As you may know I have written a book about managing email and to go alongside it I produced a companion website and a “category” on this weblog for my latest discoveries about email tools. That category has not been very busy of late but it seems someone else is picking up the slack. Email Overloaded (by someone who sells an email organization product) is a weblog completely devoted to more effective email management so you might want to subscribe to it if you wish I wrote more about email.

I am not, shall we say, known for my cooking. But since my wife does the earning, it makes sense for me to hold up my end by wearing the chef’s hat. I usually use the Foodieview search engine to help me find stuff to do with the ingredients I have, but through it I found Recipe*zaar and as soon as I started using it I got that “Flickr feeling” all over again. For those who haven’t tried Flickr that’s the feeling you get when a website contains loads of really useful, well-thought-out features that help you use and contribute to it.

Recipezaar has over 150,000 recipes but its real genius is that with each you can see it in metric or imperial, change the serving size, see full (estimated) nutritional information and see ratings and comments from others. When searching for the recipe you want you can specify time to make, hot or cold, occaision, cuisine type or any of dozens of other ‘tags’. I don’t have time to enumerate all its cool features – check it out yourself. I don’t know why a site this good isn’t the talk of the tech blogosphere. Could it be that cooking just doesn’t interest 20 and 30-something male alpha geeks?

I haven’t made an exhaustive examination of recipe sites so please if you know of better ones let me know.

New Scientist magazine – a weekly magazine of science news – a bit like The Economist or Prospect magazine for the scientifically-minded – has recently launched a weekly 12 minute Podcast – a great way to catch up on what’s going on in science while you are driving (or cycling!).

I used to be the magazine’s Net Editor ten years ago (!) and I am pleased to see that it is still keeping abreast of the latest Internet trends…

WordPress, an open source weblog engine, is what this website uses and from my experience it is every bit as powerful as Moveable Type – but free of charge. I noted earlier that a small organization, Blogsome, was offering free hosting of WordPress blogs. Now WordPress.com is offering the same and I hope (given the name) with substantial backing (though it’s not clear to me how it is that hosting is paid for).

Just for fun and to give me an idea of who visits my site and why, I have put up a Frappr! map for this blog which I encourage you to visit and add yourself to (no registration required). Basically all this is is a really easy to use way of attaching a short note about yourself (and optional picture) to a map of the world. Use it to tell me about yourself, why you like (or don’t like) the site, and what kind of things you’d like me to write about more (or less). Or anything else you think I and the rest of the readers might find interesting!

PS if you are adding a URL just paste the address into the “shoutout” space – don’t try creating an HTML link as it doesn’t work.

PPS There are several web applications that let you annotate and share maps – I have started making an annotated list of these services using my favourite shared bookmark application, Netvouz.

I just finished watching a documentary about the rise and fall of the BBC’s Third Programme, an ambitious attempt to make an unashamedly ‘high culture’ music and speech programme on the radio after WWII. The documentary interestingly put it into a wider cultural context – it was part of a general feeling among politicians and cultural elites at the time that during and after the war the public needed access to the opportunity to ‘improve itself’ through appreciation and consumption of the best of what the arts could offer.

It’s a rather outmoded idea now but I can’t help admiring the idealism of those times. The programme argues that the Third Programme was killed off by both hostility towards elitism in the 50s and the general availability of more and more competing cultural products. This sounds to me reminiscent of what happened to high-minded dissident authors in Eastern Europe when their art was no longer suppressed and they found, ironically, their market and popular support collapsed.

The wheel seems to have come full circle here in the UK with the launch of BBC 4, a digital TV station with some of the same “no compromise” ethos. It has faced similar criticism because of its high budget per viewer but it has been generally agreed that in a massively multichannel world there is once again room for an island of highbrow-ness to exist.

P.S. I seem to be getting the Wikipedia habit – I found a halfway useful Wikipedia entry on the Third Programme (linked above) and couldn’t resist spending a half hour or so correcting it and adding the details I could…

P.P.S. In my search for web stuff relating to the Third Programme (there was disappointingly little) I came across this Third Programme magazine – an online site about broadcasting put out by the rather interesting Transdiffusion Broadcasting System, “a not-for-profit historical society dedicated to documenting and preserving broadcasting history” (which alas doesn’t seem to have an article dedicated to the Third Programme itself).

Playlist magazine has a handy roundup of places to get free or cheap audiobooks, including an interesting organization called Tell Tale Weekly which sells the audiobooks it produces but for very small sums and gives the money to the people who read out the books, which has helped to produce a reasonably large list of available works. Then after five years (or 100,000 downloads) it releases the audiobooks that have been digitised under a Creative Commons license. Librivox is a similar effort but relies on volunteers to read the books and charges nothing for the result. There are a couple of books read by people available through Project Gutenberg as well – lots more if you are happy to listen to computer-generated dictation.

If you want to hear free contemporary SF instead, check out Escape Pod (which broadcasts short stories) and Podiobooks which hasn’t quite launched yet but you can subscribe to it through iTunes or whatever and wait…

Benjamen Walker’s Theory Of Everything is quite like one of my favourite radio programmes, This American Life, but… well… stranger (which is sometimes no bad thing). Ben is a professional radio producer and it shows.

If you are more interested in technology (and I am guessing most of you have some interest in it) the top-ranked podcast at the moment – This Week In Tech – is head and shoulders above much of the podcasting rabble. It features a large round table of tech luminaries and is a very convincing and enjoyable reproduction of the kind of tech-related banter, gossip and bluster that I used to enjoy myself when I was a tech journalist (though at over an hour each week it may be a little self-indulgent). For daily more ‘straight’ tech snippets, you could try Future Tense, and for recordings from the many technology-related conferences that seem to happen every other day across the US you should check out IT Conversations. And if you are a hardcore Macintosh user you should try listening to the MacCast (though frankly it could do with a little pruning as there is a lot of discussion of minutiae on it).

Update: If you want more audiobooks for no payment there are a number of streamed options. They are less easily downloadable (you need to use Total Recorder – PC – or WireTap Pro – Mac – to turn them into MP3s) but OneWord radio offers free audiobooks and book commentary 24 hours a day (streamed only) and the BBC – Radio 4 and BBC7 broadcast less but includes some originally commissioned work too and unlike OneWord the streams are archived (if only for a week) which makes capturing easier. A few BBC radio programmes are even being podcast (though not drama yet).
Podcast Review

Just to be l337 I have turned this blog into an instant podcast thanks to Talkr which essentially reads out the text as MP3s on demand – the results are not bad, I think. You can click on the individual audio links or copy this link into your podcasting software of choice. I have recently been trying out quite a few podcasts so expect to hear about more good podcasts shortly…

The American consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports recently published a online hazards survey which found:

• 33% of those surveyed said a virus or spyware caused serious problems with their computer systems and/or financial losses within the past two years.
• 50% reported a spyware infection in the past six months. Of those, 18% said the infection was so bad they had to erase their hard drives.

  To avoid spyware, 51% of all online users reported being more careful visiting Web sites, and 38 % said they download free programs less frequently.

• 64% of survey respondents said they had detected viruses on their computer in the past two years. 4% found them at least 50 times.
• Macs are safer than Windows PCs for some online hazards. Only 20% of Mac owners surveyed reported detecting a virus in the past two years, compared with 66% of Windows PC owners. Just 8% of Mac users reported a spyware infection in the last six months vs. 54% of Windows PC users.

To this I would add that my guess is that a fair amount of the virus reporting by Mac owners is probably "false positives" – people whose Macs stopped working for some unrelated reason and they blamed it on viruses. Ditto for spyware. I don’t think viruses or spyware aimed at current Macs are still around outside of the labs of anti-virus software companies.

There are some good recommendations linked alongside the report but interestingly it fails to mention one of the best ways to reduce the incidence of viruses and spyware – don’t use Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. It’s not that they are bad in themselves (though I would argue the free alternatives like Eudora and Firefox are better) – it’s that virus and spyware writers tailor their programs to work with the most popular email and web browsing programs out there.

A note about computer literacy – 17% of respondents weren’t using antivirus software and 10% of those with high-speed broadband access–prime targets for hackers–said they didn’t have firewall protection.

Also see two recent reports from the excellent Pew Internet and American Life project:
Spam & Phishing (April)
Spyware (July)

Visiting the Edinburgh Festival,
originally uploaded by D & D.

This packed schedule gives you an idea of the richness of this amazing event. Of course we won’t be able to see even a fraction of the tens of thousands of performances at this the world’s biggest arts festival. The advent of the Internet has been a godsend in helping to arrange our upcoming visit. Not only can we listen to interviews with the artists and read several blogs by performers and critics but we can access the invaluable reviews by the Scotsman and others mixed in with the comprehensive listings for all five of the currently-running festivals, and read comments by fringe festival-goers as well on the Fringe Festival’s own site. The latter even offers SMS voting for shows. The Stage also has a pretty comprehensive Edinburgh review festival and fringe reviews and listings site. This way we can get some idea of the ‘buzz’ around shows before we take the sleeper up and book what we are interested in – which is just as well since I’m sure a lot of the best stuff will already be sold out for the rest of its run…