I have been using a local Wiki to manage my dissertation.  I choose a local wiki for various reasons, the biggest of which was that when I started I didn't have broadband internet access so using an on-line wiki was not very practical.  Nevertheless, I spent a great deal of time looking for an online wiki solution that met my requirements for future projects.  My requirements were it had to be free and it had to be easy to use.  Well, I found one on-line wiki site that was both of those: Peanut Butter Wiki.  There tagline is "PBwiki makes creating a wiki as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich", and they couldn't be more right.  So check them out if you need a wiki.

p.s.  In the interest of full disclosure, they did offer to upgrade my storage quote if I said something nice about them online.  I'm not above selling myself out for a good product.

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It's a sad day for our culture when we dumb down our video games because they are encouraging original thought:

"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base ... There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an option to be part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves"

Link: Dumbing down virtual 'Star Wars' may backfire | csmonitor.com.

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The CommonCensus Map Project is an attempt to show the 'spheres of influence' of different cities in the US. It only takes twelve clicks to add how you identify to the the database. It look like a fun project so give it a click.

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Google now has a news reader. It sucks!

Link: Reader

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Truer words were never spoken:

The Kodak paradigm suggests that a radical decrease in cost will lead to a transformation in [camera] usage, and that's exactly what we're starting to see. Many amateur digital photographers are choosing to capture parts of their lives that wouldn't have interested the Brownie and Instamatic generations. They take pictures of their breakfasts. They take pictures of their subway commute into work. They take pictures of a dreary office meeting that's gone on too long. And they take way too many pictures of their cats.

Link: Total Recall: How to develop a photographic memory without even trying

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I love the Tivo I bought Sam for Christmas, but news on the street is that Tivo is in trouble. In fact, the Tivo Deathwatch has already begun. This raises the question of whether or not a knight in shining armor will ride to Tivo's rescue. One rumor is that Apple may buy Tivo. I think that is about as likly as the the old Disney buying Apple rumors, but maybe Steve has something in this long term strategy that would make this a smart move.

Currently playing in iTunes: The Sad Cafe by The Eagles

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So I was reading a story about the idea that artificial intelligence could someday be used to fight wars and I discovered this most disturbing sentence:

Already schematized into PowerPoint presentations with tangled colored arrows, talking points and an Orwellian lexicon - "soldier systems," "networked lethality," "war fighter machine interfaces" - the rationale for the effort is laid out in an Army promotional video: "Either you create your future or you become the victim of the future someone creates for you."

So our plan to use computers to fight wars is already laid out in PowerPoint. Not only is the enemy shaking in their boots, but the robots are laughing at how easily they can manipulate us.

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I've noticed something strange amongst my friends in the last two weeks. None of them seem to be aware of Bit Torrent. This seems surprising to me because the program results in 35% of all internet traffic and my friends are mostly geeks (or closet geeks if they can't admit it to themselves). While I could understand that my friends with smaller geek quotients might not be aware of the specific program, it doesn't excuse the fact that none of them were aware of one of the best uses of the software — downloading TV shows. I understand that most of my friends were getting out of college just as the Napster file-downloading craze was hitting its stride so it is unlikely that they were ever big on peer-to-peer file-sharing, but is bit torrent that generational? I just can't understand how my geek friends could not be aware of something that I take as common knowledge. What happened to you man?

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Is Google really going to offer free telephone service?

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This comes as no surprise, but web users do not know the difference between sponsored and non-sponsored results on search engines:

Only one in six users of internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements, a new survey finds.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported Sunday that adults online in the United States are generally naive when it comes to how search engines work.

The major search engines all return a mix of regular results, based solely on relevance to the search terms entered, and sponsored links, for which a website had paid money to get displayed more prominently.

Link: Wired News: Users Confuse Search Results, Ads

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