FCKeditor
OK, first of all: it's the author's initials (though perhaps an unfortunate choice of names). That said, this is really neat: an open-source cross-platform HTML textarea text formatter that works with ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, Java and more. More...

National Education Computing Conference
The National Education Computing Conference is on now, and is getting a fair amount of blog coverage. You can follow it using Edu_RSS - just click on this link. More...

Supporting Student Autonomy Online
David Wiley hits the mark with this set of notes for his forthcoming talk at Strathclyde, addressing autonomy and informal learning as key strategies. "As I pursue my own personal interest in open sustainable learning," he writes, "autonomy is a key issue." Quite so. More...

Challenges for the Semantic Web and Information Systems from Culture
An intelligent look at some of the complexities involved in building a semantic web, beginning with the observation that the computerization of knowledge has elided much of what we know about semantics in the process of transforming text to boolean constructs. More...

Microsoft Research DRM Talk
True story: while I was in Saskatoon, knowing that Air Canada shows movies only on flights longer than 3 and a half hours, and facing a three hour and 22 minute flight, I bought a copy of Gangs of New York and set it up to play on my computer. I test-played it for a couple of minutes, packed my computer, and caught my flight. More...

How Microsoft Lost the API War
Two good think pieces on Microsoft. This first item is a little technical but a good read even if you don't follow it completely. Essentially, the author argues that, since Microsoft has changed its (mostly secret) application program interface (API) so frequently in various versions of Windows, developers have abandoned Windows as a software platform and are now programming for the world wide web. More...

I’ll Spend My Time Talking to Whom I Want, Thanks Very Much!
Nice observation here: “For the consumer, the ability to control the timing, method, and manner of a transaction is very attractive – particularly if it saves them time and effort. The attraction for the supplier is that they can off-load all the administrative costs of selling to the consumer and still give a better service.” Or, put another way: stop trying to tell me what amount and kind of interaction is right for me. More...

Credit Cards Could Offer Key to E-government Authentication
Here's a stupid idea - using credit cards to authenticate voters and participants in e-government. Why a stupid idea? Well if you knew how many years I was denied a credit card (the consequence of student loans) you would understand - I see no reason to be denied my franchise simply because I have a bad credit rating. More...

The Location Field Is the New Command Line
This is a follow-up to an item run here a few days ago, How Microsoft Lost the API War. It has me thinking a lot more about web applications. I have been touting the web as the source of content for a long time now (in contrast, say, to standards designed to accomodate local media, such as CD-ROMs). More...

Codec Comparison
Oh, I don't know. Maybe somebody, some day, will need a detailed description of video coder-decoders (codecs). Well, here it is, describing varions of AVI, Quicktime, Windows Media and MPEG (Real format forthcoming) in quite a bit of (technical) detail. More...