Brian Fitzgerald

After last Sunday's incident in Pennsylvania, where both students were found to have "blogs"?which didn't seem to forecast anything about what happened?schools and parents seem to be giving blogs much more attention. I hope that this provides opportunity for parents, teachers, administrators and anybody working with youth to start visiting these sites and to become familiar with them. It is futile to try blocking these sites for the purposes of keeping children away from them (I'm all for blocking when it comes to instructional management -- keeping students on task). Internet access and computer availability is simply too easy to come by to control it. Student must be taught, early, the dangers of having their lives exposed online. Schools and school district could perhaps slow some of this by providing opportunities for students to blog in a more productive, monitored and safe enviornment.

Here's a good article that recently appeared on news.com about blogging and schools' responses to it.

I was talking with my friend Dan this morning and he’s giving a presentation tonight regarding Internet Safety based on the government’s iSafe program. He asked what I thought about sites like Xanga and MySpace.

The real questions seem to be, “should these sites be blocked by schools and parents” and “should students be allowed to use these?”.

The broader question that gets asked is “are blogs bad?"

First of all, blogs are not bad. In fact, I believe that students should be encouraged to blog. Blogging encourages students to express themselves in passionate ways about things that they care about. Through features such as comments and trackbacks, blogs allow for an interaction and linking of thoughts, ideas and commentary that can not be matched in other ways. Students can be forced to really examine their own opinions on matters and join others in a participatory online forum.

Second, for the most part, Xanga and MySpace are NOT blogs. This is not to say that they could not be used as a blog or that they are invalid ways to share content online. If used in a monitored and guided way, they can be used as effectively as any blogging tool. The majority of posts to these sites are purely social, attention-grabbing text nuggets that equate to public instant-messaging. Users of these services are rewarded for the number of other like-sites that link to them and this encourages users to find ways to attract other people in what teens mistakingly see as a pretty anonymous and harmless world. The truth is that it would be great place for those that prey on the innocent to find a target and learn their name, what they look like, where they attend school, who their friends are and what they like along with daily habits and routines. What could be more dangerous?

Here are a number of articles that I have found that discuss this. A couple of these make the mistake (in my opinion) of saying that bad things can happen and this looks like blogging, so blogging is bad. Other articles explore the good and bad aspects of this issue. I would encourage anybody, before they say that teens shouldn’t blog, to google for K-12 blogging OR go to Will Richardson’s site (weblogg-ed) and see the great things that are being done with blogging.

• Dallas Morning News: Predators Reading Blogs Too
• Standard Democrat: Local Authorities are Becoming Concerned Over Blogging
• New York Times: The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries
• Christian Science Monitor: Kids and the Internet: It's a Good Thing

Microsoft, yesterday, announced a new Web 2.0ish portal that they call live. It seems to be Microsoft's attempt to say, "Hey. We can do this stuff too." You can get a local weather forecast and aggregate numerous news feeds -- all in an interface that does not fully support Firefox yet. (Microsoft is probably still looking for some slimy way to hook Firefox into the OS since they can't seem to do anything without leveraging Windows in some way.)

Still to come, Microsoft says, is an email client and a next generation MSN messenger, along with bookmarks. If this provides a home away from home, this could be a very cool thing for Windows users.

Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. This is the first release candidate of mozilla's next generation Firefox browser, to be released later this year, and it is being made available to their developer and testing community for compatibility testing and to solicit feedback.

Mozilla Firefox Project (Development Information)

Some developers from the original Firefox team have gotten together and created a new browser based on Firefox called Flock. The great thing about flock is that for its core features, it ties into existing web applications. Bookmarks are all stored in your del.icio.us account. You can view flickr photos. You can post to your blog and even use Flock as a RSS reader that is much improved over Firefox. All of this with an improved interface also. Sound good? Go get it.

I didn't write near as much about my experience at MAX as I had planned, but I'm sure that what happened there is going to find it's way into what I write here for a long time. It was a super conference and I think there was a real feeling of sadness at times realizing that this would be the last time that we all came together as Macromedia. Next year Adobe will be running the show and no one knows what that will bring at this point. Will there be a conference? What will it be like? Will it include everybody from designers to coders to server admins or will they work to separate these audiences? I think that everybody who has attended MAX sees the benefit of bringing all of the parties together to mingle and I hope that Adobe continues this. It really is a thrill being around such smart and creative people for a week and -- when it's easy to become tunnel-visioned with a project or organization -- it's helpful to be allowed to step way back to see one's place in moving the internet forward. This is such an exciting time to be a developer and it's important to keep that perspective.

Some observations and thoughts from the first day at Macromedia’s MAX Conference:

Flex is awesome and the price may be right now. I’m frustrated that right now there is no way to develop flex applications on the Macintosh (that I can see). The code is just XML, but you have to have something that can compile the SWF file and that seems to be Windows-only right now.

Stephen Elop (Macromedia CEO) took quite a swing at Microsoft and their new flash-like features in Avalon. He displayed a big slide telling them to “try again”. Of course Microsoft has the money and resources to try again, and again, and again, and again.

Adobe’s Bruce Chizen (CEO) spoke at the end of the general session (many thought it was over and had left). He’s not a great speaker and stumbled over his points quite a bit. He flattered the developers some, but propped Acrobat and print. It will be a curious melding of philosophies when Adobe meets Macromedia. The first’s idea of digitizing content is to put replicate print formats while the other’s goal is to blow people’s minds with ways in which content can be delivered.

Macromedia’s XD development group has a series of sessions available in which they are discussing the way that they build applications. This is something that I thought was really missing next year – talk about how to build an application (beyond the code). The session I was in this morning talked about application design, brainstorming, cycling, etc. It got me excited and I hope to find more sessions like it tomorrow.

Tomorrow is going to be a loooong day. Morning starts at seven. General session should be a lot of fun as the different product groups take turns showing what cool and new. There will be a sneak peak session after the sessions have ended to show what may (or may not) be coming in future products. Finally, there is an event for attendees at Disneyland’s Paradise Pier. I may need to be dragged back to the hotel room tomorrow night.

I found another post about the Yahoo blog search that made things much more clear – AND OF COURSE linked to the correct page. That’s not so hard is it News.com?

The Yahoo blog search is nice. When you do a search on the Yahoo news site, a sidebar is presented on the right side of the screen that displays recent blog entries with related information. You can also click a link which takes you to only blog results.

I was just reading a news.com article regarding a new blog search that Yahoo has and of course wanted to then try it out. News.com however, never seems to have links to the topics which they are discussing. This is so 5-years ago, sticky-mined. Stop thinking that you have to be everything to everyone (like yahoo) and just link to those things that a person would likely want to go to. For reference, here is the story that I was reading.

Macromedia’s MAX Conference starts one week from today and I can’t wait. With studio 8 just out and the Adobe acquisition, there should be a lot of exciting things going on there. Five co-workers and myself will be headed down to Anaheim next Sunday to check it all out.

Yahoo has launched a new podcast beta site. It’s a really nice site that does a pretty good job of introducing visitors to lots of podcasts. The site allows you to listen to podcasts right within the website, but directs visitors to existing podcasting tools to subscribe.

“NewsGator has acquired NetNewsWire from Ranchero Software”:www.newsgator.com/NetNewsWi… and the developer of NNW, Brent Simmons, will be joining NewsGator as a software architect. The future of Ranchero’s blog posting tool, MarsEdit, is being discussed in the product’s mailing list.

“Google now has an AJAX powered RSS reader available.":reader.google.com I can’t seem to get to really liking an online reader, but as far as they go – this seems like a real nice one.

“Mozillazine”:www.mozillazine.org has announced the availability of “Firefox 1.5 beta 2”:weblogs.mozillazine.org/qa/archiv…

Hasting workshopers: Here are the final notes and downloads from yesterday’s workshop…

You may “view the completed site here”:www.brianfitz.net/20051006_… OR “download the project folder”:www.brianfitz.net/20051006_… to mess with.

A few extra notes…

I didn’t have a chance to show sites and books, although there are many reference “on the workshop page”:www.brianfitz.net and in your handout. If you are really interested in standards-based design and want to read more about “why?” than “how?”, the best book you can read is Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Designing with Web Standards”:www.amazon.com/exec/obid… It’s a fantastic book that I think everyone doing web development should read. Second, you should take a look through the “CSS Zen Garden”:www.csszengarden.com . It is a single page that different people design style sheets for to demonstrate how great style sheets are. It’s a lot of fun to go through.

Apple has announced a media event for October 12th. CNet reports that Apple will use the event to release a new video iPod (I swear I read this but I can’t find it now). “MacRumors says they will not”:www.macrumors.com/pages/200… and instead release a larger-capacity iPod with some cosmetic changes.

Thank you to those that attended the workshop at ESU 9 in Hastings on Thursday. I really had a fun time out there and hope that each of you got something from it when it was all finished &em; other than a headache. ;-) I’m working on getting some final wrapup pieces posted here tonight or tomorrow.

I’m in Hastings, Nebraska today to work with 16 victims willing participants on Dreamweaver, CSS, XHTML and other standards-based issue. It’s going to be a great day…

“View the Workshop Outline”:www.brianfitz.net

Wikipedia hosts one of the most complete browser comparison charts I have seen. In most cases however, it seems to be comparing the last or latest version of each browser, not breaking the features out by version.

Speaking of Sparkle. Here is a blast from someone to claims to be a PC user at Microsoft’s new photo manager (which is still in beta).

Microsoft has been rumored to have a “flash killer” in the works for a long time and it seems that the newly announced “sparkle” program may be it, but is it designed to go up against flash? It really seems when watching the available interview/presentation that it is not meant so much to be a low-bandwidth internet technology as a way to add a ton of vector-based eye candy at desktop applications. Of course, it becomes difficult to separate web from desktop when you are talking Internet Explorer, Visual Basic and Windows and I’m sure that this will impact the web in many ways.

Sun and Google announced that they will be partnering on different technologies. It’s interesting that Google (who is the big fish here) has nothing about this on their site while Sun, who really really needs this - and seems to think that they are the big player, has this as the biggest item on their site.

That which makes October the best month of the year begins today as the major league baseball postseason begins today at noon central.

MIT has put together the specifications for a computer that should cost no more than $100 to build. The 12 inch laptop computer has wireless networking, six usb ports and a shoulder-strap that doubles as a power cord. The computer would be built primarily for third world countries looking to introduce computers into the classrooms of their students. Given this, the computer also features a small crank which can be used to provide juice to the computer in areas without handy electrical power. The computer may be produced commercially for developed nations and would likely run around $200 with some of the proceeds going to the effort to get these computers, again, into more povershed areas.

Tomorrow morning, I'm catching a plane to Boston to watch Saturday's game against the Yankees. It's going to be incredible. Wakefield vs Johnson. I don't know if I'll even sleep tonight