I was deeply saddened to read this Ars Technica post about Yahoo! shutting down Geocities. The service, which was bought by Yahoo! in 1999 enabled people with limited technical and design skills to create their own little home on the web:

Started in 1994, Geocities was like the Facebook to Angelfire’s MySpace—competing webpage services that allowed over-enthused HTML newbies to create artfully horrific webpages to represent themselves in the early days of the Internet. (I was a diehard Angelfire fan, myself.) Geocities was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 with the intent of extending Yahoo’s reach with its Internet advertising and services.

Geocities was where I set up my first website, and where I first posted my short fiction and various essays. I still remember the night I "published" my first short story on Geocities, after getting the HTML just right, and wondering how many might read my story. Probably not very many.

Goodbye Geocities, you will be missed!

The glitch that caused Amazon’s website to pull many ‘adult oriented’ books (mostly gay & lesbian titles) from its sales rankings, causing the books to be harder to find, caused quite a controversy last week. I detailed it in this post Amazon ‘glitch’ stirs rumors of alleged censorship (April 14).

While the question of whether or not Amazon engaged in deliberate censorship because of homophobic tendencies is still up in the air, the fierce and harsh response to the incident on blogs and Twitter brings up other questions. Were people too quick to judge? Was there a ‘mob mentality’ in the online community?

These questions, and more, were brought up in this NYT article:

Although the way messages speed across social networks makes today’s digital world ripe for mob-fueled conspiracy theories, the controversy over Amazon was striking both for its ferocity and for the velocity with which it spread.

And at least one blogger, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, backtracked on his criticism of Amazon:

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"I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true," Mr. Shirky wrote, noting that "the idea that this was an event of mainly technological propagation, rather than a coordinated bit of anti-gay bias, simply escaped me."
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Up until now my discussion of the iPhone and iPod Touch have been related to ebooks. I have avoided the rumor mill that is cranking at full speed among Apple fanboys and fangirls.

My wife sent me these pictures she took at her office (with her own iPhone 3G), where a co-worker had returned from Singapore – where he purchased it for around $100. He had, what by all appearances looked like a mini iPhone (nano?). My wife says that the "mini iPhone" had a different operating system (OS), but the home screen looked identical to what’s on the market now.

Take a look for yourself:

She reports that the back casing is identical, and the smaller iPhone was a 16GB.

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The news about Amazon’s ‘glitch’ that has resulted in thousands of titles being removed from its ranking system has really spread around the internet like wildfire.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, thousands of titles, dealing mostly with gay and lesbian themes, were removed from Amazon’s ranking system. This basically means none of those titles will show up on bestseller lists, "Amazon Recommends" lists, and pretty much everything else. In other words, you won’t find those titles unless you specifically search for them.

Amazon says it’s nothing more than a glitch that they are working to fix. Many on the intertubes, however, are pretty sure it’s a conspiracy by Amazon to censor what we read.

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Don’t believe everything you read online, especially today. April 1 is commonly known as "April Fools Day" and there is no shortage of pranks to be found, especially on the intertubes.

Thinking about today got me thinking, how did April Fools Day come about? What is the history of this strange "holiday"? I decided to scour the internet to find out.

My first stop took me to an obvious place when searching for information – Wikipedia. I came across this entry that gives a vague and convoluted history of this day, much of which is pure speculation:

In many pre-Christian cultures May Day (May 1) was celebrated as the first day of summer, and signalled the start of the spring planting season. An April Fool was someone who did this prematurely. Another origin is that April 1 was counted the first day of the year in France. When King Charles IX changed that to January 1, some people stayed with April 1. Those who did were called "April Fools" and were taunted by their neighbors.

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Today we celebrated Earth Hour – where people around the world turned off the lights for one hour in a worldwide symbolic vote for Earth! At 8:30pm the lights in my house went on, and a few candles were lit so I wouldn’t trip over the cat. The entire city of Chicago also took part in Earth Hour.

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Today, the Federal Trade Commission began a conference in Seattle, WA to discuss digital rights management – aka DRM. While no policy shift changes were announced, I was pleased to read via this post on Ars Technica what one FTC official had to say as a warning to companies that use DRM:

Mary Engle, an FTC Acting Deputy Director, began her remarks by warning that those who use DRM had better get serious about disclosing it and the limits that it places on products. She referenced the Sony BMG rootkit debacle, saying that "sellers who use DRM technology to enforce the terms of bargains with consumers need to be particularly careful to disclose in advance" what those bargains are.

Isn’t that what the fine print is for, to disclose shady terms to consumers without actually expecting the consumer to read about the shady terms and conditions associated with DRM. According to Ms. Engle, that is not acceptable:

And just stuffing the disclosure into the fine print of an End User License Agreement (EULA) isn’t good enough. "If your advertising giveth and your EULA taketh away," she said, "don’t be surprised if the FTC comes calling."

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I’ve always thought that Japanese was one of the harder foreign languages (I struggled through basic Spanish in high school and college). But when I read this article on Yahoo!, I have a new-found respect for those who can read, write and speak Japanese.

Why is Japanese such a hard language? This gives you a good idea:

Just reading the newspaper requires knowledge of about 2,000 characters. Another 50,000 are less common but useful to recognize.

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This weekend I’ll be giving away a copy of the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (aff link)! I have been a faithful subscriber to this magazine for a few years now and I love it. The magazine talks about literature, writing, publishing and a variety of other content that keeps me going.

Why the giveaway? For some reason I received 2 issues in my mail rather than one. Instead of letting the extra copy go to waste and throwing it out, I thought I’d give it away to one of my faithful readers!

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This past week has been a rather difficult one, to say the least. It started when my Powerbook G4 decided to suffer a catastrophic failure – the details of which you can read in this previous post. And the week reached its low point on Saturday February 14 (yes, on Valentine’s Day, but I wasn’t feeling the love) when it became clear that the computer was beyond my ability to repair it.

Here is the result of my efforts:

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