Both a conversation and a document, Google Wave is truly amazing! It won't replace email, instant messenger, and online collaborative document editing tools, but when you need all three at once, it can't be beat.

For instance, Catherine Devlin and I have been collaborating on the InForm source code for "Penguicon The Text Adventure" and I think ( Read more... )

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I have higher Google PageRank than any other Matt Arnold on the web except for the fictional character in "Big Trouble". Ironically, by linking to this, I'm exacerbating the situation.

Surfing the search results far enough, you will come to a piece of amateur avante-garde experimental music with a title that happens to contain my name. Ladies and ( Read more... )

Good gravy, I am swarmed with chat messages from my friends who have simultaneously discovered that Gmail is porting Google Talk directly into their Gmail browser window. I knew about it first, but no matter how often I refresh my browser, the feature hasn't propagated to my account yet. In the middle of a huge Gmail chatfest, I'm still using the ( Read more... )

Today I wanted to make some corrections to the HTML of one of my old web pages to make it compliant with the standards of the Firefox web browser. So I saved the webpage on my Linux computer. I opened the HTML file in Text Editor and was pleased that it made the markup tags a variety of different colors. This visual aid made the work go much faster ( Read more... )

PC Turnoff Organization wants us to turn off our computers August 1 through 7. Their website features articles like "Give Your Kids The Gift Of Boredom." I am not making this up. For a moment I thought it was a parody, but it's not ( Read more... )

"There are over 8 billion web pages. Most of them suck." --Outfoxed

brendand noticed in my last post that I applied tags to it. Tags are important. Google succeeded because they realized you can't hierarchically categorize the web like Yahoo tried to do. Unfortunately Google is getting inundated with people cheating its page-rank system. The web will soon ( Read more... )

I just purchased Charles Stross' Hugo-and-Nebula nominated story "Lobsters" from Fictionwise.com. While reading about the protagonist getting slashdotted, I'm wondering how the internet is changing not just the content of science fiction, but how we read it. Back in the good old days, as Eric S. Raymond describes in this essay, SF readers had to ( Read more... )

If you're using Firefox instead of Explorer to surf the web, you can install an extension called Greasemonkey. This allows the user to change specific sites they visit. The site that shows up in your browser will look as if that site's creators had intended it to be that way. Different scripts are written every day for you to download: Take all the ( Read more... )