Author and futurist Arthur C Clarke is credited with predicting the emergence of a number of technologies, including a tablet-like device called a "Newspad", which could serve the latest news stories from electronic versions of newspapers. So far more has been said about comparing the Newspad to PDAs or Tablet PCs, but the Newpad also worked in a very similar way to ... Read full entry

Better Feed Reading While you're reading this, what am I doing? Going through all my RSS feeds most likely. Just today I was thinking about how to manage it all, when I saw this post by Tim Bray, suggesting a solution close to what I'd thought about. For years, Dave Winer has been preaching the virtues of the "River of News" approach to feed-reading: let it all ... Read full entry

Riddle me this: why are there no spam or trolls on Twitter? Answer: Because it's rather like an RSS feed - you choose to read it - and nobody so far has worked out how to spam a feed. I wonder if that is really so? (The bit about Twitter being troll free, not the bit about spamming a RSS feed)

Ad nauseam: Facebook users to cop the hard sell. Here we go then. "The Facebook free ride is over as the social network now seeks to turn its 50-million-strong user base into an army of viral marketers." I'd like to see what they pull out of the hat though, there may be a monetising cue or two for bloggers to follow... Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation at A List ... Read full entry

DWWS Facebook group: that is Designing With Web Standards. If you're a web designer who works with web standards (and you should be), and are interested in networking with other like minded designers, this Facebook group could be for you. Following Instructions to the Letter: this is what you want? This is what you get! The rise of Wordpress for 'Non-Blogs': not all Wordpress powered website are blogs, ... Read full entry

Mac OS X Web browser rundown 2007: we all know Internet Explorer isn't the only browser for the Windows platform (nor is it by any means the best), but I was quite surprised by the number of browsers Mac (Apple) users have at their disposal, aside from the usual suspects, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. This is what happens when you no longer run a PC and Mac side ... Read full entry

This is interesting. When reading is bad for you, by Megan Tough at Flying Solo. Reading has an insidious way of filling all the cracks in our day. If we are reading, we can tell ourselves that we are actually working. In fact, there's a good chance we are simply wasting time. I guess it depends who exactly needs to be reading, and what it is they are reading. Extensive ... Read full entry

I may not be a luddite, but there's no denying disassociated.com is pretty lo-tech. There's a definite lack of gidgets and widgets, twitter chat boxes, and whatever other uber cool web apps, going on around here. Deciding to migrate disassociated.com to the Wordpress blogging platform (how do you like my IT speak?) was like a "giant leap", after almost ten years of using static XHTML templates ... Read full entry

Ok so it turns out there were a few minor glitches with the import database that I used to transfer my past blog posts here, and after some exhaustive checking discovered eight posts had not made it on to the final version of the live Wordpress database. I hasten to add this was my fault and nothing to do with the database import method I used. Upon closer ... Read full entry