The Back Burner

A handy reminder today of the incredible potential for both bad and good represented by the Internet.

The good:
ConceptShare, a new online collaboration tool for graphic designers to work collaboratively, viewing and marking up designs online. A rare example of excellent use of Flash to do something genuinely useful.

The bad:
Stanford University says that if we were designing the Internet today we wouldn’t start from here.

We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and ‘backward-compatible’ style of academic and industrial networking research.

The ugly: new exploits using Javascript inserted on unsuspecting third-party websites to at best show unsolicited adverts and at worst download and install malware on Windows computers. An interesting post from Ethan Zuckerman explains, and proves the point that if you accept input from users and display it on your website for others to see, you should filter it for unwanted HTML and script tags first! Interesting that Google is now detecting these exploits and warning site visitors.

Hat-tip for pointers to all of these to John Naughton’s eclectic Memex.

Yes, blogs are *so* 2005! But our plan to start an email newsletter for clients was overtaken by events. Nowadays it makes much more sense to create a blog which can be syndicated via RSS, avoiding all the problems associated with inboxes overflowing with spam. And I was shamed into it by the fact that Glenn had me set up a blog for him in November, and I still hadn’t done anything about the one I’d been meaning to do myself for months.

The plan is to post stuff that will be useful to us or our clients. Currently there is no definite posting schedule — I’ll just post when I feel I have something useful to say.

A further purpose of this blog is to show what you can do with free or open-source tools. Although I could easily have installed blog software on our server and spent hours customising it, I’ve deliberately chosen to use a free service to create the blog. It took me about ten minutes to set up this blog — I hope that over the weeks you’ll see it evolve to blend with our existing website, as well as gaining new features.

It’s called The Back Burner because … well, it’s been on the back burner for a long time!