Dave

Word Count Journal

Word Count Journal might be a good option if you would like to start a blog, but aren’t sure how you will manage the words. A blogging NaNoWriMo, anyone?

Sometimes a little bit really does go a long way. In Word Count Journal, by gradually building up your writing stamina and discipline, you will see just how easy it is to get a whole lot done. By simply writing a set number of words each day, every day, you will write a whopping 66,795 words at the end of one calendar year. Little by little, through the power of series, the total of your written words will add up to more words than contained in the average novel.

Quite frankly, the thought of reading a blog where the words have to be dragged out of the author in this way fills me with horror, but I guess for someone who isn’t sure about dipping their toes into blogging waters, it might just help.

But then…a WordPress.com account is free. Go there instead.

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Did Wikipedia Really Ban Quatar?

Of course they didn’t. But for a little while, it looked like they might have done:

Apparently Qatar has a single ISP, Qtel, with a single IP address
shared by the entire country. Wikipedia has blocked that IP address for
anonymous edits, but is allowing users of that IP address with actual
Wikipedia accounts to continue to edit articles. There’s one problem,
though. You can’t create an account if you enter Wikipedia from that IP
address.

Jimmy Wales quickly responded on the wiki talk page for the IP address in question:

Iff [sic] you came here from a news headline saying that Wikipedia has banned all of Qatar, please pop right back over there and post in the comments that the story is not true. This IP number was temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours, and a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy. In the English Wikipedia, such an action would require approval of at a minimum the English Arbitration Committee and/or me personally, and would never ever be undertaken lightly, nor without extensive attempts at direct negotiation with the ISP and/or nation in question.

To any and all reporters, from Slashdot, TechCrunch, mainstream media, etc.: You may email me and ask me for my personal cellphone number, which I will answer 24 hours a day to confirm or disconfirm any such story of this type.
–Jimbo Wales

Fair play to Wales, he does his best to put things right (he commented on the TechCrunch thread pretty quickly).

Once again, this ruckus has brought up the issue of Wikipedia requiring people to log in to edit. Wales seems set against it, determined that Wikipedia remains open.

[tags]Wikipedia, Techcrunch, Jimmy Wales[/tags]

Microformats

Stuff about microformats seem to be popping up all over the place at the moment. I first came across them in a post by Simon Dickson.

The latest piece appeared on the Read/WriteWeb blog, which in turn introduced me to a great series of posts by a Mozilla developer by the name of Alex Faaborg, in which he moots the notion that microformats might be an integral part of FireFox 3.

So what are microformats? Well, it’s all a part of the so-called ‘semantic web‘ – embedding the documents that make up the web with information that will allow computers to find stuff quicker and better. Here’s Wikipedia’s example:

For example, a computer might be instructed to list the prices of flat screen HDTVs larger than 40 inches with 1080p resolution at shops in the nearest town that are open until 8pm on Tuesday evenings. To do this today requires search engines that are individually tailored to every website being searched. A semantic web would provide a single standard for all websites to publish the relevant information.

Microformats, then are a way of embedding this metadata into html pages, or, in Faaborg’s words,

adding semantics to markup to take it from being machine readable to being machine understandable.

Sounds useful. But there’s more:

Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online. This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc.

If FireFox could understand all this stuff – and if the microformats are being used – then all sorts of things are possible, allowing all your data to be tied to the services you use, and not shoe-horning you into using a suite of web apps because they all link up nicely. You can use Gmail for your email, Zoho for your word processing and Skype for your calls, and it will all be handled for you automatically.

Here’s a graphic example of how it looks, courtesy of Mozilla:

There’s a FireFox extension out there now for handling metadata, called Operator, so you can get in on the action straight away. Check out the microformats website for more information on what can be done right now with them. But the real benefits of this technology will come in the future, when all the information scattered across the web can be brought to order.

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