With all the talk about how Digg, the community social news site, is supposedly worth $200 million, and the ensuing cries of BS, you’d think we were well on the way to Bubble 2.0 instead of web 2.0. Semantics of the “web 2.0” term aside, the current revolution in the web is changing how things are done, and is having an effect on the industry, for better or worse.
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Nothing complicated, intricate or hidden in this title. It means what it says – but the photo does a better job.

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As expected, there has been much discourse following AOL’s release of the search query records of 650,000 of their users over a three-month period. After the publically-released data (which was originally put up for research purposes, with no ill intent), was discovered by a blogger, news subsequently spread throughout the online communities, prompting many people to download the data and AOL to eventually pull the data from their site. However, some of those who had already got the data began to offer it up for download, either from their servers or through Bittorrent, providing a very good example of “letting the cat outta the bag”.
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Well, I’ve finally started biking again, sort of as an alternative to running, and to get at least some biking in before the summer’s out. I usually keep running during the winter months, but biking then is usually not an option. Biking can also be a little more interesting than running, giving you more scenery options, and like all forms of exercise, is a great way to burn off stress and get into a relaxed mode. The weather’s also been better this week as well, with today’s high being only a dry 24 °C – perfect summer weather in my view, and certainly much better than the humid sauna-like conditions we had last week.
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Well, the “blogosphere” (I hate using that word) and various online communities are abuzz with the news that AOL Research just released 20 million search queries of some 650,000 users over a three-month time period from March to May of 2006. Though the data were released in order to provide “a real query log” to aid in search engine research, it constitutes a huge violation of privacy, as though usernames have been removed, they have been replaced by unique identifiers, which can be used to track an individual user’s searches, allowing information to be collected about them and a profile built.

The download was taken offline sometime yesterday (August 6th, 2006), but enough people had already downloaded it to ensure that mirrors would quickly be set up, ensuring its continued spread. While the intent of this release of data was obviously not malicious, it was a poorly thought-out move that AOL is sure to receive more bad PR for – especially in light of their recent troubles.
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Despite there being many tips on separating content from presentation in web design, and the existance of entire websites devoted to practicing this ethos (which has been around since at least 2001), there still remain a plethora of websites that don’t seem to take any of this account, despite the demonstrated benefits. Much of this can be attributed to sites that aren’t well-maintained or updated; however, many new websites are still being designed without regards to standards and best-practices.

Furthermore, websites done entirely in Flash are still being pushed – indicating that proliferation of best-practices and advantages, as pertaining to web-design, are still not well known. Perhaps it’s time to outline (at least briefly), why doing an entire site in Flash is a bad idea.
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I originally meant this to be part of my post, “Why Flash-based websites are bad“, but when I started typing the section, “A brief history of the problem”, things got a little too long. What can I say? I have a problem with being overly verbose, but I can’t bring myself to delete something I spent typing. This is probably also why I’m a pack rat – as I type this, there are five or six cardboard boxes sitting in my room that should probably be thrown out. But I digress.

If you’re a web designer, you may be disenchanted everytime you visit a poorly-designed or poorly-structured site. Why do these still persist, despite proper techniques of content/presentation separation having been around since 2001? Has the whole world gone mad? Fortunately no – but it is a complex problem.
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This guide is aimed at owners of Logitech mice that have extra buttons and would like to configure them for various program or application-specific settings. By using a program called uberOptions in addition with SetPoint, Logitech’s keyboard and mouse control software, you can configure your mouse buttons to do different things in different programs, without having to manually change button configurations all the time. This is especially useful to the Logitech mice that have many extra buttons, as the buttons, being close to your finger tips, can be used for time-saving shortcut commands across multiple applications and games.

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Meebo, the popular web-based service that allows you to chat with any of the four major IM networks (MSN, Yahoo, AIM or Jabber), launched their MeeboMe service, which allows website owners to chat with any visitor using their site, by way of a handy flash widget that is inserted into the site.
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Tantek has posted some nice tips on how to improve the quality of your pages and to make them more standards-compliant and in the spirit of the HTML specification. This is a great guide for web designers and developers wondering about how to improve the quality of their code, and what’s the correct way to do something – there are far too many old and outdated HTML design tutorials and sites out there, but Tantek sets the record straight and his post serves as a nice starting point for producing valid code that adheres to standards, and will make maintenance easier.
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