Publishers watch developments in the music business these days like hurricane belt weather men, anxious for signs of the next maelstrom headed their way. But the news isn’t always bad. In August, Wired published an article (The Album Is Dead, Long Live the App) that seemed to point to better weather ahead for those trying to make a living out of putting content online.
Music acts, it seems, are beginning to release their work not as single songs in the iTunes music store but as iPhone apps, bundling in videos, photos, news, games, concert listings, and/or community features such as photo sharing along with the tracks, and pricing accordingly. Sighs of relief can be heard all round at with what looks like the return of a traditional model – the album – updated for the new millenium, and a chance to add value online rather than just strip out cost.
Continue reading From codex to code: will books become apps?
Publishers watch developments in the music business these days like hurricane belt weather men, anxious for signs of the next maelstrom headed their way. But the news isn’t always bad. In August, Wired published an article (The Album Is Dead, Long Live the App) that seemed to point to better weather ahead for those trying to make a living out of putting content online.
Music acts, it seems, are beginning to release their work not as single songs in the iTunes music store but as iPhone apps, bundling in videos, photos, news, games, concert listings, and/or community features such as photo sharing along with the tracks, and pricing accordingly. Sighs of relief can be heard all round at with what looks like the return of a traditional model – the album – updated for the new millenium, and a chance to add value online rather than just strip out cost.
Continue reading 
During my holiday travels this year I discovered what may be the “missing tag” in Carnac, south-west Brittany. Here is photographic evidence that 7,000 years ago neolithic technologists were interested in structured markup.
Interestingly, the glyphs represented don’t seem to be present in the latest version of the Unicode standard. Did our ancestors know something we don’t? 
Federated authentication systems such as Shibboleth and OpenID exist to solve identity management problems but they both suffer from similar usability problems when users login and logout.
Here are my top seven attributes of effective project management: the things we PMs ought to be doing to keep everything on track …