Month: July 2006
Depressing
The current situation in the Middle East is unbelievably depressing. Stuff like this from Melanie Phillips hardly makes one more sympathetic to the Israelis.
Wikipedia CD
Hadn’t come across this before, but the children’s charity SOS Children’s Villages UK has produced a downloadable .zip of Wikipedia entries they think would be useful to children in terms of subject and quality, that people can distribute via CD.
SOS Children have released a free encyclopaedia (with 8000 images and 4000 pages worth of text) made up of articles cleaned up and selected from Wikipedia, and aimed at improving awareness of the world around us amongst 8-15 year olds. They include articles of particular interest to children (dinosaurs, space travel, the Solar System, plants and animals) and a wide variety of other scientific and geographical topics. The 2006 articles have been hand-picked from Wikipedia, tidied up (by deletion only, not alteration), checked for plausibility and suitability (by volunteers, whom we gratefully acknowledge) and put together in a form suitable for publication on a CD. We judge the content to be child friendly and allows a “surfing” experience with many cross-linked articles within a safe offline environment. The encyclopaedia can be downloaded as a zip file together with a copy of the SOS Children UK website with some details of our work in 125 countries.
What a brilliant idea.
Yahoo, Microsoft tie message knot
From the BBC:
Users of the Yahoo and Microsoft instant messaging programs can now contact each other directly.
The two firms have released software that ties the two networks into a huge community of 350 million users.
The trial software allows people to swap text messages but will eventually let people talk to each other too.
The move marks a break with the past when operators of the big instant message systems resisted calls to open up their networks.
Chat channel
AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo operate the largest instant messaging networks and, until recently, anyone wanting to talk to friends using different text chat systems had to maintain several separate accounts.
Users can sign up for the test software via the Yahoo and Microsoft messaging sites. Only those using the latest versions of the IM software will be able to join the trial. Eventually the software will be made available to every user.
The software uniting the two networks will use icons next to people’s names to denote whether that person is on the Yahoo or Microsoft system.
“It does make it easier for many consumers who will need to keep one less instant messaging system up and running now,” said Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg.
The tie-up makes good on a promise the two companies made in late 2005 to get their networks linked.
The trial version of the software is being made available to users of the two networks in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK and US.
While AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have the most users of IM, there are many other operators of these text chat systems. Some of those operating IM networks, such as Google, or developing the software, are pushing systems that use more open ways of letting users chat.