The 37signals folks have written themselves a new blogging system , and by all accounts it's lightning fast compared to their old Moveable Type solution.

What's the funny bit? "We decided not to copy over all the old posts to the new system." . Yes, their new system is straining over the colossal load of approximately six, that's six , posts. All the hundreds of old posts and thousands of comments have been dumped to static HTML.

You know what, I reckon MT would be quite fast too if you deleted the database and started again.
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Carbonite, the easy-to-use online back-up system I highly recommend, is running a 15-day free trial .

It's quite cunning - it will probably take that time to upload all your data. By which time, Carbonite clearly hope you'll just sign up to the $5/month service to keep your data safe.
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Take a look at this great home-made video of Anousheh Ansari arriving at the ISS a little over a week ago (home-made, as in someone used a camcorder to record NASA TV playing in Real Player on their computer!).

Good, isn't it?

But then read the comments - they're pathetic! The spam is one thing but some of the posts are degrading and pathetic. I wish you could simply turn off comments on Youtube - there are a lot of sad people on there.
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For a long while I was a Digg reader (or rather, subscriber to their RSS feed). However recently I've deleted Digg from Bloglines and added Slashdot to replace it. Why?

The comments. For reasons I don't know, Digg tends to have very short comments, with little in them. Their javascript-heavy comments system takes a long time to render, even using Opera with its class-leading javascript engine. And if you set the comments to only show, say, +5 comments to cut out the dross, you still get a long list of titles of <5 point comments to scroll through. Finally, there seems to be a bug in their system so that, even as a logged-in user, it keeps forgetting what comment threshold I've set.

Slashdot is a breath of fresh air. After joining, I've set the comments to display in flat mode (easy to read), oldest first, with a threshold of 4 (out of a possible 5). This gives me a ready source of informed and intelligent reaction to the original story. I don't need to go searching through blogs , usually every side is well-covered on Slashdot already!

Slashdot comments also tend to be much longer and much more in-depth than the brief throw-away shots Digg seems to engender. Digg also has more visitors , and I think as a consequence has more "junk" comments (every story seems to start with a lame comment dug to -100 followed by several "that's so lame" posts dugg to 20...).

Slashdot has a tradition of more informed commentary and with a flat (or even shrinking) userbase, that tradition looks set to stay.
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Why did I upgrade to the final version... well, how I was I supposed to know they've removed one of the most vital features?

In the old Picasa, when you connected your camera, you had the option of simply excluding shots from being imported. This made it incredibly quick and simple to scan through the pictures you'd taken removing the crap ones (and with digital cameras, there are plenty!) leaving the gems.

But as of version 2.5, the little "exclude" button has gone . Now, you have to import *every* *single* picture, then go through them and delete them by hand. Worse, deleting in Picasa is a two-click affair - once to delete, then again to confirm. And even worse than that, there's a bug that means once you've deleted a picture it skips to the next album in your library .

This has crippled Picasa, and I'm now searching for ways to downgrade to the previous version fast ...

UPDATE: after some searching (which led to me adding links above) I've discovered a hidden feature where you can press the "x" key to exclude pictures. Phew. Taking out the exclude button was still a mistake though.
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Bloglines received a minor upgrade on Thursday : the "tree" view - the left pane listing your feeds - now updates via AJAX. This means post counts update more quickly, and the system also polls for new posts more often. It also fades in a nice little indicator in the bottom corner alerting you to new posts. The technology appears to be the same that has been powering their edit feeds view.

It's a neat touch. Bloglines was already very easy to use - it is all about reading posts, not being fancy, as so many other feedreaders seem to be about. The clutter of Rojo, for example, drives me mad, and the new Javascript-heavy Google Reader is as slow as molasses in comparison with Bloglines. Reader even has a "loading..." page...

No, Bloglines is the quick and effective way to read posts, and I highly recommend it. For those who love a "river of news" view, just click the top level folder in the left pane and you'll get your river. Why one would want to mix all ones feeds together though escapes me: I find some feeds more interesting than others, so read them more often. Every so often I'll check on the others. I wouldn't want prime posts from Scoble, for example, mixed in with everything from Slashdot.
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Well, I'm not, because I live in Europe and won't be getting downloadable video until 2007 - if at all. Hey, there's only 400 million of us.

Anyway, when iTunes 7 launched I was wondering when people would blog about what the service is actually like. Turns out someone did just that on Slashdot nearly straight away. Have a read. It really does sound very promising.

I don't think it'll be long until we are all settling down in front of our iTVs and just picking what we want to watch out of iTunes, when we want it. With the simplicity Apple builds into it's products (witness the iPod), it might actually happen.
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Wikimedia has just finished an open election for a new member for the Wikimedia Board . The results are here . (The turn-out is rather disappointing, considering that the election was open to all registered members across the many Wikimedia projects, and voting was very easy.)

I'm pleased Erik Moeller won - he's the founder of Wikinews, which I spent a great deal of time on last year, and Erik is a good bloke.

Here's the soap opera bit though: the election was brought about due to the resignation of Angela Beesley from the board. Erik is Angela's ex-boyfriend ...

Angela left Erik and moved to Australia to be with her new boyfriend, Tim Starling , a Wikimedia sysadmin. Tim was the guy who set up Erik's IT permissions in Wikimedia after his victory.

Erik's participation on the board should also be interesting: there's considerable personal friction between him and Anthere , an existing board member, and also Tim Starling .

PS: Angela did send Erik a nice "congratulations" note .
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I've been a bit slow accepting how much of an influence video is beginning to have on the web. Scoble has repeatedly stressed how powerful video can be , but I have, to be honest, been largely ignoring video. I've been rating it somewhere around animaged gifs; an annoying distraction that takes a long time to load.

Then I watched my mum browse to a website that had put a small Flash video front and center on their homepage. She quietly watched it and then I asked her about it. Scoble is right; my mum, who is well past retirement, had a much greater understanding of the company from watching the video than she ever would have got from reading the website. In much less time, too.

Video is clearly becoming increasingly important in putting over information. The web has been traditionally text based, backed up with images. But when there's big news, everyone put the TV on. People will read the newspapers the next day for analysis, but they want the video as it gives them the best feel of the event.

I think many companies would be wise to heed Scoble's advice, and use small, simple, well-made videos where-ever they can.
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Tech bloggers get pissy again: Michael Arrington has the real story of the Techcrunch/Techcrush. I'll be subscribing to Techcrush , btw, it looks a fascinating blog.

An excellent blog post on the different skins of Vista , complete with roll-over images making comparisons easy.

A beginner blogger reviews all the major hosted services , and rates Wordpress best. Wordpress weren't offering hosted blogs when I started this blog; I might have gone with them. I think she's a bit hard on Blogger though, it is an excellent service. Apart from the spellchecker, that is, which doesn't even know the word "blog"(!).

I spied: Google Earth being used to provide the visuals for a British Airways advert in a prime time TV show. In the same show there was also an advert for the iPod - simply a revolving silhouetted Bob Dylan. How many adverts for non-Apple MP3 players have you seen? The result is Apple's market dominance.

Microsoft will have to really come up with something special to make even a small dent in iPod's sales with the Zune. Here's a good "insider" blog to find out if they will have a chance.
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