Read/Write Web is pleased to bring you this special feature, an interview with software pioneer Marc Canter. Marc is one of the founding fathers of multimedia, having created tools and content in the medium since the late 70’s and early 80’s. He formed a company called MacroMind in 1984 and released products such as VideoWorks … Read more

Oh man, has it been a whole week since I lasted posted something on my weblog? I’ve actually been busy working on an upcoming special feature for Read/Write Web. Top secret. I’ll publish it early next week. So, er, that’s it for now really. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

Interesting comment from Lucas Gonze in the comments to my post regarding Lockergnome’s CSS-to-Tables re-design. Incidentally, Lockergnome is in the process of moving back to CSS – good on ya! But here’s what Lucas said about my pro-CSS rark-up, replicated in full: Lockergnome went back not because it preferred tables but because they’re not front-end specialist, and … Read more

I’ve been relatively quiet on the blogging front lately, for two reasons. Firstly I’ve been busily reading as much of Heath Row’s SXSW transcriptions as possible (thanks Heath!) – so I’ve been in Read mode rather than Write mode. But I’ve also been taking a good look at my goals for this weblog and deciding: … Read more

There’s a debate going on in the Web world about Lockergnome’s backwards conversion from a modern CSS design to a 1997-era HTML tables design. The web design community is outraged by the decision, because it’s basically a slap in the face to the Web Standards movement. Photo Matt compares table-based designs to McDonald’s food and … Read more

I’ve just finished reading a fantastic science-fiction book: Permutation City, by Greg Egan. It covers a lot of the themes that interest me – computer technology, virtual reality, avatars, evolution, alternate and parallel universes, philosophy, self-programming. Heck it even has an alien race (created by humans though). Now I realise these are not topics that … Read more

That is the revelation that hit me a couple of days ago. There is no End User in Information Flow (which is a term I am using a lot these days, along with “Bottom-Up Knowledge Management”). It took a 1997 presentation to tell me this. In the article I’m currently writing for Digital Web Magazine, … Read more

Congratulations to Peter Jackson and his team for the 11-oscar sweep! New Zealanders (all 30 of us) are currently basking in the reflected glory of Jackson’s achievement, like an escaped otter sunning itself on the deck of a student flat. Full credit though belongs to Peter Jackson and the LOTR team. The rest of us kiwis can’t … Read more

I might Go Quiet for a week or two following this post. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by blog reading and writing and maintenance. Time to set my focus back on family, work, contemplative writing (read: not seat-of-the-pants writing as blogging can get for me when Info Overload hits). Besides, I need to get stuck … Read more

Just testing my swapover to PYCS comments server. Please ignore (unless you’re Phil Pearson helping me get it set up!). Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

I’ve now swapped my comments system from Radio Userland’s comments server to the Python Community Server, developed and hosted by Phil Pearson. The reason I did this was because I’ve experienced frequent problems with Radio Userland’s comments server, causing slow downloads of my webpages and sometimes no service. This is probably caused by the large … Read more

I’ve begun the push to introduce wiki and weblog technologies into the company I work for. As I wrote in my last post, I’m aiming to enhance Information Flow within my company. There is some initial skepticism from my colleagues about wikis and weblogs, but mainly due to unfamiliarity with these tools. For example, one concern is … Read more

Dina Mehta wrote today about implementing Weblog, Wiki, IM, and other collaboration technologies into an Intranet environment, to replace an “archaic” Knowledge Management system and improve inter-office communication. I’m embarking on similar activities with the company I work for, so I’m eagar to read about others experiences. In my work, I’ve made a couple of proposals to IT mgmt … Read more

The RSS Aggregator Bloglines is starting to build a lot of whuffie on the Web and it’s justly deserved. I signed up to Bloglines at the beginning of August 2003 and at the time I raved about the benefits of having a browser-based RSS Aggregator – as opposed to the so-called “smart clients” (non-browser based … Read more

One of my goals this year is to get my writing published professionally. I called it “Paper-publishing” when I wrote down the goal at the beginning of 2004, but I include online publications in this definition as well. I’ve taken my first steps to publish a non-fiction article, by submitting a proposal to Digital Web Magazine. … Read more