JD on EP

Marc Sylvester of IntroNetworks talks about how this social application has been well received, but outside the circles in which many weblog commenters travel. (A-list bloggers can see this stuff at some conferences, but they don't know how it's being adopted (and paid for!) on intranets and for private functions.) Good stuff on the social and financial work behind getting adoption of such a people-oriented application.

Ivan Todorov and Crucial Limit ran a rap, later picked up by Ryan Moore, about "Flash devs have higher IQs"... Ivan's original is more about how people developing in SWF tend to have a wide range of knowledge and expertise, but I'm a little scared about that "IQ" line getting out into some of the other discussion groups.... ;-) (Good point about the possibilities for the SWF ecology/platform, though... the whole is positioned well for future growth, and there are definitely distinct reasons for ignoring such an advantage.)

Geoff Stearns itemizes how various browsers and tasks respond to various plugin-detection approaches. This looks like the definitive reference. (Odd personal note: I think it was ten years ago next month that I first suggested a META refresh on the old Shocker-L mailing list... browser differences have cost me a lot of hours typing since then.... ;-)

MapGUI v2.0 is a SWF-based, data-fed mapping service which can be implemented and customized via an XML text file, no programming required... more info in their press release this week. (Additional keywords: maps, cartography, GIS.)

"Fixing the Back Button in AJaX apps"... I'm still not sure there's consensus on that "back = undo" line over the "back = navigation" position... when I hear that "fix" language I have to first check what the speaker thinks is wrong and how they think things "should" be. (The first paragraph here also gets into bookmarks, which is more about representing an application's state within a universal resource identifier -- seems like a different issue to me than "What should that 'Back' button do when I'm typing?", although both issues are related to overloading a hyperlink document browser with application-like functionality.) I appreciate that Mike linked to Robert Penner's original work on this subject.

Sam Wan has some pictures from his recent trip to Guilin and Macau, where I spent time last year (and which I miss)... if you think Flash 8 is visually stunning, then take a look at Guilin and the Li River.... ;-)

John Hattan examined ways to obfuscate and protect your ActionScript.

Nathan Pittman Pitman [sorry, Nathan!] is conducting a series of interviews with people who have started digital businesses of their own.

Mike Schleifstein at FlashInsider.com has had a very steady posting schedule, turning up things I don't think I would have found otherwise... I appreciate the work he puts into his journal.

Scoble, Winer and the rest apparently spent the weekend arguing over the label "RSS" versus the label "web feeds" and more (here's an entrypoint). I get sort of nuts when people argue over what labels "really" mean... I'm more of a "how can we do this or that" kind of guy, and it's tough when all the oxygen gets sucked up by labeling debates. Microsoft is apparently using the latter label in betas of its upcoming UIs, and it does seem more friendly than the acronym "RSS", but... I'm not sure most people would be sure of what the word "feeds" means either. ("Oh no, the giant spider is going to eat me, I don't want the 'web feeds'!") I'd go along the lines of differentiating "Do you want the whole experience the designer intended, or do you just want to know when its text changed?" But then again, the label "RSS" has already had a few generations of mutation already, so maybe the whole thing's just a wash..... ;-)

BoingBoing had a scandal about marketing references being inserted into Wikipedia entries, but it seems like it was just an independent fanboy thing rather than a Raging Cow type of thing.

Chris Josephes describes how Verizon apparently didn't validate its inputs, letting website visitors read certain details of other people's phone bills....