Alex Barnett's blog

Right. Family is away, I'm not going to cook. I need to eat, so a take-out is in order. The options are: Chinese: Spring rolls, Sweet & Sour Pork, Rice. Indian: Lamb Jalfrezi or chicken korma, rice, nam bread. Wendy's: Burger &...

emarketer reports on the news that email open rates are falling from 38.2% to 30.2% over a year on year period, according to DoubleClick . There is a caveat to these numbers in that tracking methods to report the data are being blocked by some ISPs. That...

Eric Dolecki writes about his concerns regarding the news of Microsoft's Ajaz project, Atlas:: "However word on the street is that if you build an application using Atlas, it might require a browser add-on in order for it to work. Am I the only...

Google Video - launched Monday , cracked Tuesday .

Dare Obasanjo on the news of the Microsoft Atlas Ajax project: "This is excellent news which I know a lot of our UX developers at MSN will be glad to hear. Already Scott Isaacs who's been a key part of the AJAX development we've been doing at MSN...

One of the things I've been missing since moving to Seattle is the cricket. Until now. With the Ashes starting soon...I looked around for the various options I might have, including sattelite and online delivery. The DirecTV via sattelite option was...

Open Source Radio interviews 3 4 folks ( mp3 ) who know a thing or two about the Grosker / Supreme Court decision: Joshua Wattles , Law Professor and Copyright Lawyer (clients include Paramount Pictures and Gnutella) Michael Weiss, CEO , StreamCast...

Inside Microsoft : " Phil Ringalda didn’t like part of the way Microsoft’s new RSS extension is structured, and suggested a cleaner format. Twenty-one hours later, the RSS team at MS, in their first blog post , suggested making his change pemanent...

Seattle Times quotes Scott Gatz , the senior director for personalization products at Yahoo in reaction to yesterday's RSS/Longhorn news : "The biggest thing is to not overly use the word 'RSS'" RSS , RSS , RSS , RSS , RSS , RSS , RSS , RSS ...

A bunch of RSS news relating Longhorn news will start emerging: Robert Scoble : "I just posted the hour-long interview I had with Microsoft's Longhorn Browsing and RSS team. More shortly after the announcements get made." I'm going to update...

Inside Google points to some home-grown funny Flash movie.... Google Song , created by Edward Evans (known to b3tans as giant_squid) and manwithunderpantsonheed.

Myscreencast.com , a library of categorised screencasts , is worth checking out. This is where I found Phil Jones' DebugCast (more from Phil here ): "it's improvised rather than scripted. (Hence has that patent podcast-style mumbling and uncertainty...

Kevin Briody picks up on the internal blogs at Microsoft discussion , and makes some great suggestions as to how any company - not just Microsoft - can encourage more behind-the-firewall use of blogs and RSS. Love Kevin's pre-canned internal OPMLs idea...

Check out the 'Near Me' & aerial features on results seach.msn.com beta (I've only tried out the Seattle and Redmond areas, not sure what the coverage is for the beta...). I'll update with links to any Microsoft bloggers who know more. (updates already...

News and commentary that the new Office XML formats are not compatible with the GNU General Public License - and therefore not 'open' - prompts Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo to respond : "There are two points I'd like to make here. The first is that...

Chris Pirillo points out Old-Computers.Com . Ah, memory lane (or lack of)...So, I'm going to bore you with a list of my first computers. My first computer - Sinclair ZX81 . Ram: 1K, although I extended this with a wopping 14K Memopak Oooh. Learnt...

(via Digg)... New Scientist reports : "The BBC is poised to release a free and 'open source' internet video delivery system to compete head on with proprietary favourites. The UK corporation has developed its own video compression algorithm, called...

"Someday this picture will be a header graphic on Scripting News." Here you go Dave , all yours .

DONTCLICK.IT is an imaginary interactive research institute - a Flash site created by Alex Frank who's working on a diploma in Communication Design at the University of Essen-Duisburg in Germany ( via Usability in the News ). The site is an exploration...

I was asked the other day what the difference is between the United Kingdom and Great Britain. Sam provides the clearest explanation I've found so far. ( Via groovy mother )

Thought I'd share this with you... "In information technology, canonicalization (pronounced KA-nahn-nihk-uhl-ih-ZAY-shun and sometimes spelled canonicalisation) is the process of making something canonical -- that is, in conformance with some specification...

Dan Hill runs the team responsible for designing and building the BBC's radio and music -based interactive offerings across web, digital tv, and mobile platforms. Dan posts the following on his blog regarding the BBC press release announcing that there...

The Father of Web 2.0 has asked that all who refer to Him , refer to Him as the Farter of Web 2.0... Or is it the other way around...? Anyhow, seems perfectly reasonable to me.

James Robertson points to a post by CorporateBlogging.Info claiming IBM is running 3600 internal blogs: "Through the central blog dashboard at the intranet W3, IBMers now can find more than 3,600 blogs written by their co-workers. As of June 13...

MSN's Steve Rider is looking feedback for on the next version of the AJAX RSS reader Start.com : "Our goal is still about aggregating the best of what you want on the web, like bookmarks, rss feeds, and news. But it also means that you should be...