Developing your alter-ego online

I spotted this in a strange place, but Computer Shopper report that "psychologists have carried out studies that suggest that people are using social networking websites to develop an alternate identity, and are gradually growing into the personas they create. They explained that social networking sites are beginning to serve as a self-development tool for young people discovering their own identities."

From this I found a link to the papers from the Children's Digital Media Center at UCLA, for the academic reports behind the news.

BBC News: Pupils can beat safe net filters

According to Ben Geoghegan: Pupils are using special websites to hack out of their school computer network while in the classroom. They then access social networking sites and even hardcore pornography.

BBC News: School computer firewall fears

There is concern some schools are not doing enough to stop students accessing unsuitable websites.

Settlement of the lawsuit against Google for its Book Search program

Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities blog reports his first impressions of the Google Books Settlement. The agreement focusses on in-copyright but out-of-print books and on access to the Google Books collection via libraries ...

The Text Technologies blog focusses more on the authors' side of things ...

Gender analyser

This site lets you test whether a blog has been written by a man or woman.

Windows to Mac tips part 2: internet shortcuts

I've been used to dragging the icon to the left of the URL in a web browser to a folder and it gets stored as an internet shortcut on Windows. You can do the same in Safari on the Mac and it is saved as a webloc file. However, the URL part is stored in the resource fork. In order to get a more portable webloc file in which you can view the stored URL as plain text, you should drag the full text of the URL to Finder. This still results in a webloc file, but the URL is readable as plain text so that you can open the webloc file in a text editor. 

There are some other solutions: storing the URL as text clippings rather than weblocs and converting weblocs to urls with Applescript and again.

How not to make PowerPoint slides

There are a large number of these on You Tube, but this one is funny.

Thanks to Adrian for spotting this ...