5typos.net

Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age →

Trip Gabriel, on the NYTimes.com:

The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

I may be a supporter of the Rip. Mix. Burn. school of thought, but still, the Mix part involves producing something. You can stand on the shoulders of others, but you need to add value – even if it’s crap like mine – and always give credit.

This is not a problem of a digital-enabled confused generation, this is just lazy persons.

Ditch Bookmarking with Search Powered historious →

Great overview of historious by Jarel Remick, on Web.AppStorm:

historious‘ concept is quite simple really; instead of bookmarking sites you want to read later, “historify!” them and go back to them later via your personal content search engine.

I’ve been using historious for the past two weeks and I really like it. No need to add tags to your bookmarks, it’s like leaving breadcrumbs all over the net, and then being able to search them.

Unlike with Pinboard, I’m still not sure that I trust them with all my bookmarks in case they loose them, but I haven’t experienced any downtime yet.

Creating a Network Like Facebook, Only Private →

From Jim Dwyer, on the NYTimes.com:

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business.

It’s starting. I don’t know if diaspora* is going to be it — although it does sound pretty good — but Facebook has now crossed from late adopters to laggards in the adoption curve, and geeks are looking for greener pastures.

Case in point, just this morning:

Not the finest authority in tech predictions, but still, an influential early adopter.

I also really like the developers bootstrap approach:

[…] their project — which does not involve giant rounds of venture capital financing before anyone writes a line of code — reflected “a return of the classic geek means of production: pizza and ramen and guys sleeping under the desks because it is something that it is really exciting and challenging.”

In any case, it’s disruption time in the social networks space again. Normal users should hang-on to the Facebook boat for a while, but geeks are ready to start signing up and giving a try to unstable new stuff.

Growing On Google, People Asking “How Do I Delete My Facebook Account” →

Shady data, but I believe the trend is real. As soon as a real alternative appears, the migration will begin.

Glitch Brings New Worries About Facebook’s Privacy →

Jenna Wortham, on the NYTimes.com:

On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.

Is not the existence of the exploit, those happen everywhere. The problem is that on Facebook, they’re usually the result of a sharing feature that goes too far.

Adobe Responds (kinda) →

Kevin Lynch, Adobe CTO, Moving Forward:

The primary issue at hand is that Apple is choosing to block Adobe’s widely used runtimes as well as a variety of technologies from other providers.

Vague.

We look forward to delivering Flash Player 10.1 for Android smartphones as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a general release in June.

Anything they say before this is out, should be considered whining.

Microsoft on HTML5 →

Dean Hachamovitch, IE General Manager, on HTML5 and video:

The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design.

What the what? Never thought I’d read the above sentence.

Of course, this is great news. With Microsoft joining the party, both HTML5 and H.264 will jump in adoption and all users will benefit.

However, I’m a little concerned that everybody is claiming support for HTML5 as a way to fight the current leader -Adobe Flash- before trying to push their own flavor of a standard as the new champ.

Dot Canon →

Yesterday Canon announced that it will try to acquire the “.canon” domain. The reasoning being:

Canon hopes to globally integrate open communication policies that are intuitive and easier to remember compared with existing domain names such as “canon.com.”

As I prepared to rant my heart out, I recalled that 25 years ago this week, the first .com domain name was registered.

It struck me that my feelings towards messing with top level domains where comparable to what purist thought of allowing commercial presence in the beginnings of internet.

So, rather than sounding like Dvorak, I say good riddance to them and I welcome a future of s90.canon, books.amazon and iMac.apple.