Australia’s world first ’smoke free’ city: and that could be the South Australian capital city, Adelaide. Only for a day though.
The Tobacco Products Regulation (A Smoke-Free Adelaide) Amendment Bill 2007 would ban smoking in Adelaide for at least one day of the year, with maximum penalties of $200 to go to the Cancer Council.
A kind of smokers’ version of Earth Hour possibly? +
Designing for the Sake of Usability: what does the term “web design” mean to you?
If you’re like me, the term generally opens the mind’s eye to different color schemes, different layout choices, and a host of other elements that shape and form the way a website looks. However, the more I learn about design and information architecture, the more I realize that perhaps both the architecture and appearance play equal roles in web design.
It’s not just design, it’s web design. +
Of Knol and the web: another week, another announcement by Google some new something-or-other. John Allsopp provides an informative dissection of the latest… initiative, Knol.
To huge fanfare, Google this week announced Knol. We really know little about it, other than what we might glean from a single blog post by Udi Manber, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, which hasn’t stopped breathless coverage in mainstream media and the blogosphere alike.
If I have it right, finding what we are looking for online may become easier, but will what we find be actually be useful, helpful, authorative, impartial, unbiased… +
Why faces are better than Facebook: it seems social networking is not so hot in continental Europe.
The obsession with Facebook, MySpace, Friends Reunited and other social networking sites is not exclusively British, but there is far less interest in them in France, Italy, Spain and even Germany. While the average adult Briton spends 5.3 hours a month on one of these sites, the average French person spends two hours, German, 3.1, and Italian 1.8.
Apparently continental Europeans tend to spend more of their lives in close proximity to their place of birth, rather than moving “nomadically” around their home country, or even abroad, to study and/or work.
Living within a limited geographic area makes social connections longer lasting. The friends you played with when you were five will be around when you are in secondary school and writing your essays at university. By the time you start working, even if you move home, your social web is a strong, supportive one.
The ties that bind… +
It really is spam: from the Akismet blog.
Back when spamming started it was a very crude business. Comments left would consist of many links around one subject - “Buy my porn” or “Buy my pills.” These posts were very obviously spam and blog owners deleted them when they saw them. At some point the spammers changed tactics.
Now spammers play the flattery card, and tend to say something like:
Hi, you have a jolly good post here, thanks for the good read
It seems some people are taking the bait though and believe the comment is bona fide. While such comments are just about always flagged as spam here, you only have look at, not follow, the “commenters” URL to get the measure of the comment.
What gets me of late though is the way some spammers are leaving, say, Google’s URL as their homepage address. What’s the point in that? They won’t sell many of their fabulous pills or porn doing that surely… +
