some kind soul has set up dropload – you upload a single file (up to 50Mb) then an email is sent to the recipient telling them how to pick it up. Much better than trying to email it…

Telltale Weekly is a scheme which offers audio books in MP3 or Ogg format charging from $0.25 a story. After five years (or 100,000 downloads) each audio clip will be put into the public domain. It’s great way to fund the development of a public domain library. I have my doubts about whether they will get anything like enough customers to make it worthwhile but it is certainly an interesting and valuable thing to try.

Alas the list of “upcoming releases”:http://telltaleweekly.com/index.php?Show=Schedule is not very exciting – but you are encouraged to “make your own suggestion”:http://telltaleweekly.com/index.php?Show=Feedback – personally I would like to hear an English translation of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education…

I wonder if librarians could get together and give Project Gutenberg and other similar projects like this one an idea of which are the most important texts to work with? I can’t believe that what the world needs next is texts like “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction”:http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/3/4/11348/11348-h/11348-h.htm (the latest text produced by the “Distributed Proofreader”:http://www.pgdp.net/ project.

Thanks to “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/ and “Ben Hammersley”:http://www.benhammersley.com/dparchives/008110.html for the link.

Check out the “Dead Thesis Society”:http://freewebhosting.hostdepartment.com/d/deadthesissociety/resources.html which runs a “Yahoo Groups email list”:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/deadthesissociety/ for peer support and also has an excellent “resource library”:http://freewebhosting.hostdepartment.com/d/deadthesissociety/resources.html (displacement activity?). I checked out some of the humour sections – “how to tell you are a grad student”:http://www.cs.umbc.edu/www/graduate/how-to-tell.html is quite good, and I always liked the earlier, funny Matt Groening but I didn’t realise (or forgot) that he “wrote about grad school”:http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~dmirman/gradschoolhell/schoolishell.html. This one – “Why God Never Got Tenure”:http://www.stanford.edu/~smarti/Fun/godtenure.html particularly tickled me.

Thanks to Marcelo Vieta for the link

Edward Felten posted defending the way Google search results are delivered, suggesting the ‘votes of web authors’ is a fair way to determine website prominence in search. This touched off an interesting argument. As one poster pointed out, “think about how you will feel when a search on evolution brings up creationist sites explaining why evolution is wrong and evil. That’s a widespread view in the U.S., currently under-represented online but that may well change as the net penetrates more deeply into society.”

I was also struck by the comment by “Armature”:http://abstractfactory.blogspot.com/ in which he points out, “One interesting side effect of Vivisimo’s clustering of search results is that Vivisimo’s less vulnerable to tyranny of the majority than Googlocracy.”

It’s called “The Spoke”:http://www.thespoke.net/ and I heard about it via Microsoft-Watch. It’s aimed at, ‘a restless generation of designers, programmers, and inventors’. Interestingly it allows you to see only those blog entries that are on a given (pre-configured) subject-category across the whole of ‘spokespace’. It’s hard to see how that could scale up on an open service though it could be very useful across a limited domain…

Published in The New Yorker February 16, 2004

(NB you can browse all the cartoons in the New Yorker’s current issue each week “here”:http://www.cartoonbank.com/prints_currentissue.asp)

If you want to make ‘conference calls’ (calls to several people at once) you can use FreeConference.com to arrange them – but the free version uses a US non-freephone telephone number so you and your fellow freeconference users will probably still have to pay long distance charges.

Here in the UK, BT is selling “Buzz In”:http://www.bt.com/buzz-in/ which is quite a sophisticated conference calling system aimed at domestic rather than business use (doubtless to keep their business conferencing margins high!) but each participant pays 10p a minute – with long distance rates being what they are it would probably be cheaper for everyone just to call America and use FreeConference instead.

*Update:* “Voicemeeting”:http://www.voicemeeting.co.uk/ – another UK company which I just discovered – appears to work in a similar way but costs 5p per minute.

Does anyone know how to do conference calling using free Internet telephony? Of course you could always use the “free calls to the US”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_useful_web_resources.html#000967 that appear still to be available (without fanfare) via the VOIP software at “Free World Dialup”:http://www.freeworldialup.com/ but that may not last forever and it’s not a particularly elegant solution.

dodgeit lets you set up one-time-use email addresses for when you have to register for something but don’t want to get spammed – and it lets you read those emails via “RSS”:https://blog.org/archives/000880.html instead of having them delivered to you (if you are really addicted to using RSS for everything).

According to E-government Bulletin (which unfortunately doesn’t have an archived version of this newsletter yet), the “Department for Transport”:http://www.dft.gov.uk/ will be launching an integrated transport guide (at “transport.info”:http://www.transport.info/ – not live yet) that would, “include car routefinders; bus, tram and rail timetables; and a range of maps, updated regularly by external partners such as bus companies”.

Here in London something like this already exists – “JourneyPlanner”:http://www.journeyplanner.org/ and while inevitably it doesn’t always come up with the best possible route it will still be a great advance when it launches this Spring. I hope that at some point either JourneyPlanner or transport.info starts to offer a direct connection between the Internet and the counters that tell you when the next bus is coming at bus stops….

Well, I finally plunked down my plastic and picked up a Tungsten T3. Now what? I have already downloaded:

• “Eudora Internet Suite”:http://www.eudora.com/internetsuite/download/ so I can sync my Palm with my Eudora email and
• “Avantgo”:http://www.avantgo.com/ for content on the move

  I’ve also bookmarked:

• “Palminfocenter”:http://www.palminfocenter.com/
• “Handheldnews”:http://www.handheldnews.com/ and
• “Brighthand”:http://www.brighthand.com/morenews.php?site=Palm

for news about what new stuff is coming up. Where should I be looking to find lists and reviews of the best freeware and shareware apps for my Palm? Are there any must-have applications I should run and get right away? Any I should shy away from? Where should I look for the most up-to-date news about Palm-related stuff? And where should I go for good Palm-related peer tech support?

Later: This article suggesting that there may be “no upgrade path to PalmOS 6”:http://www.brighthand.com/article/palmOne_Refuses_to_Confirm_OS_6_Upgrade for existing models has me nervous. Should I cancel my order (I ordered online and it hasn’t arrived yet)? I don’t want to be stuck with the last incarnation of a dead-end OS. On the other hand, if I waited a few months to get a new PalmOS 6 model it might be buggy… What do you think? Do you think they’ll make the top-end models of Palm upgradeable but just don’t want to guarantee anything?