Words of Waldman

eBay: even the anarchists' online marketplace

A brief glimpse to another world today, when someone showed me Anarchy Online a massive multi-player game. Completely not my thing (frankly, my gaming stopped with Street Fighter 2). The game itself is of no interest to me...but what's fascinating is the fact that people now buy and sell the credits you earn from playing the game (and which allow you to buy weapons and armour, and take months of playing to build up) for real cash on eBay. A quite spectacular collision of real and virtual worlds. Apparently you get booted off if you get caught trading. Anarchy by name....free market by nature, it seems.

World Spy: a recent convert writes..

Late as ever to catch anything...I stumble across the brilliant collection of neologisms that is The Word Spy after kottke reveals it's been turned into a book.
Particularly like: mucus trooper (MYOO.kus troo.pur) n. An employee with a cold or the flu who insists on showing up for work.

My endless scramble to be better organised...

...has led me to trying WikiPad (after seeing a link on LinkMachineGo). It's a standalone app, which as its name suggests combined the functionality of a notepad and a wiki. Very clever, although whether it will pass the novelty stage...I'm not yet sure. Would love a print or export to text function. I'm still waiting for V2.0 of Keynote.

In praise of Feed Demon

I've played around with pretty much every Windows compatible RSS reader now for a while, and frankly it just hasn't worked for me.
I like Bloglines as a service, but it's a bit clunky. And it's nice that Oddpost provides an RSS reader; as I'm sure this is the way we're heading - but it too is a little difficult to use.
Anyway, have finally got FeedDemon installed at work. Very nice indeed. At last a reader I can really work with. Although, I'm still uncertain whether I'll be using it in a month or so.
My one flaw, is that I'd ideally like to keep my profile online, so that I can move from home to work with the same feeds, and saved stories etc. A minor grumble.
Have also tried Gush from 2entwine - which seems to be very clever - combining IM and blogging - but had a few bugs/shortcomings in when it came to basic stuff like organising your feeds.

Strange google result..

My google referrers become stranger and stranger. While I'm slightly bemused to find myself at number 1 for iPod Battery Life (up from number 3...and frankly, there are much better places to go to find out about this), and number four for Jodie Marsh (come on...I've mentioned her once, in passing...). I'm now number 1 for 'The Strokes Anti Semitic'.
It's strange that I'm at the top ...but why was anyone searching for this anyway? Have I missed something? Are they? Does anyone think they are?
Meanwhile, I'm very glad to have fallen completely off the scale for Hitler (at one point, I was number 4...which frankly is a ranking I can do without).

Back on a Mac

After 10 years, I'm back on a Mac. My laptop is in the menders, so work has very kindly loaned me an iBook. Unfortunately, it's not OSX, so it's not quite your all singing all dancing wondermachine. And rather annoyingly Typepad comes out rather weird in IE5....so I've had to switch to Opera...which means I lose all the text formatting buttons.
It's nice to be back, and physically the iBook is great to type on...but, you know, I'm kind of missing XP.
Still now I've got a laptop back in the house, normally early morning blogging service can be resumed.
Oh, and I really miss not having a Mac version of Bloggar or Zempt.

Zempt vs Bloggar

I've always thought w.bloggar was one of the great works of genius. Unfortunately, it doesn't deal with titles and categories, so following a recommendation on the Unofficial Typepad resources, I've switched to Zempt. Because of titles and categories, it's better for writing from scratch, but isn't quite as elegant as bloggar and you can't edit previous posts. So, I'm using Zempt to write, and bloggar to edit. Which works surprisingly well (I find working in the browser templates really clumsy).
Someone's built a little 'Zempt this' IE context menu, for those who like that sort of thing. (Might be slightly quicker than the Typepad quickpost)
Oh - and neither of them let you post to your QuickLists (now, I'm deep in Typepad talk). Anyway - enough blogging about blogging....
UPDATE Actually, Bloggar does do titles and categories, you just have to set the blog tool to 'MT' not 'Custom' in the account settings panel. Although...when I do that, it seems I cant' edit old posts. Back to square one.

Guardian and Observer put digital editions into beta

Don't normally talk about work on here...but in case you're interested, we've just put the Guardian and Observer digital editions into beta today. They're digital facsimiles of the paper, and will ultimately be paid for. Feel free to take a look and tell me what you think.

Losing privacy for better prices..

The Economist from a couple of weeks ago on the increase in discriminatory pricing as a result of the internet, and the llink with our ever diminishing privacy. Based on this paper, which says:

The Internet offers the possibility of unprecedented privacy. According to the famous 1993 Pat Steiner cartoon in The New Yorker, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." But in practice, there are many who not only know you are a dog, but are familiar with your age, breed, illnesses, and tastes in dogfood. The Internet offers not only the possibility of unprecedented privacy, but also of unprecedented loss of privacy, and so far privacy has been losing.

Forget iTunes for windows, voice recorders and image viewers...I want an iPod that does this...

Tried iTunes for Windows..and it looked very pretty and all...but in the end, had to change it, because I've got two separate sets of MP3s, one on a desktop and the other on a laptop. And actually, a combination of Musicmatch for ripping and library sorting and Ephpod for synching works just fine.
Obviously, all will be different when they launch the music shop over here. But till then.... iTunes is off my machines.
And while I'm at it...think they're slighly mad to be working on all these extra goodies for the iPod. An image viewer...in black and white? As it is, the battery life is much worse than anyone would like because (so we hear) they have tried to kludge a half arsed PDA into it.
Stick to the knitting. Make sure it's the best digital music machine on the market.
Oh, and then just add a DAB radio, preferably with the rewind and record functionality of the Roberts RD1 (pic right). Without increasing the price, of course.