Chris Lydon's programme, Open Source, has a great, positive show about Changing the World - Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman is on the show. 

Wired's Monkey Bites blog has some good new years resolutions for coders. I can't promise that I won't learn any new languages. I'm gonna have to learn C++ and Java if I manage to get in to the Masters CS programme, and no doubt something a little bit wider in scope than PHP. That means either Perl, Python or Ruby. I've been listening to some of the shows at Python411 and Ron, the presenter, provides some very good reasons to do so (Jython, for instance). 

I bet Shelley Powers doesn't know that she's in Gopherspace, as is this little funny about coding styles. Floodgap is probably the place to start exploring. Tell you what, would it be great if Grazr supported Gopher?! 

Slashdot has a very retro link to The Best and Worst of 1995 and Predictions for '95 - a summary of what Internet World journalists were writing about back in '94. In the comments, I found a link to Kottke's post from August '06 entitled "Gopher still going". And it is! Firefox still supports the browsing of Gopher trees. Cool, or what? Now I just need to figure out a way of making my blog available over Gopher. Oh, we've got OPML. That'll have to do.  

The BBC are reporting that Sense About Science are asking celebrities to check their facts before making endorsements of medical treatments - such as these fine examples. More coverage from The Times. (Via B&W) 

I gotta say I'm totally stunned by the coverage that Lisa's Placeblogger has gotten over the last few days. It's brilliant that a service like Placeblogger has gotten hundreds of write-ups across the 'net. I met Lisa in person back in September when she was developing Placeblogger, and I want to wish her huge congratulations on a successful launch. 

Want to see another strange use of social networking? A hybrid owners social network. Sorry, but I can only think of the South Park episode "Smug Alert!" Social networking seems to be the new "chuck it in" technology, even when already existing technologies like message boards and blogs serve the purpose one is hoping to achieve. Social networks have to offer some long-term benefit. I don't go on to MySpace because it doesn't really benefit me in any way. I do go on to Facebook, because I can track what my friends are doing neatly and efficiently. Why exactly would I join a social network for hybrid car owners instead of just joining a hybrid car owners group on a social network like Facebook? 

I'm watching Scoble's video with Heather Champ where they are walking around a Japanese garden in SanFran taking pictures. This page has links to pages about Japanese gardens in the UK. There's one about ten minutes walk from my college in London. Once the weather improves, I'll go and take some pictures.