Ianiv blogs about one of my pet peeves: DVDs that force you to sit through ads before you get to see the movie you paid them for.
But with this DVD first you get a copyright notice, then a short clip about how bad it is to download movies (stop saying copyright infringement = stealing!) and then 2 or three trailers for movies I’ve never heard about before. And… Read more...

Gerard Kennedy and Maurizio Bevilacqua are, I’m happy to report, among the living. Bevilacqua was hanging out at the apparently un-Google-able maurizio.ca, and Kennedy’s site went live, as far as I can tell, today.

Kennedy’s site is still a little rough around the edges. The link to his blog isn’t working yet (and, oddly, it’s under “Multimedia”) and several pages have awkward “This page is currently under… Read more...

And as you might expect from a lexicographer, he doesn’t mince words.
Barrett recently issued an RFP to redesign his superb Doubled-Tongued Word Wrestler Dictionary (a must-read for anyone who loves language, by the way). Apparently, a disproportionate number of hucksters, poseurs and fraudsters responded to his call. He fires back today, and it’s a scorcher certain to leave a lot of online rip-off artists dabbing aloe vera… Read more...

Maybe not all by my lonesome. But about two weeks ago, I called the TiVo support line, fed up with a months-long problem where every single TiVo show we recorded was being flagged for timed deletion: one week was the longest we could keep anything, and any show we began to watch was deleted within 24 hours.

According to a… Read more...

Jane Jacobs is known for her vision of vibrant, liveable cities. But as Alex posts at Civic Minded, her prescription for a viable city is also the recipe for a thriving online community. And Alex has a terrific suggestion for one way to remember her:
These still-early days of online community-building amount to explorations of the potential that Jacobs identified: the potential for supporting real human relationships with virtual… Read more...

Orlando, Florida – “She’s a law-breaking illegal immigrant, and she’s getting everything she deserves,” Bill O’Reilly said today as INS agents escorted a heavily-sedated Dora the Explorer from Nickelodeon’s studios into a waiting van. She was flown to her country of birth, an undisclosed but boldly colored Latin American nation.

For O’Reilly, it was the successful culmination of his month-long “Dora the Exploiter” campaign, conducted through his highly-rated TV… Read more...

Just checking out Joe Volpe‘s leadership campaign site and found several new things to update.

But there was one interesting twist: for a while this morning, Volpe’s site offered translations into more than just English and French. You’d also find Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian and Spanish. But unlike every other link on the site, when you moused over the translation links, the destination URL didn’t show… Read more...

Dr. Carolyn Bennett: There’s a perfectly functional, content-rich web site here; unfortunately, it’s buried several layers inside an interface that makes a serious usability mistake.

Once you click past the English/Français splash screen, you arrive at an attractive photo of Dr. Bennett’s desk, with a large agenda book open in front of you. You navigate by clicking on entries in the address book. But if you’re visually impaired… Read more...