• Uncyclopedia – a pretty funny Wikipedia spoof
• Goal Mouths is now live
• BBC Technology: What is it with Wikipedia?
• Guardian Technology on Yahoo!

Moving URLs is a stupid idea. What was I thinking of? It’d be crazy to just abandon all the existing links out there and would take ages to sort everything out.

Instead, I’m just going to change the name of the blog. The difference between the URL and the title has always annoyed me a bit. The tagline will be a quote I like at the time, so it will change every so often.

I am going to ignore my own advice and move this blog’s URL next week.

The new address will be http://theclosedcircle.com.

Obviously I will keep the two running side by side for a day or two to ensure everything has switched smoothly enough.

davebriggs.net will just end up being a holding page, which I can use to develop stuff out of harm’s way, like the Goal Mouths forum, which itself will be going live at http://goalmouths.com on Monday, all being well…

Here is an article I have written and submitted to the now active-again Living Without Microsoft website, run by John Naughton and Quentin Stafford-Fraser.

You would have thought that working without desktop applications would be pretty tricky. But there are now a growing number of online tools which can help you get things done online just as, if not more, effectively than by using traditional apps. All you need is a fairly quick internet connection and the will to try something new.

There are loads of different applications out there and it would be nigh-on impossible to list them all. Here’s a selection of some of the better known ones, and no doubt many more will be suggested via the comments.

Email

An easy one this – everyone has a webmail account, right? But these accounts are getting more and more sophisticated, and generous in the provision of space for your emails to be stored in. The two big players, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Hotmail, were shaken up by the appearance of Google’s Gmail (now Google Mail in parts of Europe including the UK) and are now working on new, more richly featured services. The new Yahoo! Mail looks to offer an online equivalent of desktop mail clients, and Microsoft’s Live Mail is heading the same way.

Word Processing

Why use an online word processor? There are tonnes of reasons, but the main ones are accessibility and collaboration. Writely is the clear leader in online document editing – allowing users to upload Word files and edit and save them online. Other users can be invited to edit the same document. So, no more carrying documents on CD, USB flash drive or (heaven forbid!) floppy disk; or emailing them here, there and everywhere with the inevitable version control problems that result.

Spreadsheets

Unlike word processing, there isn’t really a standout service for spreadsheets. NumSum is probably the best option, because it works. It offers the basic spreadsheet functions we all know and love, and makes it possible to share access to the file for collaborative working. It doesn’t look all that great, however. You can’t at the moment download your work into a desktop file (as far as I can tell) but you can copy and paste into a desktop spreadsheet application.

The other option for spreadsheeting, where using the sheet as a rudimentary database is the aim, then Jotspot Tracker might be for you. Currently in beta and offering new users a maximum of two trackers (i.e. spreadsheets), this service looks a whole lot better than NumSum but doesn’t do as much. There’s no formulas for example. Instead, the focus is on project management, with a calender view that shows any dates listed in the Tracker in a calendar format.

Personal Information Management

HipCal used to be called MyPimp, before the developers realised that they were getting too popular not to be respectable. This site offers a nice calendar, to-do lists and a quite sophisticated address book. The only problem is that at the moment, those who like their days to come before their months in date formats will find themselves a little confused – though they are working on date representation, apparently.

Web Publishing

These days, personal websites don’t have to be the crapathons they used to be. Easy to use content management systems are everywhere these days, and you don’t need your own domain and hosting account to have an easily-updated, stylish looking website, let alone a hideously expensive HTML editor on your desktop. Google’s Blogger is simple and easy to set-up and use. WordPress is a great customisable CMS and you can sign up for a hosted site at wordpress.com, or BlogSome. There are countless others – TypePad and LiveJournal for example.

Photo Management

The obvious choice here is Yahoo!’s Flickr, which allows the user to upload photographs, which can then be organised into ‘sets’, shared with others and posted to blogs. Great fun.

Google has a kind-of entry in this category with Picasa, which is a desktop application that lets you upload and share photos with a service called Hello. I must admit, however, that I have never actually understood what Hello actually does.

News Aggregators

With the growth of news and information provision on the web, new ways of receiving and reading that information are being developed too. One of the most rapid-growing of these is RSS and its kindred spirits, Atom and RDF, which automatically sends a site’s new content to an application called an aggregator. These can be desktop based, or you can access them wherever you happen to log in with services like Bloglines and Newsgator.

Bookmark management

Why have one set of bookmarks saved in your desktop browser when you can have them available to you wherever you are? Sites such as del.icio.us and Furl (amongst others) allows you to save links to sites and tag them with keywords so that others may find them through a search and benefit from them too.

Homepages

OK, not exactly a desktop replacement service but useful nonetheless. Create a personalised homepage, accessible from anywhere, containing some favourite links, news and site feeds and other information using services like Google Personalised Homepage or (my favourite) Protopage.

All of this barely scratches the surface of what is available, and there are likely to be further advances making the online experience as close to the desktop as possible. Perhaps one day the desktop will be rendered obsolete – though until all these new services start to tie in together more seamlessly, it is unlikely to happen.

Of course, to make the most of all these exciting web developments, you really need to have a decent browser…

The Palimpsest Authors Directory is up and running, and the slog is now to get some content in there. Most of it is being cut and pasted from Wikipedia, which is released under the GNU Free Documentation Licence.

This means that we can copy the material, and amend it, as long as we credit the original source and publish our versions under the FDL too, which I obviously have no problem with.

The bit that really takes the time is looking for links to Palimpsest threads, and setting up the bibliogrpahies to link to the Palimpsest Amazon account. But we’ll get there in the end!

Wasn’t aware of this, but when browsing through the Writely blog, I found this snippet of a press release:

Since its beta launch in August 2005, Writely has enjoyed enthusiastic adoption from users all over the world including businesses, bloggers, editors, students, teachers, poets and playwrights.

…

Case#3: NaNoWriMo Collective Novel Creation

By midnight on November 30th, a group of seven writers are due to finish a 50,000 word novel as part of National Novel Writing Month: “We are using the Web Word Processor Writely which is ideal for a collaborative project like this, where people from both the U.K. and the U.S. are working on the same document.” (You can view the novel in progress at http://www.writely.com/View.aspx?docid=acjp62pqm98b)

Am slightly ashamed that we didn’t get it finished in time. Outside pressures put paid to it. Still, I might knuckle down during the Christmas holidays to get at least my chunk finished. It would be a shame to waste all that effort.

A slightly more wordy list than usual today: I don’t think I will have time for any lengthy articles but will keep returning to this throughout the day.

• HipCal is the new name of MyPimp. Apparently the developers had originally thought the service would be used mainly by students, hence the vaguely amusing name. The realisation that quite a few professionals wanted to use it, but were put off by the URL, meant a change was felt necessary.
• Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, now has his own blog on the BBC news site. Entertaining stuff.
• My local council, rather strangely, have a VBulletin discussion forum on their website. Top marks, I guess, for trying to open lines of communication, but it has hardly been touched and the setup leaves a lot to be desired. Good use of Council Tax funds too, when phpBB is available for free and is surely the better option when user numbers aren’t known.
• There was an interesting interview with William Hague on Today this morning. Hague has returned to the shadow cabinet as shadow Foreign Secretary, as a result of which Malcolm Rifkind has flounced back to the backbenches.
• Not sure if I have mentioned it before, but Protopage is an excellent RSS aggregator and personalised homepage. You can add RSS feeds, link lists and sticky note anywhere on the screen you like, and can have multiple screens too, making some or all public, if you like. Good stuff.
• Absurdity of the day: Sainsbury’s and Woolworth’s have taken the DVD of Jerry Springer: The Opera off the shelves for Christmas due to pressure from Christian groups.

Well, I am back now and should be posting again more often.

Here’s a few things I have been playing around with recently, some of these things may never see the light of day.

• I’m looking into trying to do for football discussion what Palimpsest did for books. Still not sure on the title. Stewart, who is helping me out, suggests Goal Mouths but my original idea was the slightly clumsier My Cultured Left Foot. Any thoughts would be appreciated. The site is hidden away here. It’s running on phpBB at the moment, as I doubt numbers will be great enough to warrant the investment into VBulletin, say.
• I have installed a version of Drupal, which lifts various stylings and user accounts from a Vbulletin install. I had the idea as I wanted a CMS that could create some sort of directory of authors, with biographical information, bibliographies, appropriate links and whatnot. Am not entirely convinced just yet, as Drupal seems to be more of a blogging platform than anything else, but more playing might reveal a way in which it could be used. The work in progress is here. Drupal is being used in the interesting Open Source Theology project.
• I received a job lot of Ubuntu CDs at the weekend. 32 and 64 bit ones, and some Mac ones too. If anyone would like one, email me your details and I will post it through.

Apologies for the disruption in service. Little’un has been in hospital for a while and all my spare time is spent with him and my better half.

Hopefully they will be home and normal service resumed later this week.

I have started a visual book list. Looks quite nice, though the numbers of unfinished books worries me slightly. Will get round to writing little reviews at some point for each one.

Chain Reading. It’s like a social booklist keeping thing. Kind of.

You select the book you are reading, and have read, and will read. Recommend them to people. Maybe they will recommend some to you. Fairly interesting.

Of course, some people had this idea nearly 12 months ago…

Glypho appears to be a site offering collective authorship. It looks quite interesting, but at a guess I would say the quality of writing is probaby variable…

Horrible! From Guardian Technology:

“Prosecutors claim a Mac specialist on trial in connection with the killing of his wife did a Google search for the words: “neck snap break” and “hold” before she was killed. Robert Petrick, who is defending himself in Durham, NC, cross examined a computer forensics expert this week. The expert testified about digital footprints he said the state discovered on several hard drives in Petrick’s home,” reports TechWeb.

“Prosecutors claimed that Petrick, who stands out in his Christian North Carolina community as a self-professed Pagan, left behind a trail of digital evidence including a visit to a site called bloodfest666. Investigators are also focusing e-mails to women they said Petrick was having affairs with and a download of a document entitled ’22 ways to kill a man with your bare hands’.”

Note: “a lawyer standing by for Petrick said he believes the evidence was all culled from the hard drives and he has no information that Google participated in the investigation.”

From Guido Fawkes’ blog.

I have a job interview on Friday, for a job in Scrutiny at Chester City Council. Am quite confident and am looking forward to the idea of getting back into Scrutiny.

Browsing the Council’s website, it would appear that some of their councillors are blogging. Excellent!

Great post from John Naughton.

The United Nations have released a Word file which, in the meta data and changes tracking, reveals some pretty embarassing edits…

When will people learn to stop using MS file formats to distribute material?

• With enough eyeballs, all bugs are invisible
• Pitiful spectacle of an old DOS trying to do new tricks

Had a jolly time at the bonfire and fireworks party last night.

I guess a relevant link to push here would be Guy Fawkes’ blog – a great one for UK parliamentary rumour and gossip.

Rick Green is blogging again after a brief hiatus, and it’s well worth heading over there. He doesn’t just focus on one issue, but a whole range of them – almost all of which are new to me. It’s a real eye opener.

Like this one: he’s reading the whole of the 1960 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica – only the ‘F’ volume is missing. Great stuff!

Anyway, he’s in the process of making some changes to the layout of his site, trying to make it more personal. Why not head over there and let him know what you make of it all?

I have started a new category, called Good Stuff.

It’s basically just a tag I can apply to longer posts that I take a bit longer over than normal. I’m going to try and do one a week from now on.