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The modern news consumer ignores Weblogs and online citizen journalism at his own peril. But not everyone has the time to keep track of what's going on the Web. With this blog we hope to track the highlights of what's being discussed online so when news breaks from the Web, we're ready.

Will Femia is a Weblog enthusiast who, through good fortune and dumb luck, was introduced to the form as his position as chat producer for MSNBC.com careered into obsolescence. On any given day, Will can be found having already spent an unhealthy amount of time squinting at a computer screen.

Send a message to Will at spotter@msnbc.com



Three things I meant to mention, an update, and a game

Posted: Friday, September 19, 2008 11:58 AM by Will Femia
Filed Under: ,

I have installed Twhirl and it makes a world of difference in using Twitter. Essentially it turns your Twitter account into an instant messenger. Different people feel comfortable with different interfaces but for me, perhaps because of my chat background, I like IM so this suits me well.

Twhirl isn't new but Dropbox is and though I haven't tried it I plan to install it on both my home and work machines. I've mentioned before the problems I have with doing work on my home machine and then coming in to work and having to figure out how to get the previous nights work back in front of me. (You'll recall Instapaper was one solution I was liking for a while.) Dropbox is for more than just links, you can drag photos and whole folders into the thing and it synchs up with your other machines. Actually, it's probably less about synchronization and more about Dropbox being a middle man, but the demo video looks like what I want to be able to do: on the way out to work, drag whatever I'm in the middle of into a folder, get to work, open that folder and there I am. No e-mailing stuff to myself, no plugging in flash drives. I'm going to set it up Monday so I'll let you know if how it works.

I didn't hate the Seinfeld Microsoft commericials but I agree the point of them was a little difficult to discern. I do, however, really like these new ones that are apparently going to replace the Seinfeld ones.

I just added this as an update to yesterday's post but since it looks like it could be a new story on it's own I wanted to surface it here. Someone claiming to be the person who hacked Sarah Palin's e-mails posted a confession/explanation of sorts on a message board. The message was deleted but not before there were grabs taken and the username and the associated e-mail address were noted. At the time (long, long ago, yesterday afternoon) the thinking was that it would surely be a dead end because how could the guy be so stupid as to post that long confession and use something that could be so easily traced? I should add a note of caution here that as far as I know, no one has been charged and of course the person who owns that address is being investigated because it's an obvious lead. But at the same time, it appears that the hacker may actually have been that stupid. I'm sure there are a lot of people blogging it but I clicked Gateway Pundit.

Something that didn't occur to me that of course makes sense is that Internet justice in a case of invasion of privacy will be a complete and thorough invasion of privacy. I expect this will not be pretty.

In the Light Bot game you program the robot to make it move. A nice level of challenge without being too discouraging.

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There's seems to be a little uncertainty regarding whether or not the Seinfeld commercials will be replaced with those new ones:

http://gizmodo.com/5051682/microsoft-ads-featuring-bill-gates-and-jerry-seinfeld-not-canceled

JE, Detroit (Sent Friday, September 19, 2008 1:38 PM)

interesting concept on Dropbox. And I know I may be the only person who actually reads the damned things but there is verbiage in the EULA even more interesting :

"BY UTILIZING THE SITE, CONTENT, SERVICES AND/OR YOUR FILES, YOU CONSENT TO ALLOW DROPBOX TO ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER..."

"You acknowledge and agree that you should not rely on the Site, Content, Services and Your Files for any reason."

"Dropbox reserves the right, at any time, to impose fees..."

LA Marlowe, Richmond, VA (Sent Friday, September 19, 2008 1:51 PM)

I'm a PC. And I run Ubuntu Linux.

Methinks there's more to being a PC than Windows. My Windows box is being emptied and re-purposed.

Oh, and I also own an old eMac. My video and audio tool.

Howlin' Hobbit (Sent Friday, September 19, 2008 2:38 PM)

Will,

I have the same issues as you because I work at home and at various clients, plus use my laptop, so I have 4 different machines I need to have the same stuff on at all times.  I don't know how dropbox's interface works, but the problem with stuff like this in general is that you have to actually remember to put it on there at the end of the day, which I don't.

SO... go check out Webdrive - it installs itself as the W: (or other) drive on your regular machine(s).  That way you can basically set it up as a web resident Network drive, accessible through Windows explorer or any other programs.  The advantage here is that I never drag and drop anything anymore, I simply use the W: drive for all my files (which I have a lot) instead of my local drive, and it does the rest without me thinking about it.

You can use various protocols when you set it up, but I just use ftp (which is slower but simpler) and all my stuff is physically stored on my own ftp site (which I prefer for security).  Of course, you never see any ftp stuff, it just happens seamlessly.

There's also Xdrive which is similar, but I like the reliability of Webdrive, very solid.

With Skype and Webdrive and so on, what you really want to create is a Virtual Workspace where the machine is simply a portal to that Workspace, so that effectively all your email, Files, applications, phone calls etc are all accessible with a minimum of setup.

Matthew Paul

Matthew Paul, Ashland, MA (Sent Friday, September 19, 2008 2:50 PM)

'It's' is a contraction of 'it is.' 'It's' is not a possessive pronoun. 'Its,' however, is.

rtyhsh (Sent Saturday, September 20, 2008 9:50 AM)

The new PC commercials are good.  I like the ideas that Microsoft is challenging the notion that cool, hip and groovy, and earth friendly types only use macs.  Enough with trying to pitch Vista.  People either wil get it or not.

Arguably, Ubuntu Linux is a huge step forward about making linux a viable alternative OS for people by removing the often difficult setting-changes-by-editing-config-files issue.  Still it is a little hard to get something or drivers to function for the average person (Note I said Average, not Uber Geek).

Mac continues to be a solid OS, but fopr years macs didn't crash because they owned all the hardware inside the machine.  Now that their processors are not proprietary motorolla's, and the other components aren't so locked down anymore, you'll start to see other issues come up.  Same thing as why its easier to make games for consoles rather than home pc's.  Pretty easy to make a smoking game when there is only one set of specs to make it run on.  A little different when you have 50 different graphics cards, and 100 different sound cards, with differing amounts of ram and 2 different processors with varying speeds.......

Anyhow, I'm glad that its the 'hipness factor' that’s being challenged.  Oh and for the record, flaming mac lovers who will be posting, I have 2 servers running server 2003, 2 laptops with XP pro, a g4 mac server running osx, a mac g4 powerbook running kbunutu, and 2 servers running centos so miss me with the 'pc fanboi' comments.  :)

Tim Knoxville, TN (Sent Saturday, September 20, 2008 11:57 PM)

211 commands to finish the bot game? How did I fare?

Shoaib, Pittsburgh, PA (Sent Sunday, September 21, 2008 2:36 PM)

would lov to send a link for the gameroo lite bot but
it needs to be english for my grandson - any ideas?

kdr, mishawaka, in (Sent Monday, September 22, 2008 2:36 PM)

don't mean to whine.  
actually i love your blog. enough to check it everyday.
however, either do it or don't do it!
If your bosses are giving you other assignments, then
they should hire someone else to run the blog.
However, you should train them well....

Konnie (Sent Wednesday, September 24, 2008 3:02 PM)



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