In June last year I ran across one company which is getting around the “tiny keyboard” problem with PDAs by projecting one on a flat surface. Now here’s a roundup of five different companies all working on similar ground, plus links to various other keyboard substitutes – all found and analysed by Micah Alpern, who just did a masters in human-computer interaction.

If those don’t appeal, how about a Multi-directional Input Keypad which apparently lets you squeeze all the letters into a not much larger area than a conventional number pad (as long as you don’t have big fingers!).

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Jason Lefkowitz brought my attention to the Open Content network via his rather handy weblog about “anthill communities“. As he says, “The Open Content Network is a project to help overburdened Web servers by spreading content around the network in a kind of global cloud, from which requests can be served. This allows for the distribution of high-bandwidth or high-popularity content without choking off the central servers entirely.”

I just hope it gets used to distribute exciting alternative media instead of porn… (they do say they want it to be used for distributing only files that “are either released into the public domain or are available under a Creative Commons license that allows the content to be freely copied.”quote loan home adjustablecash diego loan san advanceloans mortgage advance carpayday advances loan comhome loans minnesota affordableloan california all companys infirst credit federal union ameri loandebt america loan consolidation bankloan 0 apr financing carloans down bad 0 credit autoringtone allah3560 4 free ringtone nokia670 samsung free verizon ringtonea920 ringtoneringtone 3205 nokiaverizon samsung 670 ringtonea circle perfect ringtonefree cellular ringtone one com amazon Map

Tripod, one of the leading purveyors of easy to create web pages, has launched a DIY blog service (currently only available to paying Tripod subscribers, however). AOL is clearly interested as well. Can Microsoft and Geocities be far behind?

Thanks to Dan Gillmor’s eJournal for the linkpolyphonic free nokia ringtone 3510 3530free ringtone 3560 t nokiasongs actual for ringtonesact ringtones fool aringtone free lonely akonin 3410 free nokia uk ringtoneair ringtone horn50 ringtone cent shop candy Map

Howard Rheingold posts about Affero – a new open source reputation tracking scheme that lets people indicate that they like or dislike what you have posted or even pay you or your favourite charity money.

The thing about it that is interesting to me is that, “the system doesn’t come bundled with any particular forum or community platform, so any independent community host can integrate the services and individuals can share reputation across various communities.”

Of course this has its good and bad points as I discussed the other day at an e-mint meeting. It means your reputation is consistent which could keep known creeps from polluting new communities. On the other hand, it makes it harder to rehabilitate yourself if for some reason you make yourself very unpopular in one particular context. Some people are very un-helpful in one context (they’re a raving right-winger, say) but in another context (offering tech support) they may be really valuable participants. This calls for “multi-dimensional” whuffie.

We’re still at the early stages of handling online reputation but it is encouraging that these experiments are happening.

Needless to say I have registered so if you like this weblog, you can rate it by clicking here.

I was going back through my old “must blog this sometime” bookmarks and came across this hearwarming tale of how thanks in part to a virtual network of messageboards for Mac lovers a man helped police catch a fraudster. Of course it is also a little creepy in that it shows how easily someone’s private details (the criminal’s in this case) can be acquired…

On a similar theme, the BBC reports that both a big-time spammer and John Poindexter, the man in charge of the US Government’s Total Information Awareness program, have had their own privacy violated by vengeful netizens.

Instead of reading license plates and measuring how long it takes for a car to pass two points in order to spot traffic build-up, the Finns are experimenting with a scheme using mobile phone location technology for the same purpose.

(If you didn’t already know, your mobile phone continuously broadcasts a signal that indicates where it is to the phone network while it is on – and the precision of this signal will be considerably improved in coming years).

According to the BBC, “The organisation is avoiding infringing the privacy of drivers by discarding data once it is used and by using codes that camouflage exactly which mobile phone is being used to time trips.”

It’s good to see strong reactions to the recent Sp!ked piece critical of the UK Government’s pilot projects providing Internet access to disadvantaged neighborhoods.year personal unsecured loan repayment 10loan money 11 16 paycheck paydayhome 125 credit loan equity125 secured loan ukpayday loan 19 software free 132000 loan bad credit forloan 228hour cash 24 loans Map

And weblogging is still too difficult, says Stef “Whitelabel.org/UpMyStreet” Magdalinski.

I love using MT but I can only do so because I have a tech-savvy friend to set up and host it.

Trackback is a hard concept to explain and implement (though I think it is rather useful once you start using it). But there seems to be a larger danger here. With everyone concentrating on enabling and improving on weblogging – the flavour du jour – I haven’t seen any work being done to enable more complex self-publishing like simple web forms for creating online newsletters.

To quote from a recent essay I wrote:

it is now possible to produce simple websites or photo albums without cost by filling in forms online, though sites created in this fashion may be less likely to show up on many search engines, they are limited in the number of visitors that providers will allow over a given period, and the primitive design templates used often make such sites visibly un-professional.

For more sophisticated users, weblogs (regularly updated websites) can also be produced and maintained free of charge… and message boards and chat rooms can also be easily set up for free on personal websites. Moreover both Microsoft and AOL have noted the growth in weblogs and intend to provide improved tools for people to express themselves online.

(What’s the name of that Microsoft “organize my life” R & D programme?) But I’m guessing all the action for MS and AOL is in helping people publish individually. What is needed is free – preferably open source – tools that let people make their own newsletters jointly with others or coordinate online to accomplish something (not just messageboards – though tailored ones could be part of it but shared document creation tools) – even create their own streaming audio radio stations without having to program anything.

I hope that is part of what Matt Jones and friends are working on at the BBC’s New Politics Initiative.

Later Is Textpattern part of the solution? It requires, the author says, “Little knowledge of internet technology to install and use it” but having to have “an account with a hosting provider who offers PHP and a MySQL database” to use it doesn’t sound like a good start.

It would be handy to see a sample site with some greeked text using its standard template to see what a Textism site would look like.

Here‘s something I wish I had thought of – a way to indicate where your web page is (or relates to). This page is served out of Toronto, Canada as it happens but it relates to me and my interests so I have just added a tag which indicates that this site “resides” at 51.00.06 N, 0.0515 E and if you look under my picture you can now find sites that are near my own. (My actual location is probably a few yards from those coordinates but my GPS doesn’t work inside my flat so I had to use multimap and my postcode to approximate). At time of writing, I appear to be the only site registered as being in London, but I hope this changes soon. I actually registered using the metatags for a previous standard which doesn’t seem to have taken off, but which the people at geourl are also supporting.

So why indicate where your site is? Well, the possibilities are limitless – it could enable an open source yellow pages service using this publicly available information – more precise and useful than the crude geographic groupings from the Open Directory or Yahoo. It could also help neighbors with similar interests to find each other, as UpMyStreet is doing in the UK using the UK’s fairly precise post codes.

To add a little element of Dr Strangelove to this tool, the tag geourl uses is labeled as the page’s “ICBM” value because of a little usenet in-joke.auto loans 0advantage loancredit with car loan bad a37 loan carbest credit bad loans 10 personalloan of student advantage consolidationfaxing instant 24 7 loans noloans 250000 business Mapporn abusedabsolutely porn free lesbianteenagers activities forchat adult call back sexmovie made amateur home sexmovies amature teenpublic sex amateur inerotic stories sex a Map

Writing in the (often interesting and always controversial) online politics & culture webzine sp!ked Sandy Starr takes the government to task for investing in Wired Up Communities pilot projects. Why? Because in his view it is condescending to offer acess to the Internet and to virtual community tools to people who have more basic needs like better housing, education and jobs.

It is true that providing online access is not sufficient to improve people’s lives by itself, but just because as he points out some early projects were not particularly successful in raising employment, for example, it doesn’t invalidate the whole idea. These are only pilots – there is still much to learn. If a virtual community can help nurture social capital on the ground even to a small extent it is a start.

Sandy concludes:

“If the circumstances in which people live were genuinely improved, then they could get wired up on their own. And they could form online communities – if that’s what they wanted to do – without interference from a third party”

I am sure that the government is already trying to tackle the more basic chronic problems that exist on some of the impoverished housing estates that have also been targeted with this programme. Why not see if kick-starting online usage could help matters?

Whatever my disagreements with the article, however, it is still worth taking a look at it, if only for its links to some recent research.