• New Google Desktop Blog
• Guardian Technology: Microsoft: 1995 redux?

Everyone has heard of NaNoWriMo, the web-organised novel writing sprint, which involves writing 50,000 words to get a novel finished during the month of November. It sounds like madness, and it is.

What’s the point of it? Well, part of the idea is that the quality of what you write isn’t all that important. It’s the very act of getting the words down on paper, or rather onto the screen, in such numbers that the whole thing just won’t seem so daunting any more. Plus, there might be some nuggets of plot or character, or maybe even a chunk of some genuinely good writing that can be salvaged. It also gives you an opportunity to say to people at christmas parties that you are now on your second novel.

Over on Palimpsest, we have set ourselves a different challenge. We are going to try and get the 50,000 words done collectively. With more of us involved, the individual word count goes right down, but complications are added, such as getting the thing to make sense, for example. Have a read of the various deliberations that have taken place over who is involved, how it can be done, and what the plot should be.

The actual document is being collated using the web word processor Writely – which is ideal for a collaborative project like this, where people from both the UK and the US are working on the same document. A copy of the work in progress is published for other Palimpeople to read and keep up-to-date.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out. It looks like there will be a massive editing job at the end.

Microsoft have released two websites just recently: one that barely works and one that doesn’t actually do anything at all.

The first is live.com, some sort of portal that seems rather like start.com, though Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s chief apologist, claims there will be more to it than that. At the moment though, it doesn’t work with Firefox. Joel Spolsky gives it a thorough spanking.

The second is officelive.com, which appears to be an attempt by Microsoft to head off the potential competition of Web 2.0 style applications, presumably by offering online services that MS Office currently lacks while still tying users into the core desktop applications. Either way, all you can do at the moment is register an interest.

There are a couple of issues to be debated around here. One is the current fad, which is to release stupidly early beta versions of software, which I assume Google is partly responsible for. Is there some sort of credibility to be gained by having beta releases floating around at a really early point? Possibly – the other factor might be that these companies are getting a whole load of free testing being done, and with the growth of blogs and accurate searching via Technorati and the like, it’s all very easily collated.

Secondly, if Microsoft is taking a turn in this direction, then it must be pretty worried. Maybe the constant rumours of a Google powered OpenOffice have got Bill Gates and co. a little worried. But the ease of sharing and collaborating on documents across the net is becoming a number one priority for software makers, and this will have interesting affects on all sorts of things, not least the way people work. Soon, people working from home, given a fat enough broadband connection, will be able to do everything that someone based in the office can – and they can be anywhere in the world, and using any operating system. Maybe Microsoft try and use their web services to tie users into their existing platforms, but they would be unlikely to succeed long term.

The key to all this is the creation and acceptance of an open standard for documentation formats, to ensure that peope can work across all services, so that it doesn’t matter what application or site someone is using: the file can always be opened.

• Phil B: I want to…
• Dilbert’s blog
• Nextaris – Pretty much lets you do anything with your files online

Two in two days! You are so lucky.

• Tony Finch: Frustrated by Thunderbird
• The Guardian: You can judge a person by their book covers

I love these posters. The sheer awfulness of the puns they employ never fail to make me smile.

This was taken on my cameraphone (hence (lack of) quality) in Warwick.

Haven’t done one of these for a while. Sorry!

• Joel: Something Rotten in AdSense
• CyberJournalist: Top 10 Reasons for Reading a News Site
• Google Base Was Sort of Live
• Phil Bradley asks which blogging system he should switch to

Palimpsest’s Book Group is reading two H.G. Wells books at the moment. Being a skinflint, I thought I would download them from Project Gutenberg, a library of free books available in ext format, and sometimes HTML.

The two novels are:

• The First Men on the Moon
• The Sleeper Awakes

The trouble is that often the HTML option isn’t there, and the text files are formatted with hard line breaks, which means that the lines break at that point whether it needs to or not. So if you load them into a word processor and change the font and text size to get the page count down for printing, the results look terrible.

Surely, I thought, it must be possible to automatically remove these line breaks, somehow? I asked in various places:

• Palimpsest’s Ono No Komachi suggested using EReader, but that costs money!
• The guys at South Cheshire LUG had a go at producing some Perl to convert the text files – but they didn’t quite work, and I don’t have a linux box to run these on yet
• Blixa on Palimpsest came up with some VBA script for MS Word to reformat the text, but it doesn’t quite work either, and it involves Word and VBA (but is very clever)…

All to no avail!

Until Carfilhiot suggested a tool called GutenMark, a command line tool for linux or Windows which takes the text file and reformats nicely it to HTML. It is released under the GPL, so it should be possible to have a look at the source and see if it can be persuaded to produce just text files, though it may be possible to cut and paste from the browser to a text editor to see what results from that.

Carfilhiot has hosted the reformatted versions of the Wells texts:

• The First Men on the Moon
• The Sleeper Awakes

Excellent – and the copy-and-paste to text file seems to work too!

Been listening to Radio 4 and the Today programme on the way into work recently. This morning’s news was full of interesting stuff:

• Galloway accused of Senate ‘lies’ – I am no fan of Galloway’s, but I do find it surprising that the Seante Committee has come out with these statements without further interviews with ‘Gorgeous’ George.
• Africa Aids orphans ‘may top 18m’ – and one report stated that the life expectancy for a male in (IIRC) Zambia is 30. 30!
• EU mulls wild bird import freeze – Apparently this was suggested and agreed by most EU states in March this year. the only country to explicity say ‘no’? The UK. Brilliant.
• Overweight job hunters ‘lose out’ – no wonder I can’t get a job nearer home! Reminds me of one time I was being abused for my rotundity, and I accused my adversary of being fattist. “No, Dave,” he replied. “You’re the fattest.” Bastard.

The Guardian asks whether the content in Wikipedia is worth all that much, and gets some experts to judge some entries.

The founder of the online encyclopedia written and edited by its users has admitted some of its entries are ‘a horrific embarrassment’.

To be honest, I would never dream of using Wikipedia as a serious research tool. If I want a very quick rundown on something, though, it’s fine. Would be interested to find where Jimmy Wales mentioned this ‘horrific embarrassment’!

edit: Aha! The article than began all this was by Nicholas Carr, titled The amorality of Web 2.0. Wales then responds:

I don’t agree with much of this critique, and I certainly do not share
the attitude that Wikipedia is better than Britannica merely because it
is free. It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better
quality, period, free or non-free. We should strive to be the best.

But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific
embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.

Why? What can we do about it?

So there we have it…unless we let Andrew Orlowski have his usual rant against ‘Wiki-fiddlers’, in the Register:

Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.

Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management to improve its content by befriending, and not alienating, established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who know what they’re talking about.)

Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that’s almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, … passionate, you haven’t met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it’s a religious crusade.