Looks like Qumana has been bought up by arranged a distribution deal with Lycos, if this URL is anything to go by. Nothing on the Qumana blog yet.

Mark Evans has some detail.

[tags]qumana, lycos[/tags]

Robert Scoble posts on the fun they are having over the pond with the fun being had early yesterday morning with the time and date – at two minutes and three seconds passed 1am in American format it appears as 01:02:03 04/05/06.

At least we here in the UK (and, I presume, elsewhere) have this to look forward to in a month’s time!

[tags]date, time[/tags]

Well, it’s certainly a question. When I load up my RSS aggregator (currently Bloglines – though this could change when the UK finally gets the new Newsgator look) there are always new Digg entries. When I leave it for a few hours, the limit of 200 news posts is nearly always reached.

Now, one of the criticisms, if it can be called that, of the use of the internet and technologies like RSS is that it can result in information overload. I’d generally disagree with this, but with Digg, I am afraid it’s true. The site is a victim of its own success – it’s nice to look at, easy to use and boasts some great features. But it just produces too much stuff – I can’t be faffed even to skim the feed sometimes. And then, when you see something you actually like, you can’t even read it because the so-called ‘Digg effect’ has rendered the site in question unusuable due to server pressure.

That’s why I probably still pay more attention to Slashdot that Digg. Slashdot doesn’t produce the number of posts that Digg does, largely because it has a proper focus in terms of subject matter and it has some sort of an editoral focus too – in that you know which way most of those who use and post to it lean on many issues.

As a completely non-scientific comparison, Digg has 3.909 subscribers on Bloglines, compared to Slashdot’s 66,089. There are bound to be many reasons to explain some of the difference, but I would say Digg has a lot of catching up to do.

One site I have never got round to using at all is the Tech Memeorandum. Perhaps I should subscribe and give it a go.

[tags]digg, slashdot, memeorandum[/tags]

Google have added a directory of possible services to their personal homepage, as announced on their official blog.

It provides a much wider variety of easy-to-add content than before, but doesn’t stop the homepage being a pretty static and dull affair compared to the likes of Protopage and Netvibes. You also have to be logged in to use it, meaning any searches you perform will be saved in the search history, which could be a little creepy.

Eponym is a new hosted blog service, and a direct competitor with Blogger. It’s nice and easy to use, and it’s really quick to set up a new blog – like I did (check out that nice Slashdot-esque theme).

My one criticism would be that the Control Panel page is a little cluttered – I think they should have ditched the top header, really.

But it seems quicker than Blogger, and is bound to be with fewer users, so for absolute beginners it’s worth a shot.

[tags]eponym[/tags]

As spotted by Google Blogoscoped, this is from a CSS comment on Microsoft’s website:

/* fix for the IE 1px-off margin error */
* html .StupidIEMarginHack
{
margin-right: 1px;
}

According to the BBC:

More than half of government and council websites contain errors and cause problems for disabled people, research shows.

Some 60% of UK government websites contain HTML errors, according to a study by the University of Southampton.

A similar proportion do not comply with guidelines created to improve web access, it found.

In response, a government spokesman said the UK had been actively promoting better accessibility of sites.

[tags]web design, standards, government it[/tags]

Daveybot provides a great round up of his Firefox set-up. Have pinched a few of those extensions for myself.

[tags]firefox, extensions[/tags]

Apparently the blog run by David Miliband, the UK government’s “Minister of Communities and Local Government”, costs the taxpayer £6,000 – whether that was a one off payment or an ongoing annual fee it doesn’t say.

Clearly the government’s ability to wildly overspend on IT even stretches to the world of blogging – which is surely the easiest techy thing to do for free?

[tags]blogging, politics, miliband[/tags]

Nick Bradbury has announced the release of the final version of FeedDemon 2.

It is such a great piece of software – I am hoping that when my new PC arrives, there will be a Linux equivalent that is as powerful…

Akismet caught its first attempt at comment spam today – the first spam I have had on this blog since it was set up. Nice to see it working so well – and I guess it means that I must be doing something right if I am getting the attention of the spammers…

Just had news that my new desktop PC is on its way and will be here on Monday. Woot!

Then I can get cracking with installing Ubuntu onto it… perhaps a few days off to get it sorted would be a good idea!

My Toshiba laptop is a nightmare right now – it keeps overheating and turning itself off. Not helpful at all.