JD on EP

100 Frequently Misspelled English Words is a good collection... related are an additional 150 and some frequently mispronounced phrases.

Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal discusses user experience differences between online email interfaces from Google and Yahoo.

Om Malik decries unnecessary platform-specificity in a Mountain Dew desktop video viewer, and the comments talk about how the website uses cross-platform Flash video. (I've seen variants of this conversation-crossing in support forums... the playback environment is a key variant.)

CD-Audio copy protection got covered (with umbrage) at The Register and Ars Technica, but I'm still not sure why those who don't like the purchasing implementation of "the music industry" are still interested in listening to what "the music industry" thinks is good stuff to listen to... the final quote at The Reg captures this: "So an album comes out and it's a copy-protected to the hilt and not supported by your preferred operating system - don't buy it. Ignore it - don't steal it - and spend your hard-earned on something else."

The press release for the Fall DEMO conference is a good concise list of the technologies represented there this time.

An Associated Press story covers some of the rich-media and decentralized-authoring projects used by daily newspapers on their websites for recent hurricanes -- raw local-citizen blogs, edited staff blogs, data-fed maps, downloadable audio segments of about 20 minutes, reader photo galleries.

An article on net entrepreneurs in China describes an interface convention which varies across cultures: "The leading Web sites in China, from portals Netease and Sohu to the game site Tencent or auctioneer Taobao, break basic American Internet rules from the get-go. Their entry pages are far too crowded with information, fairly bursting with text, jammed and overlaid with loud graphics and music. And they are wildly popular."

There's a new round of stories on content restrictions in China... in the subsequent debate over "engage China or boycott China?" I keep thinking of how the USSR effort to license typewriters and fax machines did not end up having the effect they anticipated....

"IE7 Security In Brief" gives a high-level overview of upcoming changes... IE7 runs in "protected mode" and "cannot install software (good or bad) or change settings on the user’s computer without explicit user consent"... ActiveX Controls will be separated into "those safe to use in a browser" and "those not safe to use in a browser"... may additional smaller areas such as URL-checking, parental controls, easier intranet deployment. (The comments are lengthy, and in a quick scan I didn't notice significant content there.)

Kevin Werbach notes that web content companies are moving into communications just as communications companies are moving into web content, and it's hard to predict the exact future: "I don't quite see the big picture yet, but something tells me the model of the Internet and communications world we've followed since the early 1990s may be falling appart. The concept is that connectivity, applications, and content are distinct technical, business, and regulatory spheres... It does sound as though all of us excited about the 'Web 2.0' vision of open standards built on top of open standards, facilitating mashups and lightweight innovations all around, might want to question our assumptions."

A DoubleClick press release notes that 40% of Fortune 500 web advertising in 2004 was for rich-media assets... automative, telecomm, and entertainment companies lead the list, with financial sites, job sites and directories bringing up the rear. (These days when I see people complain about Flash because of "all those ads", I first think of how much text content I find unhelpful, and then realize that advertisers choose SWF because it's practical, and they'd dump it in a second if they measured out the money and found something which worked better.)

Jakob Nielsen tests this theory "many consumers click on the first link of search hits", and gets mixed results -- switching the top few results does show that many click automatically, but a good number of people evaluate within those first few links too.

Karlisson de Macedo Bezerra has a presentation summarizing the current options in opensource SWF work... it's in Portuguese, but the layout makes it easy to figure out what's going on.

PubSub is starting to segment blogs by category... MXNA and tech.memeorandum.com are other examples of learning more by listening to fewer blogs.

Martijn de Visser freely offers SWF shell for FLVs, but explains how you can make your own for the Flash 8 video codecs if you wish.