Donate to the NZ Red Cross Appeal for Japan:
Red Cross New Zealand – http://www.redcross.org.nz/donate (Select Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 2011 from the drop-down menu)
Internet Explorer 9 – ‘A More Beautiful Web is Here’
www.microsoft.com/IE9
IE9 was released this week and was downloaded over two million times on the first day. The new browser is said to be very fast, and there are also significant improvements regarding web standards. IE9 will support major HTML5 and CSS3 modules, as is discussed in this article from Six Revisions.
There is also a new emphasis on the privacy of your information.
IE9 and Your Privacy:
However, a recent study shows that a flaw in the IE9 privacy feature may leave users vulnerable.
In spite of all this, if you are using an earlier version of internet Explorer, it’s definitely time to say goodbye.
Don’t forget the other great Browsers available for download: Firefox, and Google Chrome are both great places to start if you’re jumping off the Microsoft bandwagon.
Huffduffer and Copyright
You might remember a few weeks ago that I featured Huffduffer. I had been waiting for some spare time to try the service out, and I finally got to have a better look at their site earlier in the week.
I signed up for the service and was ready to to start posting links to my favourite podcasts! But something held me back. Huffduffer links directly to the file, and in this respect the service is not like an audio version of Tumblr where the original item is re-blogged with the correct attributions and re-posted on each blog.
The second reason I thought twice about Huffduffing is that you are able to make your stream available for subscription on iTunes. On the face of it this is a fantastic feature, especially if you are the original publisher of that content. But if I link to someone else’s content on Huffduffer, essentially I am just republishing their content without their permission. This is similar to the problem encountered by the insanely popular Flipboard application released for the iPad, which presents streams of information in a magazine-type format. People began to claim that Flipboard was merely a content agregator rather than a content provider.
Upon looking into the matter further, I found a complaint from a content provider to Huffduffer saying that they would like their content removed from the site. Huffduffer’s response was of course that they could not be held responsible, as the content was not actually hosted by Huffduffer. All they do is host direct links to the audio files.
I will continue to play with Huffduffer, but will make very sure that my posts do not infringe on the intellectual property copyrights of other publishers. When in doubt, always ask permission from the copyright holder.
Finally this week:
For web designers and developers: http://placekitten.com/
‘A quick and simple service for getting pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code. Just put your image size (width & height) after our URL and you’ll get a placeholder.’
How can you resist?