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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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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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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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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