional one-liner, but they quickly show their limitations when put to the task of managing large, intense discussions. ... Meanwhile, here I am, sitting on what is probably the most robust, blog-friendly discussion app anywhere, and all of those people out there using Movable Type and similar apps can't take advantage of it. ... I've decided to see what I can do to make this thing more useful to people using "foreign" blogging apps. Enter ping2talk. ...

[Corante: Social Software] [owrede_log] 
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Students teaching with blogs. Jill Walker: »One thing I've really liked in the student weblogs I've been grading is that there are a lot of posts that are really useful. It's so different from exams where only the examiners are ever going to see all the work students have done. For instance, a colour blind student teaches other students and readers how to design sites that can be read by colour blind people (you'll have more colour blind readers than readers using Opera or Netscape or needing websafe colours or any of those other things we fret about), another student explains how to make skins for your blog, one explains how to use php to join up separate html files. There are lots of comments from other students on the blogs, and questions are asked and answered and there are links to and fro and they've just done a really impressive job.« [owrede_log] 
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Watchblog: Coming From All Sides. Proximity Politics. One kind of proximity politics refers to new-found adjacency resulting from globalization which forces new dilemmas before citizens. Another kind of proximity politics refers to the coat-tail riding of aspiring politicians who try to trade on the fame, glory or popularity of others. Still another kind of proximity politics are practiced in attack ads, in which politicans seek to attach their oppenents' names to negatives without explicit accusations, relying instead upon a series of words or short phrases without the grammatical glue which might permit proper parsing or analysis. And the final kind of proximity politicsâ??probably the most positiveâ??are those practiced by WatchBlog, which calls paid to the inward-looking, self-reinforcing echo chambers of one-view political forums. Instead, the two main American parties and their myriad third-party siblings are posting to the same arena. It's the answer to the question, "How can people's minds be changed if they only seek out what they already agree with?" If the opposite camp is in the text column next door, maybe you can't help but to take a dose of what's turning out to be strong commentary largely free of carbon-copy rhetoric, cardboard cut-outs, and cookie-cutter opinions. [MetaFilter] 
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Africaserver. Africaserver. Contemporary African art and culture - San art from Botswana, Arms into Art from Mozambique, Dar es Salaam in Delft Blue - a cross-cultural comparison of favourite objects, Marthe Nso Abomo from Cameroon, a Rwanda Genocide Monument, and more.
Related :- Meshu, an artist and political activist from Lesotho who may have been southern Africa's first streaker. [MetaFilter] 
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Ambient Devices.

Via Alison Lewis and Howard Rheingold comes news of an intriguing device called Ambient Orb.

It is a wireless device that "slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, the health of your stock portfolio, or if your boss or friend is on instant messenger." [Don Park's Blog]

 
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Ambient Security.

Writing about ambient devices and reading about Gartner Group's recommendation against investing in intrusion detection systems (IDS), I thought this might be a good time to talk about ambient security: protection that weaves into your daily life without being obtrusive. [Don Park's Blog]

 
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Hands-on Henna. The Reverend Bunny's Secret Henna Diary. Sssh! Don't tell anyone, but this is a fascinating site featuring tips and tricks, and a nice gallery of images annotated by background information, image sources, history, and interesting anecdotes.

You can also find free patterns here, both traditional and non-traditional. [MetaFilter] 
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RVW specs. Alf Eaton has announced the RVW Specs.

RVW is intended to allow machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from distributed sources.

He's also using "ENT" to describe the type of subject under review. Exellent! [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 
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Team Tasks Tool. Last year we spent some time working on a Radio UserLand tool which we were calling Team Tasks Tool. The basic idea was leveraging on the power of Radio's embedded object database, outliner and web server to create a p2p task management and tracking tool.

We went pretty far with the development, we were actually using the tool internally, until our company's downsizing forced us to freeze the project (we didn't have the necessary resource to finish it nor enough tasks and people to manage).

I had totally forgot about this tool until a few days ago I received an email from Robert Barksdale asking me about it.

We still have no time to work on it, but maybe somebody out there is willing to work a little on it or simply use it (it already works).

So, just as a test, we are releasing it under a Creative Commons License.

Feel free to contact me () if you have any idea about this cool tool. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 
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Trackback. Looks like we got trackback working on a couple or Radio weblogs. It still needs some work but it looks promising. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 
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Surgical Diversions offers a wide range of nifty Radio scripts and tools. Good value! 
3:20:25 AM      comment []   trackback []