A couple of TED 2010 highlights that I stumbled on today. First Tim Berners-Lee reports on year one of his “More Data Now” campaign. Next I finally got around to watching Gary Flake on the data visualization features of Microsoft Livelabs Pivot (which I first saw reported on Swansea Yammer network a few weeks ago). Try to find 30 minutes to watch all three videos then reflect like I did on what might be possible when Pivot and linked data colide!

This last week or so I’ve been watching a lot of Yahoo! YUI Theatre videos on JavaScript, starting with Douglas Crockford’s excellent five-part series Crockford on JavaScript and ending yesterday with Christian Heillman’s inspiring talk on YQL and YUI. This has inspired me to explore how I can use YUI (a JavaScript library) in the next version of my Proman dissertation project management application which will be needed for 2010-2011 allocation round in May.

This last week or so I’ve been watching a lot of Yahoo! YUI Theatre videos on JavaScript, starting with Douglas Crockford’s excellent five-part series Crockford on JavaScript and ending yesterday with Christian Heillman’s inspiring talk on YQL and YUI. This has inspired me to explore how I can use YUI (a JavaScript library) in the next version of my Proman dissertation project management application which will be needed for 2010-2011 allocation round in May.

Just a quick post to tell you about a new (to me) social network notification service called ping.fm. Just by connecting to your favourite services you can update them all from a single web site. I’m using it in the HEFCW Peer Support project to post messages to Ning, Facebook and Twitter. Many other services are available including LinkedIn, Yammer, Flickr, Posterous, Blogger, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. Other features: - You can also distinguish between micro-blogging, status updates and blogging, - ping.

Today I got a reminder from Google that the annual domain registration for my semi-defunct Google Apps account was due. Having also seen a service email from Blogger.com telling me that FTP support was being withdrawn and suggesting that I consider using a custom domain, I thought I’d take the opportunity to renew my domain and use it to host this blog. Sort of like a vanity plate for the Internet age!

Sometimes you stumble upon things on the web that are quite breathtaking in their simple cleverness and sheer elegance. I discovered one such resource today while reading the current draft of what may well become a seminal text on the emerging HTML5 standard. Chapter 2 of Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into HTML5 is all about supporting the transition as browsers start to support the new HTML5 elements canvas, video, local storage, web workers, offline web pages, geolocation, input types, placeholder text, form auto focus and microdata.

A new BBC/Open University documentary series on the World Wide Web started last Friday on BBC 2. It is called “The Virtual Revolution” and is hosted by Guardian Technology journalist Dr Aleks Krotoski. It is interesting not so much for its technical depth (which quite frankly is quite shallow) but for its introduction to the social/political/commercial issues surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web. Plus it has interviews with many of the pioneers and entrepreneurs who were involved in its development.

Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2010. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments.

I found this fascinating quote today. Regarding TurnitIn: Recycling and repurposing of text online is becoming so ubquituous that the noise is casuing a problem in the interpretation of originality reports. They used to save us time in investigating cases of plagiarism, now I’m not so sure.Nick Sharratt, DrBadgr, Nov 2009 As we are about to use TurnitIn for dissertation theses, this arrives as a timely warning!

Yesterday I installed Windows 7 on a virtual machine on a MacBook Pro with no problems (see previous post). Today I’m attempting to do the same thing on my office desktop. Yesterday I ran the compatibility checker and no real problems were found. Today, at around 10.00 am, I stated the upgrade from Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional and it’s still not finished. First I had to remove Zone Alarm.

This is a screen-grab from my new MacBook Pro and it’s running Windows 7 in a OS/X window. It’s not magic, it’s the free open-source VirtualBox virtualizer from Sun Microsystems. At less than half the price of Parallels! It works. It took no time to set up. And it means that I can continue to run some of the essential windows-only software (such as Camtasia Studio), Windows Live Writer, etc, during my transition from PC pragmatist to Mac Zealot.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve started getting comment spam attacks on this blog via my comments stream. There’ll be comment like “I visited your blog and I’ve saved to read later” from a (presumably) bogus user. But the comment will include a number of links to dubious services. I use Disqus for my comment handling and I’ve had to gradually turn up the moderation settings so that now all comments have to be moderated.