It looks like the new version of Microsoft Word will support blog publishing. It certainly makes sense. Word is about writing (allegedly) and so are blogs. But one has to wonder at the timing of the announcement. Beta 2 seems awfully late for something so obvious and so likely to bring blogging to a mass audience. Could it be that Microsoft are responding to Google’s acquisition of Writely and its blog front-end features?
Building a web application is expensive, right? You need designers, developers, branding, testing, trademarks and loads of other stuff that you haven’t even thought of. Wrong! Ryan Carson shares his experience of building DropSend in this excellent MP3. Total cost? Under £30,000. Less than a lot of developers get paid in a year.
A lot of the buzz about web 2.0 and web application development has focused on technology and process rather than the business case, so it’s really refreshing to hear someone talking honestly about the costs of development and offering advice on sticking to a budget. Gems include:
And it’s always great to hear Americans say ‘quid’ (I don’t know why, but it just sounds so incongruous).
Who else would throw in a complimentary T-shirt with their hardware? Such a simple (and cheap) thing to do, but guaranteed to raise a smile, turn the mundane experience of opening a box with a server in it into something a bit more memorable and provide a walking advert for your products.
No suprises that there was controversy at the world air guitar championships. It’s too brash; there’s too much spandex and not enough craft. I’d suggest something a little more refined. Air banjo or air sitar championships anyone?
I’ve been unable to send messages in Gmail for a couple of days now. I suspect it may be a timezones problem – they’re working on the system out-of-hours in California which means that functionality is unavailable in Europe during the day.
Not being able to send a message is a big pain, but I’ve been really impressed with Gmail otherwise.
The missus dug it up on Friday and we left it out to dry. Yesterday it went into a frying pan with some onions, mushrooms, liquidised red pepper, chilli powder and tinned tomatoes for a basic tomato sauce. Tasty!
It’s probably the easiest thing I’ve ever grown. In Autumn you plant cloves from a shop-bought garlic bulb into compost in a pot. I can’t remember how deep it has to go, but experiment. And that’s it – you just leave it to grow. A thick, spring onion-like stalk will develop and flower around July. When the flower dies pick it, leave it to dry, then remove the stalk and roots and you’re there, ready to stink the kitchen out.
Anyone in England can’t have helped but notice the appearance of thousands of England flags on the cars in our streets. As usual, Private Eye has it spot on.
In educational technology circles the talk used to be about VLEs (virtual learning environments) that brought together content, assessment, discussion and personalisation. This was the future and would improve learning. There was lots of money floating about so everyone went out and bought or (in some cases) built a system. And then they realised that these systems needed to talk to other systems and that universities weren’t just about learning and thus the phrase managed learning environment (or MLE) was born. But no-one really seems to know what an MLE is? Unlike CRM or intranets there are no distinct products that will give you an MLE. IT departments tend to deal in products, rather than concepts and so I wonder if Jisc’s notion of an MLE is actually doing more harm than good.
From the Independent:
Britain’s largest tobacco company has been testing chocolate and alcohol-flavoured cigarettes, which campaigners say are aimed at enticing children to smoke.
Let me be clear that while I think this is disgusting it seems a natural step for the tobacco companies. After all, we already have flavoured alcohol drinks aimed at a young market. What’s truly scary is British American Tobacco’s nonchalence towards the affair.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an album cover that has made me laugh out loud – until now.
I was in the record shop looking for The Zutons, and the assistant suggested I might like All Night Radio’s Spirit Stereo Frequency. Here’s the cover (courtesy of Amazon):
This is what happens when you give hippies access to technology. Either beautiful or terrifying (or funny) depending on your point of view.