In my pursuit of procrastination (I’m supposed to be writing supplementary [summer resit] examinations) I’ve been through my feeds and am now watching Stephanie Booth’s excellent Google Tech Talk on Localization (which incidentally is a trickier problem than most English speakers realise). Whilst listening, I was following the links to Stephanie’s blog Climb to the Stars and from there to her del.icio.us link collection and discovered a useful tip. She bookmarks links to the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) record for the films that she’s seen and tags them films seen cinema , films seen dvd, etc.

You may have heard about the BBC’s plans to release iPlayer which will allow license fee payers to watch BBC programs on their computers. Unfortunately, the system is targeted at Windows and uses Microsoft Media Player and Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect the content. While the use of some form of DRM to protect the content seems to me eminently sensible (I don’t see how the BBC, which outsources most of its production, could offer any form of Video on Demand (VOD) without protecting the Artistic Property of itself and its partners), the choice of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Media Player and Microsoft DRM does potentially disenfranchise a small but significant minority of computer users.

In a knowing echo to Edward R. Murrow’s indictment of Senator Joe McCarthy (recently immortalized in George Clooney’s film film), Keith Olbermann has used the closing of his eve-of-July 4thMSNBC Countdown program (link includes video) to publicly castigate the current President and Vice President of the United States – suggesting that they both resign. To paraphrase the tag line: “I didn’t vote for him,” [John Wayne referring to JFK] once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.

Tom Johnson strkes a chord with his latest [blog](http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2007/07/03/motiviations-for-switching-from-desktop-to-online-tools/) posting on [i’d rather be writing](http://www.idratherbewriting.com) wherein he talks about moving from desktop to online tools. Here’s his list which of tools, many of which I find I am already using (but not exclusively yet): - Instead of Microsoft Outlook, use Gmail. - Instead of FeedDemon, use Google Reader. - Instead of Microsoft Word, use Google Docs and Spreadsheets (if only!). - Instead of to-do lists and other notes stored on Word documents, use Mediawiki Todoist and Dokuwiki.

I’ve been reading a lot recently about Yahoo! Pipes so I thought I’d give it a try myself. I created a simple feed aggregator by merging the RSS feeds for my Google reader starred items, del.icio.us, and the RSS feed for this blog together and output as a new feed. I had to do some minor manipulation, for example to remove duplicates (which you get when you star, bookmark or link-blog the same item) and to sort the merged feeds into descending order of publication date.

In a follow-up to his blog article on Digital Media (reported in my article about serendipity), OU Educational Technologist Tony Hirst has used the web 2.0 site SplashCast to mash up a presentation with the cited videos. Here’s Tony’s blog article, and here is the presentation. The end result serves both as an interesting introduction to the educational possibilities of digital media and an interesting case study of what can be done with access to video sharing sites and the web.

Seen in today’s Guardian is news of the impending July 27th release of the BBC’s new content-on-demand iPlayer. Unfortunately, acording to the article and Guardian blogger Bobbie Johnson, it won’t run on Vista which adds it to a growing list of essential software (which includes Quicktime and iTunes) which won’t run on my newly upgraded laptop. Still, we still have XP on the computer at home so next time we miss an episode of Dalziel and Pascoe because of a recording clash on the Sky+ box, all will not be lost!

It’s not technology related, but the arrival of new Gordon Brown as new PM, ought to be marked somehow, even if a day late! My personal Brown story: I was once within three feet of Gordon in the ticket hall of the Paddington Station underground. He was in the opposition then, so got around using public transport. I don’t suppose he’d remember me. (image originally published on the BBC news web site.

So we’re all agreed. Blogs: good; email: bad. Wikis: good; sending round attachments to a dozen people and then having to merge all the changes by hand afterwards: bad. This one goes out to all my colleagues who really do want to send out attachments by email and merge changes manually. (No, I tell a lie, they want to send out printouts of documents and merge red-lined versions back into the electronic documents manually!

Just published by Lee LeFever on the CommonCraft site is a new “paper works” video on Web 2.0. This time its social networking: which apparently is all about finding a life partner or finding a job. Since, in my case, I’m happy with both, I fear that social networking has little to offer. Still, enjoy the video. Comments: AJCann - Apr 4, 2010 Yeh, English is a bitch, ain’t it? (Just noticed I made exactly thre same known error in an email I sent).

Following a link in Stefan Tilkov’s blog to another blog entry by John Lam which claims that Rails has been ported to JavaScript by Steve Yegge of Google, I came across this intriguing article by Mr Yegge published back in February. He gives a lot of hints but doesn’t actually name the NBL: but from the speculation in the comments and now this announcement, it looks like it might have been JavaScript!

### Serendipity: or the fundamental interconnectedness of all things > [The World Wide Web is] the only thing I know of whose shortened form — www — takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for. – Douglas Adams When reading [my river of news](http://crispyj2.blogspot.com/2007/06/day-in-20-life-part-2.html), I often come across interesting cross-links and related ideas. (I guess because I am reading lots of sources there are *bound *to be some that are related.