This is only spookly because just yesterday I was drafting a post suggesting that Google might do exactly that. It was all part of a post about the recently leaked screenshots of the Google Calendar application, and I was going to hypothesise that Google might buy a service like Writely (with Writely specifically identified) and develop it into a full-blown online Office-style application suite, as part of the push to get us all to store more stuff online.

So I very nearly had a scoop. So close, but yet so far. I’m beginning to feel like ITV.

No, I’m not bitter.

Well maybe just a smidge.

Steve Robinson has become the first person to podcast from space (via). He did it from the Space Shuttle Discovery, whilst floating above Indonesia. Seemingly, the main thing this proves is that news travels remarkably slowly round the blogosphere – the story first appeared on the NASA site nearly eight months ago, and yet blogs that I read are only just starting to pick up on it. Especially with such a watched mission, one would have expected something like this to have spread round the web rather more quickly, but hey-ho, I guess that’s just not the way it happened this time.

In addition to listening to the podcast above, you can download it from NASA here, or read the transcript here. Perhaps the more amusing observation is that NASA’s podcast from somewhere off the planet sounds a damn sight better and more human than the podcast of this site, generated just across the pond in New Hampshire, USA.

In other podcasting news, the Pope’s got an iPod to help him keep up-to-date with the Vatican Radio podcast. It’s somewhat unclear which other podcasts he’ll be listening to, but then it’s also somewhat unclear what music he’ll be listening to. From the Newsblog:

The pontiff responded to receiving the gift by saying: “Computer technology is the future … I can’t wait to check out the Arctic Monkeys.”

OK, I confess: I made the last part of that quotation up. But the music player definitely brings the head of the Catholic Church closer to being “down with the kids”.

And so we’ve found it. Podcasting is the single point where religion and science meet back on the other side. The internet really does bring people together 😉

After ten years of loyal service, Jeeves has retired from the search engine Ask Jeeves, as bizarre as the concept might seem. Ask Jeeves has now rebranded as the utterly forgettable Ask.

But then, as bizarre as the idea of the eponymous character being dissociated from his own search engine appears, it’s certainly no more bizarre than the initial decision to associate a seventy-nine year-old Wodehouse character with a site claiming to be at the forefront of cutting-edge technology. Having said that, the strategy was remarkably successful, with the site gaining far more popularity than the (woeful) quality of its search results ever deserved.

As for the new-look Ask.com: It has a very clean interface, which appears to be largely based on Google’s (as almost every search engine is nowadays – the only innovations appear to be in sites like a9.com). Frankly, it’s so samey as to beg the question: Why bother?

A little over a year ago, I scoffed at the idea that Windows Vista would have seven versions. Then I sort of unscoffed about six months ago. Turns out that the initial scoffing was right. There won’t be seven versions; there’s going to be eight.

Just when you thought computing was getting simpler, choosing an operating system is suddenly becoming as confusing as buying a toothbrush. We all now face the unenviable decision of choosing between Windows Starter 2007, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Basic N, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Business N, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ulimate. Of course, asking for advice anywhere as to which version you actually need will result in being told to buy Ultimate, because that’ll be the most expensive. It’s much the same as the way that thousands of Home users are using XP Pro, despite not needing any of the extra features.

I can’t imagine where Microsoft were coming from with this decision. And I have no idea where I’ll go with mine. It’s a headache waiting to happen.

Just days after it was leaked, Microsoft have decided to publically realease he Beta 2 version of Internet Explorer. As a relatively recent Firefox convert, this release is designed to target people like me, and get me to switch back to Internet Explorer (as an aside, note that it’s now Windows Internet Explorer rather than Microsoft Internet Explorer). I’m downloading it as I type, and in the coming days I’ll no doubt post some of my thoughts on the latest IE experience. You should feel free to do the same – leave your comments or a link to them here if you want. But don’t feel obliged 😉

Two years ago today, Bill Gates promised he would rid the email world of spam within two years.  18 emails I’ve received today says he’s failed.  Unless, of course, “teen girls get anally violated” and “Very sad German statistics say in average” don’t count as spam, for some reason.  Luckily, I have Reg to back me up on this one.  He’s failed miserably.  Let’s all point and laugh.  (via)

The software that powers this very site, WordPress, is three years old today. I’ve been using it for over a third of its lifespan now (there’s a scary thought), and for my needs, it’s the best blogging software I’ve come across. I can’t give a full and completely fair review of every blogging tool out there, but as a previous user of three, I can offer some (possibly outdated) opinions on those.

The good ol’ days of The LBSC were powered by Movable Type. Admittedly, I’m commenting on an old version of Movable Type, and that’s not entirely fair, but I didn’t particularly like it. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, but just somewhat over-powerful, and not terribly easy-to-use. It’s not particularly pretty, either. But the main thing which stopped me using the Movable Type software over here is that it seemed incredibly difficult to install, and it’s emphasised that no support is offered for the free version. Given that I originally hoped to have multiple authors on here, too, Movable Type had a financial disincentive compared with other blogging tools.

As a complete novice, I was taken in by Blogger. This is designed as an incredibly simple blogging tool to use, and there’s no question that it fulfills that requirement. It’s literally click-and-publish blogging, which can be hosted either by Blogger themselves, or can be published to your own host. I used the latter method, and it worked well for some considerable time. Eventually, however, I became frustrated with the limitations of Blogger. It is an incredibly difficult , if not impossible, tool to modify, as it is entirely run by Google, and so outside of my personal control. So if I want to display something in a slightly different way, if Blogger doesn’t have a built-in expression for it, then that’s too bad. Also, every time I made a simple change to the site template, the whole site had to be re-uploaded, because Blogger serves static pages. When you only have a handful of posts, this is no problem. But when you’ve got a wealth of them, it becomes a very real issue, and it can take extraordinary lengths of time to correct the smallest of spelling errors in the sidebar, for example.

So after a while, I moved over to WordPress. I haven’t looked back since. Its got almost everything I need built in, I can tweak the PHP to my heart’s content to do cool things, and there is a huge amount of support available when I get stuck, from the fantastic community who’ve helped me out time and again, to the codex when you just can’t remember the parameters for a particular command. The latest version even looks pretty visually stunning. And on the occasions I think WordPress is missing something, there’s almost always a plugin available to fix the problem. Most recently, the new built-in spam filter has made the pretty huge headache of comment spam on the site a complete non-issue. And all of this for free.
If I was facing the decision of what tool to use again today, there is no doubt in my mind that I would’ve chosen WordPress. I’m unsure whether I’d have gone for the Blogger-style easy hosted set-up offered by WordPress.com, or set up the site myself, as I have done now (which is remarkably easy to do), but WordPress would undboutledly have been the tool of choice. And with the flexibility now in-built to bring posts over from a number of other blogging services, there’s really no reason for anybody not to swtich, even if they already have a blog elsewhere.

So Happy Birthday WordPress. May you continue to grow and develop, and make my life ever-easier.

Last Friday, Google officially launched Google Pack.  This is essentially a bundling of a whole load of Google sofware (Toolbar, Picasa, Desktop, Talk, Earth, and Screensaver) along with bits and pieces of non-Google software (Firefox, Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware, Trillian, Adobe Reader, RealPlayer, and some GalleryPlayer HD images).  These all come with the Google Pack software, so that through one manager all of the programs are downloaded, installed, and kept up to date.  It’s quite a good idea, and makes owning the internet essentials – and keeping them updated – easy for even the most basic internet user.

More than this, though, it puts Google in a unique position.  Presumably, when they release new software – be that Web Accelerator, or some form of Office software, or whatever – Google Pack will present the user with some kind of a pop-up window, asking if they’d like to install this new, free software.  And a lot of people will just click ‘yes’, and Google Pack will go away and get it all installed for you.  Hence, take up of Google software, and therefore Google’s prescence on the desktop, increases.

It also allows Google to form strategic partnerships with any number of companies – what agreement was necessary for RealPlayer, for example, to be installed by default for everyone who downloads Google Pack?  Google could make an absolute fortune through this – as long as enough people download Google Pack, which they almost certainly will since it provides such a good package, Google has a hand-hold on millions of users’ desktops. And the user can be assured that they will always have the best software, fully updated, free of charge.

It is, quite simply, everything Windows Update could have been, if Microsoft had a bit more nous.

Due to a copyright dispute, GMail is now GoogleMail, in the UK at least. No more gmail.com addresses are to be issued, with the rather less sexy googlemail.com domain replacing them. Otherwise, the service remains exactly the same. But those ‘gmail.com’ early adopters get to look very posh all of a sudden. Hurrah!

Eight months ago, in response to claims that there’d be seven different editions of Windows Vista (then referred to by the codename Longhorn), I said:

This seems a rather unlikely story

Today, reports state that

there are seven separate editions of Vista headed your way

So you’ll notice that I picked up on quite a small rumour months ago, and trashed it. And it turns out to be true. That’s a pretty big bobo, even by me. But hey, when I was I ever right? 😉

Anyway, the seven editions are reported to be Starter Edition, Home Basic Edition, Home Premium Edition, Professional Edition, Small Business Edition, Enterprise Edition, and finally the Ultimate Edition. Nice to see that they’re keeping it simple. How on Earth do they hope to educate users as to which version they need? It was hard enough to educate people when there was just XP Home and XP Pro – seven versions is going to be a bit of a marketing nightmare. But, as I’ve said before…

At the same time, though, this would be a good move by Microsoft if it meant that the most basic version of Windows could be sold at a very low price, so that it could compete in that field for the home users that Linux and the like are trying to target, since these could become more of a threat over the next few years. And, of course, Microsoft has been shifting in this direction by adding two further editions of Windows XP to the market (Media Centre and Tablet), as well as the stripped-down bargain version sold in countries where piracy is a particular problem. So there are clear advantages to taking this proposed stance on the release of Longhorn, and clear signals that this path is being taken.

Hey ho, I’m sure Microsoft have done their research, and I have little doubt that Vista will be very successful. So good luck to them.