Ian Lamont's Most Recent Posts

Mathew Ingram points to a BBC report that describes a sharp increase in the number of people visiting online video sites since the Hollywood writers' strike began.

Linden Lab is finally banishing bogus banks from Second Life.

One of the bottlenecks that has held back the development of three-dimensional, computer-generated environments are the building tools.

The New York Times has highlighted an interesting trend in Web video: "Video snacking," in which cube-bound viewers take some time to browse and share comedy clips, news reports, and other light video fare:

A few weeks back there was a lot of buzz in Second Life surrounding the reported departure of Cory Ondrejka from parent company Linden Lab.

My daughter has finally discovered the joys of the Web. Not surprisingly, her interests have nothing to do with checking email, catching up with the news, blogging, or surfing to other text-based sites -- the stuff that I like to do.

IDG has put together another video of tech highlights for 2007, this time covering the most sought-after gadgets of the year.

The following video, prepared by our colleagues in the IDG News Service in Japan and Boston, gives an overview of some emerging consumer technologies from the past year. A flexible version of Sony's OLED display has to be seen to be believed, and there's a pretty neat Sharp screen that can scan items as well as display them.

I was surprised to see this item on the front page of the New York Times website this evening: Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab's CTO and a key architect of the virtual world almost since its inception, has supposedly been forced to step down by CEO Philip Rosedale.

I just finished reading Rob Mitchell's interview with Henry Malmgren, an IT manager who oversees a rather unusual shop: The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

A student group in Hong Kong recently published a blistering report about conditions at several Dell suppliers in China.

Economist, author, and virtual worlds researcher Edward Castronova has announced the public release of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that he designed. The plot of Arden I, The World of William Shakespeare, inserts players into medieval Somerset, where they can interact with local residents and attempt to get a handle on a royal power struggle.

Six years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a very bold vision: To share course materials from all MIT classes with the Web-connected public. This dovetailed with MIT's mission to "advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the nation and the world."

Uh-oh. Another scandal at Wikipedia. The Register lays out the evidence, and reports the angry reaction:

Why do video cameras have such terrible UIs? In the early days of analog video cameras, it was kind of expected -- the only people who could afford them were pros or enthusiasts, and it made sense to have knobs to control color balance, aperture, audio levels, and other factors that they might need.