Wednesday, August 13, 2003

AOL Journals and iBlog OK, I was never serious about AOL Journals - but I was curious. Now I've discovered a flaw that makes it almost worthless as a blogging tool. In AOL Journals you must choose between making an entry with a title (which is essential), or making an entry which contains links (which is also essential). You can't have both - and this is an anathema to any self-respecting blogger. This is because you can make an entry with a link by using AOL instant messenger - but when you use AOL instant messenger, you can't designate a title for your entry. Now there is a way of editing an entry, when you could theoretically add a title, but if you try this, you will lose your link! Because the stupid editor only handles plain-text - it doesn't even support any HTML tags! So until this is fixed, it's quite useless as a blogging tool. The trouble with iBlog is that I'm yet to find a iBlog blog which seems to offer a good RSS feed. This is crucial for a blog - your blog may as well be invisible if it doesn't have a reliable RSS feed (this was something which AOL at least, could get working). In no way have I surveyed all of them, maybe I was just unlucky with the ones that I looked at. So I'd like to support iBlog, but it's not quite ready yet either. Besides, I've been playing around with TypePad some more and am still very impressed. Its elegance and functionality remind me of a Mac. Coming from a Mac user like me, this is high praise. 7:14:08 AM

	Monday, August 11, 2003

ads with air guitarists and the idea / expression of the idea dichotomy Ads Ape Apple's Air Guitarists. Upstart BuyMusic.com is doing more than just offering a music service that mimics iTunes. Its commercials are strikingly similar to Apple's ads, too. Flattery? Perhaps, but it also could be a lawsuit in the making. By Danit Lidor. [Wired News] [A blog doesn't need a clever name] "The fair-use doctrine does provide a defense to copyright- and trademark-infringement claims," Crowther said. "The critical issue will be whether the BuyMusic.com is a parody of the Apple ads." "When the second work just borrows from the first work to get attention or to avoid having to develop something new or fresh and does not make fun of the original work [sigma] it is not a parody and may not have protection," Crowther said. Parody or not, a copyright-infringement suit wouldn't necessarily be an open-and-shut case. "The dichotomy between 'ideas' and 'expression' is hard to get across," said Blaney Harper, an intellectual property attorney at Jones Day. "Showing average people air guitaring their way through a song against a white background" is not enough to show BuyMusic is copying Apple's expression, he said. I haven't seen these ads, but I admit that they would really annoy me. It would seem that BuyMusic is stealing numerous ideas of Apple. But this happens all the time - in business, in art and science. Stealing an idea (unless it's patented) is different from violating intellectual property rights. This is a really good thing - even if it is infuriating to see BuyMusic use this legal point to peddle its lame Windows knock-off of the iTunes Music Store. It's corny, but the law is meant to be blind, (if people stay within its bounds) it protects the good and the bad, the creative and the exploiters. To change the law to stop the "bad" BuyMusic would be opening the possibility of flooding more of the "good" public domain under a torrent of copyright claims. It could shut down or severely damage the blogosphere. The idea / expression of idea dichtomy is being undermined enough already by contract law, without this happening. So what can be done? Protest this protected form of idea theft in non-legal ways. Try to shame BuyMusic into changing its behaviour. Music (legally downloaded from iTunes): Moby, 18, I'm not worried at all 1:44:32 AM

	Friday, August 8, 2003

Dave Pollard on the blogging process Another intriguing flow-chart from How to Save the World. My thoughts: This is a very detailed & helpful description of what's generally an unconcious process for me. It also serves as a best practice to aim for, because it's rare that I'm doing all of the things which Dave mentions. 5:50:20 AM

	Thursday, July 24, 2003

tinkering with AOL Journals The first AOL journal (blog) I've seen. Via Hylton Joliffe I've clicked through to an AOL Journal called sound & fury. The branding at the top (below the generic AOL nav) reads "AOL Journals: Your Thoughts. Your Blog." I was hoping I could find my way from that blog to other AOL blogs but there doesn't seem to be any central jumping-off point (or blogroll/sidebar, for that matter). [Radio Free Blogistan] I was playing around with AOL Journals yesterday. My attempt was very experimental & silly so I'm not going to link to it. As I expected, it was very easy to set up - there are various templates for choosing how the Journal looks and how functions it has. Updating is also easy - you just send an instant message to the AOL Journal bot. This means that you can use all the formatting that you can use in an instant message, which is quite a lot. But I also a discovered a bug with this. If I add an entry with AIM and then want to edit that entry in AOL to give it a title or information about my mood or the music I'm listening (like LiveJournal), then most of the formatting goes away. If I initially created the entry in AOL, then there's no option to use anything but plain-text - and no HTML tags for bolding, italicizing, changing colours or fonts. This isn't an issue, so long as they fix that bug about editing entries created with AIM - or allow you to give the title, mood and music in the instant message. Hopefully they'll fix this by the time it's officially released. An AOL Journal does provide an RSS feed, but not any news aggregator functions. Because of this, I think that AOL Journals is more equivalent to LiveJournal (albeit not as good!) than software like Radio Userland or Blogger. And I agree that AOL needs to provide a way of locating other AOL Journals. 6:54:24 PM

	Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Safari and internet banking sites Macintouch has had some interesting postings concerning the fall out from Microsoft’s decision to discontinue developing IE for Mac. There is concern because some sites, notably online brokerages internet banking sites, only work with IE. People are worried that if IE for Mac atrophies, Mac users will be shut out of many sites because so many lazy web developers design only for IE. I think that there is a little bit of panic occurring with this issue. There are already sites which only work well with IE 6.x for Windows, not IE 5.2 for Mac. By the way, my credit union’s internet banking and online bill paying works well with just about any web browser. If the big, mean banks and brokerage firms are being troglodytes about only supporting IE, I say that Mac users should take their business elsewhere – especially to credit unions which have lower fees and are usually more responsive to their customers. Now that Microsoft has won the first browser war, it has little incentive to develop IE for any platform. So their announcement about discontinuing upgrading IE 5.2 for Mac comes at the same time that IE 6.x for Windows also goes onto the back-burner, at least until Longhorn is developed. 9:04:00 AM

	Wednesday, July 16, 2003

my flirtation with EverCrack So things have been kind of busy at work. Then I am embarrassed to mention that EverQuest has just been released for the Mac and that I have wasted many an hour on that game. I have decided that although EverQuest has some good points, it is diabolically designed to be the biggest addictive timesink, even more so than Lineage. Furthermore, although I like all the different class/race combinations which EverQuest offers, this makes for some very specialized characters which can’t function well outside of a group. And although group adventuring can be fun – especially when it’s only with Mac users – it seems that finding a good group which plays at an appropriate time (in terms of hour of the day/night as well as duration) is very challenging. So having sampled it, I won’t be planning EverQuest. I will continue to play Lineage in moderation. Music: Liz Phair, Liz Phair, Little Digger 12:07:06 AM

	Wednesday, June 11, 2003

random silliness - Strong Bad emails on Homestar Runner Today I was doing some systems librarian stuff - basically updating some people's privileges in the library system. I was reminded of Strong Bad's privileges email. Homestar Runner is the weirdest site. Some of the Strong Bad emails are hilarious. There are some silly games, which I'm not really into - although there's something about Trogdor which appeals to me. This is a twisted retro-style game where you are a dragon who is supposed on stomp on hapless peasants. Squash enough serfs and you get to burninate the entire village! There are some short cartoons - the King of Town special edition being my favourite. Watch the normal version first, then listen to Strong Bad's commentary. 12:20:08 AM