PTP Blog

the skype system seems to have given me the boot - can’t login, website doesn’t recognize my username/email address combo to send me a new password - all very odd.

So, I’m available via Gizmo, which is rapidly becoming my favorite VoIP client.

The Skype strangeness is really quite strange - the only thing I can imagine is that my account was somehow wiped from their system, even though it still sort of seems to be there. The folks at Skype have to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen if they are serious about moving from dinky voice IM client to credible communications platform.

Of course, this little Skype hiccup that I’m experiencing could be an indication that concerns about the demise of Skype are correct - check out Om Malik’s blog (VoIP topic) for more Skype rantings that I can summarize here.

In People Power Vs Google, Om Malik asks if “a people’s collective be able to beat Google at the search game?”

Now, before anyone gets too excited, he’s not really talking about a people’s collective (as an aside - why is organizing and counter-culture lingo so popular these days?), at least not in any way that you or I would understand it, but he is talking about the merging of invidual web site tagging and search.

The big question is whether any of the new search ideas deliver a better, faster, more relevant search results and do so in way that’s so easy to use that folks drop Google.

As Om Malik points out, Google’s business model is a strong disincentive for further improvements in search, and let’s face it, Microsoft is no more interested in more effective search than Google - they just want our eyeballs to look at their ads, not Google’s; Yahoo is in the same camp. So, if anyone is going to dethrone the big search sites, it’s going to come from “the people.”

We’ll see.

I’m writing this using a new Firefox extension: Performancing for Firefox..

Performanicing is a WYSIWYG blog editing tool.  And from the look of it, is really quite nice compared to some of the other blogging tools available for Firefox and/or Windows.

I’ve also been looking at the Xinha Here extension which turns a text area in a web form into a rich text editor, so we’ll see how these two roughly equivalent (ok, not really) extension stack up over the next few days.

Now if only I could figure out how to plug Performancing into a wiki, that would be very cool.

I don’t actually know why I’m posting this here.This article gives the impression that it’s only (presumably) white Australians who are using SMS to instigate racial attacks. The report that I heard on NPR earlier in the week suggested that SMS was being used widely by all parties to coordinate action.

Really, I think it’s a sad, but not surprising reminder that technology can serve positive and negative ends with equal ease.

Punt is a Open Source multi-language Windows desktop application that allows the user to view the terrain of any world in 3D. Using open standards Punt can make use of data from the Internet combined with local data in common GIS-compatible formats.

oh my. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should:

3 UK is touting a new video-call service where subscribers can dial into a live camera… in a pen full of turkeys

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