“Vivendi’s Universal Music has said it is to test the digital sale of songs from artists without the customary copy-protection technology.” BBC
This is great news – I can buy tracks from a mainstream publisher without worrying about whether I’ve got it on my home or work computers and without being slightly illegal.

For some reason this last paragraph made me laugh:

Rupert Murdoch, who bought MySpace in 2005, has already expressed concern about the growth of Facebook. His executives will now be under even more pressure to find ways of making MySpace fashionable again.

BBC: Social sites battle for new users
Which reminds me – DesignDyke, I emailed you about my other blog that talks about social software a lot more, but it was probably eaten by hotmail.

Apparently.
Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It?

From the depths of the internet, lists of unusual and lost words.

Wired: Suddenly, the Paranoids Don’t Seem So Paranoid Anymore

Have you noticed? We’ve become a people that no longer respects, or apparently desires, privacy. Our own or anybody else’s.
That’s a remarkable thing, when you stop to think about it. We Americans, historically, have fiercely guarded our personal privacy. It’s one of our defining characteristics. Others, who live in societies where personal privacy isn’t so easily taken for granted, have looked on with a mixture of admiration and bemusement. “Mind your own business” is a singularly American expression.

I’m not sure about the last statement, but generally, I’m glad to see this article. I’m not sure how or when the onus switched from the need to show why a loss of privacy was necessary to the need to show why privacy is important and necessary, but it annoys me.
When did privacy go from being a right to just barely being a privilege we’re allowed?

James told me about More Words, which is mostly for word games but also has nice random words on the bottom of the page.

Kinda basic but possibly thought provoking: What search engines know about us

Randomly, some choice insults from AWAD: “Ignorant blackguards, illiterate blockheads, besotted drunkards, drivelling simpletons, ci-devant mountebanks, vagabonds, swindlers and thieves..disgraceful gang of pettifoggers”
The .Net course goes on, and time crawls. The lab sessions are really annoying because they spoon feed you everything. The exercise might say, create a new instance of blah, declare an array of whatever, call this method, set properties, la la la… and then it gives you all the code, right there on the page. Fair enough some people might not have all the syntax to hand, but surely they could provide a primer and refer to it – how are you meant to learn if you’re just typing in someone else’s code? No wonder Microsoft certification doesn’t mean anything in the real world… ignorant blockheads. The instructor is quite good and I suppose I’m learning some useful stuff but overall, bring on Friday.

I’m really quite bored. I’m on a week-long ASP.NET training course and since I don’t particularly want to learn .Net, I feel like the bored rebellious teenager in the back of the room. By coincidence, I even have the dodgy leather jacket. I haven’t fallen asleep so far but it’s probably only a matter of time.
The training centre is full of tellingly over-cocky people with regional accents who’ve travelled in from the further reaches of the world outside London (it exists, apparently), and the ‘coffee’ is Nescafe but at least it’s near Old St so I can pop into the office afterwards and keep the plates spinning there.
I’m already annoyed at some of the stupid things about Visual Studio .Net, like wtf is up with storing the project files in My Documents? What kind of idiot thought a development environment that stores config and header files in the login of a single user was a good idea? The worst part is I’ll actually have to do some work with the damn thing when the course is over.
Actually, that’s not the worst part – the worst part is they don’t provide lunch or luncheon vouchers!

I’ve only just came across this entry about geek companies/conferences producing t-shirts in sizes and shapes that suit women. It’s all true, dammit:

This is partly tongue-in-cheek, but still…the t-shirts are a metaphor for–or at least a reflection of–the way the company feels about users as individual people. The shirts matter, and they speak volumes about your company.