CNET News reports that Hewlett Packard is working on a robot that acts as your in-room avatar for a remote meeting:

Mechanical engineer Stan Thomas said that when he joined the team, he noticed that people spent more time looking at the robot's shiny metal parts than at the video screen that's displaying their co-worker. Thomas helped redesign the device to have a more human-looking (and less jarring) form--the current blue, plastic model resembles a giant Lego.

People seem to like the fact that the new model doesn't have arms, Jouppi said. Although the arms on the first version allowed the robot to perform simple tasks such as pushing an elevator button, researchers say people were put off by the fact that the robot could touch things.

Dave Shea has established the css Zen Garden to showcase CSS design:

There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really.

There is also a link to a CSS Resource Guide.

Brian Fitzgerald and Tony Kenny have published a paper (PDF format) that describes their experience with open source software:

This study describes the implementation of open source software in a large Irish public sector organization, Beaumont Hospital. The findings reveal a radical shift in open source deployment from invisible infrastructure systems to highly visible vertical applications. The case study describes the implementation of these systems, the difficulties encountered, and also the benefits in terms of astonishing cost savings of €13m over 5 years. These details are useful in that few studies have thus far quantified the savings from the deployment of open source software (OSS). Given that Beaumont were already receiving academic pricing discounts for many of their original propritary closed source applications, the savings for a typical commercial organization could be even higher. Also, in many cases, the extra functionality available in the OSS systems deployed allowed for a richer feature set overall. The study also identifies the primary drivers in the move to OSS, namely principle, pragmatism and practicality. This is useful, since while several studies have considered the motivation of OSS developers, the motivation of actual users of OSS has received far less attention. The study also indicates how a typical company can contribute back to the OSS community in their own unique way, by distributing applications from their own domain of expertise, rather than having to make detailed code contributions to the original code base.

There are a number of other papers on open source available at the Free/Open Source Research Community.

From Marketingprofs.com, an article on weblogs and why they are having a profound impact:

Two important characteristics of blogs are that they are written by a person who is knowledgeable and passionate about the topic, and they are written in a "real voice." This is a cosmic shift from the marketing and public relations materials that are the staple of business communications.

Often, when information goes through a formal marketing or PR process, the end result is an attractive, expensive, stale, diluted document written in corporatespeak. This result is generally due not to any incompetence or malevolence on the part of corporate communicators but to the processes that have evolved to accommodate the costs and standards of print technology. As a result, the edge, the authenticity, and the voice of the professional speaking to his fellow professionals are lost.

Blogs offer the human voice, which can be loud, controversial, and even wacky. But the realness of the blog inspires trust and piques people%u2019s curiosity. A blog can create a community and a dynamic discussion.

Dan Gillmor reports on OhMyNews:

OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model, where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic.

The influence of OhmyNews is substantial, and expanding. It's credited with having helped elect the nation's current president, Roh Moo Hyun, who ran as a reformer. Roh granted his first post-election interview to the publication, snubbing the three major conservative newspapers that have dominated the print-journalism scene for years.

OhMyNews publishes via website and a weekly print edition. The business has a staff of about 50 and more than 26,000 'citizen-reporters' who contribute news to the site. The 'citizen-reporters' cover politics, economy, culture, arts and science--"but they tend to focus more on personally oriented issues like education, job conditions, and the environment.

WebMonkey has an informative RSS tutorial:

What is it really for, anyway? Two things: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way for sites to share headlines and stories so that other sites can integrate them into their pages. Additionally, some savvy surfers use special RSS aggregators %u2014 kind of like mini-browsers %u2014 to speedily flip through the latest news and links from dozens of sites.

It includes information on what RSS is, how to get an RSS feed, and what to do with it once you have it.

...via Scripting News

Ed Cone provides some guidelines for journalists who also blog. They're useful ideas for anyone who are considering combining weblogs and work in positive ways:

Try not to be a jerk If you publicly trash your job, your publisher, your co-workers, your last article, and so on, don't complain when you get fired or shut down for doing it. Work with the boss if you can If your publisher thinks your weblog is too close to what you do on your day job, try to get the publisher to adopt the weblog. Make it a win-win. If CNN had co-branded the Iraq weblog maintained by reporter Kevin Sites instead of shutting it down, it would have been great for CNN, Sites, and %u2013 oh yeah, them %u2013 people trying to learn about the war.

...via Scripting News

Are weblogs wrecking Google?

Here's the problem: some people have noticed that, for certain kinds of Google search the top references dug up by Google often come from weblogs. "Gah!" cry the searchers. "Those bloody weblogs are clogging up Google!" Among those who consider weblogs to be a mindless recycling of links and idle chatter by a vanishingly small number of net users, this is seen as a Bad Thing.

One of the key issues, as expressed succintly by Dave Winer is:

If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web. It's pretty simple.

Most weblog entries are right out there for everyone to see. Many newspapers, put their older articles in archives (some for pay, some not) which are not available to search engines. Search engines search what they can see. And what they can see includes a lot of blogs.

So, are weblogs wrecking Google? The better question is, when you do a search, do you find the information you need?

...via Scripting News

Steven Johnson promotes the idea of the web as mind space in a recent Wired article:

What happens when you start seeing the Web as a matrix of minds, not documents? Networks based on trust become an essential tool. You start evaluating the relevance of data based not on search query results but on personal testimonies. ("This page is useful because six minds I admire have found it useful.") You can research ideas or breaking news by querying the 10 people whose opinions on the topic you most value - what Cory Doctorow calls an "outboard brain." A tool recently created by Dave Sifry of the blog analysis site Technorati lets you take any URL and automatically generate a list of bloggers who have commented on it. Almost anything you stumble across can be filtered through the perspective of other bloggers.

Via Mobitopia, the news that mobile spam is already here. There's both SMS spam and voicemail spam. Right now it's probably a bigger problem in other countries than in the US (where they use more text messaging). But sooner or later, it will come here too.

Hasbro announces THIN-TRONIX which includes, among other things a poster phone:

This is a radical twist on the standard wall phone. It's a real working speakerphone that's just over 1" thick and meant to be hung on a wall. The Poster Phone makes group calls easy and fun. The eye-catching design comes in two colors. You can program up to five numbers into the Speed Dial memory and write those names in the erasable spaces on the poster. It's battery operated and comes with all accessories included. Just plug it into any existing phone line and dial away for endless hours of hands-free talk time.

...via The Shifted Librarian

Wired has a brief interesting discussion on network space:

A fascinating (and deceptively simple) example of network space is the small-world phenomenon, the idea that anyone on the planet can be connected to anyone else through just six degrees of separation. Although the notion had been floating around in popular culture for much of the 20th century, it was only tested in the late-'60s in an experiment conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram gave letters to about 300 people in Boston and Omaha with instructions that the envelopes ultimately reach a single "target," a Boston stockbroker. The letters could be sent only to a personal friend of the current holder, who then received the same instructions. To the surprise of many, more than 60 of the letters reached their goal, changing hands, on average, only six times. Milgram's conclusion was that people who seem very distant in physical or social space may actually be closer than we imagine.

Silicon Valley.com provides an overview of the basics for wireless at home:

Wireless home computer networking is becoming more and more popular, even as the buying process gets more and more complicated.

Just when consumers were getting comfortable last year with the concept of 802.11b, also known as WiFi, the industry trotted out the 802.11a standard.

When 802.11a turned out to be a flop, the networking industry rolled out 802.11g.
Now the story gets even more confusing with the arrival of A G networking gear that uses both the 802.11a and 802.11g standards.

The Roving Librarian is a "pilot project that brings library services into the areas of students' everyday life. Using a wireless laptop, Reference Librarians take HOLLIS, the Harvard Libraries portal, Research Guides, and Finding Aids %u2013 many of the primary undergraduate research tools -- out of the library and into non-academic spaces where students spend time. The Reference Librarian is available to answer questions, assist in research, help locate material, and encourage the students to keep the library and librarians at the forefront of their research. "

...via Library Stuff

A Chicago Sun-Times article on blogging gives us a field guide to blog classes:

Linkage Blogs: The most classic-style blog, its individual blog entries are links to other sites on the %u2019net, embroidered with brief descriptions. If the person operating the blog has interests similar to yours it's a lot like having a TiVO for the Web. Someone else is sifting through the mounds and mounds of junk, and reporting back on just the links that might interest you.

Info Blogs: Is the office print server available, or offline? Schools, companies and local businesses use blogs as a way to keep folks informed.

Boswell Blogs: Like Boswell's London Journal or Pepys Diary, this is a street-level account of an individual life. It's the most interesting and exciting type of blog by far.

Barbie Blogs: Like the Boswell Blog, except the blog entries are of interest only to the writer, the writer's immediate circle of friends.

...via The Shifted Librarian

An article about Blogging at Your Library...but this really applies to lots of other organizations as well:

So why are blogs important to libraries? In one word%u2014communication. You can reach your patrons or staff in a whole new way. Information can be posted instantly. You can highlight an event in your community, review a book, or announce new materials. A blog gives people a reason to continually return to your site. Parts of your Web site can be blogs. Pages that change regularly can be quickly updated if they%u2019re a blog and you don%u2019t need to know HTML. Each department can update its own page. You can also communicate easily with your staff. Everyone from the director to part-time staff can post policy changes, news, or vacation schedules.

A directory of Libraries with wireless networks.

It reminds me of the days when people kept directories of agencies with web sites.

...via The Shifted Librarian

Mobilemag reports on RadioYourWay

With Radio YourWay, users will have the ability to set a timer or record real-time AM/FM radio and listen to their favorite show at a convenient time and location of their choice. Recording is as simple as pressing a button to record a particular broadcast totally unattended or set it up to record daily or weekly programs. Radio YourWay also has the added bonus of the ability to use it as voice-recorder or to listen to skip free MP3 music.