mrbrown’s blog has this post about Shel Israel mentioning Singapore blogs. Shel mentions that he was looking for Singapore related topics on Technorati. Technorati is a tracking engine for the blogsphere. It lets you looks for trends, patterns and entries by different people on similar topics or issues. It does this by encouraging people to “tag” their entries. Tags are words or phrases that describe your individual posts (something like the categories on blogs but more focussed and narrow). I think it is a good idea to participate in builiding a “tagged” web for Singapore or wherever you are.

I was talking about social software like meetup.com, friendster, bloglines ect. last week at the campus and we covered some features of technorati.com too – subscribing, adding tags and using watchlists to track what people are saying about some issue. Here is a short tutorial you may find useful if you plan to use Technorati.

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Whenever we conduct training on some software, the problem always is if the students can afford the tool. We want to discourage piracy and try to offer cheaper or free alternatives to commercial tools. The feature set is probably lesser but most of the time we hardly use the more advanced features.

The ever resourceful (or rather “always full of resources”) Robin Good put up a post on Photofiltre.
Free Digital Image Editor Review: Photofiltre – Robin Good’s Latest News

I tried it this morning on my office PC ( its a windows only tool) and I found it could handle most image editing needs. There is even a batch feature. You will find the download link on Robin’s post.

I did a presentation on Rich Media Accessibility at the ftp Digital Media Conference last week. I spoke about making audio, video and Flash content more accessible to people with visual and auditory disabilities.

One of the things that came up later during the Q&A sessions was should the governments force people to comply with web accessibility standards. I believe that we do need official intervention just as physical accessibilty guidelines are now embedded into building construction codes. The trouble is that most design houses and companies do not care even to get informed. They are not aware that minor tweaks like putting ALTernate text description on their images and providing text transcript can make their web more accessible. And these changes only makes our web better and faster to load. In my own case, I am running a screen reader (a speech synthesis tool JAWS that reads out the web page) through my travel pages and I realise that actually hearing what I have written helps me edit my sentences to improve the structure.

In the web design class that I used to run, I used to talk about Metaverse – a fully immersive virtual world that appears in Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash. We used to discuss issues like how far this technology is and what would be the implication of such a world on the real world. One speaker, Adrian Cheok talked about some of the interesting work they are doing merging the real world with virtual one at the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore.

Link to the Mixed Reality Lab

If you spend a lot of time researching, you will end up making a lot of book marks. Sometimes when you go back to site, you find that the pages have moved or disappeared (in case of a paid site).

There is a new web service called Furl that solves this problem. Go to their home page and sign up for the service. Furl can be downloaded as a toolbar. if you already have yahoo, amazon and google toolbars like me, you may want to implement furl as a “favorite link”. Very easy to do this with the instructions on the site.

You like some web page, just click on the Furl button (or link).
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