#Dev

As mentioned in the previous post, Flickr kind of rocks as a photo sharing community. Besides the taggability of photos and creation of feeds, you can even mark up photos and add notes for emphasis inside photos, tag and comment on them which is the bomb. Oh, and it has easy posting of photos to any blog service as well as creating arbitrary xml rss feeds. Quite cool.

Besides the fact it is a great little Canadian company out of Vancouver, BC they also use one of my favourite languages, PHP to get a lot of their functionality in place.

Highly informative, useful and beautifully designed Pushing Your Limits presentation by Doug Bowman for the Sydney 2004 Web Essentials conference.

Basically, tells you why and how you should design with CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. If you don’t know, Cascading Style Sheets, while it won’t save you and is not a solution for every interface problem you have, is this simple, almost boring technology which allows you to separate the presentation of your site from the actual data in it. Fantastic for design and allows almost effortless changing of site design.

They did it. Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne made a successful first Ansari X Prize rocketing to 100 miles and the limit of space before returning safely to earth.

Like the 1919 Orteig prize which spurred Lindbergh to attempt the first transatlantic crossing in the Spirit of St.Louis, the Ansari X Prize has managed to do what superpowers have failed to do: open space.

I think the X Prize competition is important, but not for the reason most people think I do (my father being an aeronautical technician, my brother an airplane mechanic, and my mom a trekkie). I honestly think the benefits to science and industry will be minuscule to the changes I hope it creates in our ideas about ourselves.

Quick followup on the wikipedia authority challenge .

Ed Felten did a quick smackdown comparison ; the mighty Wikipedia vs Brittanica cage deathmatch.

Very interesting actually. Wikipedia seems to do very well against Brittanica when it goes toe to toe. Would be interested in seeing how far that actually goes though for a representative statistically significant comparison of entries.

Overall verdict: Wikipedia’s advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren’t for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica’s advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.