Living With Ads

Amy Gahran over at Poynter blogs some more on annoying ads and tips on how to get rid of them. She also refers to John Battelle’s suggested alternative to IntelliTXT “to break out keywords for a given article in a separate box, and run that box at the end or to the side of the … Read more

A Directory of Social Annotation Tools

Update July 24 2006: Diigo is now live, combining “Social Bookmarking, Web Highlighter, Sticky-Note & Clipping to make it a powerful tool for online research, collaboration and information discovery”. Looks good; I’d be interested in hearing how people get on with it. Social annotation, sometimes called web annotation, is back. Put simply, it’s software that … Read more

The Future of Paper

The Observer has an interesting piece on the future of the book. For some the future of the book is electronic: [Bloomsbury chairman Nigel] Newton is certain that ‘within seven to 10 years, 50 per cent of all book sales will be downloads. When the e-reader emerges as a mass-market item, the shift will be very … Read more

Podcast: Online Shopping

From the BBC World Service World Business Report: Online shopping Here’s an excerpt from the original WSJ.com piece (subscription only, I’m afraid): Why does buying stuff online still look so similar to buying offline? First, Web sites still use the whole browsing-shopping basket-checkout metaphor, an approach that even real world shops are trying to get … Read more

Sideswiped by Skype

I love Skype and I write about it a lot, because I think it’s a great tool, especially for people in places where phone calls cost a lot. But those places tend to be developing countries where monopolies are powerful. Just those kind of places where credit card fraud is a problem. Like, say, Indonesia. … Read more