HTML on a prim takes a step closer

I'm not as convinced by HTML on a prim as I used to be.... nonetheless, the announcement by Linden Lab that it is now possible (albeit with some limitations) is interesting and is bound to cause quite a stir.

I think the act of having to explicitly 'play' the content, meaning that others around you may not be seeing the same thing as you are, is problematic (as it is with streamed video currently but even more so I suspect).

It'll be interesting to see how things develop.

BBC news keyword installation in the Avon Gallery

This has been around for a while but I haven't got round to mentioning it...

I put together a little SLashup exhibit in the Avon Gallery on Eduserv Island a while back. The piece consists of about 100 random colored balls, each of which carries a word taken from the BBC 'world news' RSS feed.

Each ball updates itself after a short random period, changing both color and word.

The words are selected via a server-side Perl script that grabs the BBC news feed, parses it into individual words, removes stop-words, then chooses a word at random. The feed is cached to reduce load on the BBC site - without this the script is quickly treated as a misbehaving robot and blocked by the BBC Web site.

Second Lives - BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week

Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 this week is Second Lives by Tim Guest, which I happened to catch in the car this morning, driving back from a failed attempt to get the air con in my car fixed :-(

Very listenable (is that a word??). The are 5 daily episodes which will remain available for 7 days after broadcast.