Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

In a truce in the browser wars, Microsoft has agreed with Mozilla that the standard browser icon for RSS will be the friendly orange button from Firefox...

I’m excited to announce that we’re adopting the icon used in Firefox. John and Chris were very enthusiastic about allowing us (and anyone in the community) to use their icon. This isn’t the first time that we’ve worked with the Mozilla team to exchange ideas and encourage consistency between browsers, and we’re sure it won’t be the last.

Apparently the Mozilla folk are happy for anyone to use it - so let's hope we see Opera and Safari pick up on the Mozilla move. After all, there's one thing that's good for the web, and that's consistent semiotics.

<rant text ="And it's not that annoying and incorrect XML icon that certain people want everyone to use. RSS - and ATOM - are XML languages. The relationship between XML and the web is much bigger than just content syndication, and it shouldn't be trivialised in a misleading orange blob." />

Need to get folk to meet at a specific place? The Transport For London Journey Planner is a useful site, but it's not easy to link to it from your web pages. At least that used to be the case...

You can now add a button to blog postings (and web pagers) that will allow you to link to a preset Journey Planner search.

In true Blue Peter fashion, here's one I made earlier that will navigate you from anywhere in London to The London Eye.



Useful, and so easy to set up. Highly recommended.

[Update: nmg recommends Transport Direct as a service for planning travel outside the metropolis.]

Phishing mail in my spam trap, headed "2006 Barclays Security Update.". So far so good. (Hint to phishers, I don't bank with Barclays, so any mail like that is going to be ignored. The social engineering skills of these mass mailers, pah. In my day...)

Anyway, the message went on to read:

Dear customers:

Wells Fargo is proud to announce about their end of the year Upgrade. We updated our new SSL servers to give our customers a better, fast and secure online banking service as soon as the new year begins, (2006).

Due to the recent update of the servers, you are requested to please update your account info at the following link.

[phishing links deleted, even though I know none of my readers would click on them - but it's not worth giving the scum even one drip of my meagre Googlejuice]

Thank you,

Wells Fargo - Online Banking

Hmm. Since when did Barclays become part of Wells Fargo?

Note to phishers: when editing someone else's phishing mail, edit more than the headers and the URIs. Or at least get some understanding of the international banking market...

Doh.

Web 2.0 aficionados talk about the two way web.

They're just reinventing history - Tim Berners-Lee's original specifications allowed web-hosted documents to be rewritten on the fly, then WebDAV promised a universal file system based on web protocols. We'll gloss over the PR problems Microsoft had when it introduced public annotation tools for Internet Explorer.

Now we have Google's Blogger Web Comments plug in for Firefox, which does much the same as Microsoft's annotations tools, but this time ties things into their Blogger blogging platform. It compares the URL of the page you're on with links posted on Blogger blogs, and pops up a little floating window showing recent blog postings. It's unfortunate, as Google could have worked with Technorati or PubSub to develop a better database of linking pages - using Blogger only is limiting, considering the number of sites hosted on LJ or Moveable Type or TypePad or WordPress or A.N.Other blogging tool. They could have even used their own blog search engine...

It's interesting seeing what people are talking about as you browse news sites or popular blogs - however, with this tool you never forget that you're only hearing part of the conversation.

It's a pity.

This isn't the two way web we were promised - it's more like the one and a bit way web.

And the bit isn't very much at all.

What with Yahoo!'s current acquisition spree, buying Flickr and del.icio.us, and now that they're working with Six Apart to provide a business blogging service, what are the odds that they buy Six Apart (and thus LJ) sometime in 2006?

Their VC's are going to want to cash out soon. It's been, what, 2 years since they put their money in. And Six Apart are, like Yahoo!, a Bay Area company.

Baseless speculation, of course, but I don't think I'd want to risk any money betting against it.