The launch pad is a renewed version of the Science Museum (London)’s interactive area for kids, over the years as a child all the way to now I remember playing in this area, its far more dynamic and interesting now, and as before half the stuff is broken from the standard kid heavy handedness which the equipment has to deal with throughout the day, the grain pit is still there!

This was my 2nd visit to the Science Museum (London) to see the Listening Post, its something I find really interesting to watch and I captured it for people to watch on this occasion but it really is far nicer to actually be there and see it in the flesh if you can!

Typical.

I guess I will go back to my self diagnosis of being stressed about stuff and take my own medicine when I get head or ear aches and see if I have crap-itus at my blood test.

/sigh

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This is my first, in a series of posts towards my dissertation.

Digg is a company that was created by founder Kevin Rose, as an experiment. However its not the company which is important but the website digg.com. Since late 2004 early 2005 the site has had continual development and seen massive expansion, and is one of the biggest technology news sites on the Internet today.

Digg is often referred to as a social news website or social bookmarking website and these descriptions are accurate. The website is a place where visitors can submit stories on any subject for others to view. Other visitors can then view the title and description, and visit the linked site, and if they like it they can “dig” the story. Eventually when a story has enough digs it will be promoted to the front page of the website so other visitors can see the most popular stories first.

Over time the site has grown in popularity and traffic to linked sites has also grown with it. This has led to the term “the digg effect”, when a story is promoted to the front page the linked website receives intense amounts of traffic until the point where the web server crashes, or the web hosts closes the site because of high bandwidth use.

In addition other phrases such as “bury”, “dupe”, and “dugg”.

• Bury or buried - Is normally posted in the comments attached to a story when someone does not like the story, more recently the creators of the site have added functionality to actually bury or -1 the count against the story.

• Dupe - Is short for duplicate, and is also posted in the comments attached to a story when somebody believes they have read the same story before on Digg.

• Dugg -  This refers to one of two things either the person as does the story, or more likely that the website effected by the dig effect, that was mentioned before.

Over the last four years digg has continuously evolved, expanded, and its design has been refreshed many times and many new features have been added, but essentially its core assets remain the same, as a site where you can post comments, stories and now photos and videos, and allow other people to rate them.

The site has also expanded its categories of news from just technology related stories, it has now expanded to a fully fledged news site visitors can find information about world, business, science, gaming, lifestyle, entertainment, sports, and other news topics.

The site is almost 100% controlled by its visitors, with no need for administrators or moderators on the site. In fact on the one occasion where moderation was required due to a cease and desist order. Mass outrage followed and the site had to deal with continuous spamming of the disallowed content. Eventually Digg conceded and the article was about to be posted and it would seem that no further action has been taken against Digg.

I would highly recommend voice recognition software to anyone that uses the keyboard for long periods of time writing essays, dissertations, articles, newspapers, weblogs, and really anything that matter where you have to spend a long period time writing.

It does take some time to get used to punctuating your sentences for example you cannot simply pause to insert a comma, you have to say the word comma and it seems near impossible to actually say the word comma, unless you actually mean to insert a comma. I am told it becomes second nature after some time, and I have to agree so far.

In addition to receiving the software and a microphone, I also had some training, the training was by a lady called Alison Thompson who are highly rated the use of these software, although she had only used DragonDictate, on which the MacSpeech Dictate software was based on.

Finally, I find it amazing how easy it is to write massive amounts such as this post without even realising it, it will definitely make the 6000 word dissertation and easy walk in the park, if I get my research nailed and have a good writing plan.

The final decision on the topic has not been made however, I believe it will be along the lines of communication on the Internet past, present, and future including, photo and video sharing, social bookmarking, social networking, social news, virtual worlds, online forums and other forms of Internet media which allow multi-user communication and sharing of information.

That rather wordy list above may sound confusing but really it translates into the following…

• Photo sharing - Flickr
• Video sharing - YouTube
• Social bookmarking - Delicious & Stumble Upon
• Social networking - Myspace & Facebook
• Social news sites - Digg
• Virtual worlds - SecondLife & There
• Online forums - Penny Arcade, Overclockers UK, etc…

EGNM 3001

Woopra on the otherhand now actually works the last update brokeded my Woorpa plugin and it would no longer activate, but its working all cool and nice now with this update, added a nice feature to see live comments, on such a small site like this it doesn’t matter but on a larger site like GDNM.org could be nice to see it working!

‘Be, unlimited ways to break your connection from the internet’, they are fast, they do have 24/7 support but argh how annoying is it when they randomly break their network at 20:00 on a Saturday evening!

What went wrong this time, well, so far I cannot use Skype for more than 1 minute at a time, iTunes music store, Google (search, maps, images, gmail, etc…) Yahoo.com (search etc…)….

I have yet to find more but looks like either a good portion of America just blew up or the ISP who are so fantastic actually screwed up again!

Just though I would also point out that their so called ‘free’ modem is not free at all you have to return it, the modem is leased but they don’t bother to mention that anywhere on most pages of their site, makes me wonder why they get away with such blatant misinformation when other companies get criticised for the slightest mistake.

UPDATE: Almost an hour later its finally working!