Category: Comment

Micro$oft are still filtering for non-MSIE browsers at MSN and sending them a style sheet which messes up the display of the page.

Only a short while since they laughed off the US Department of Justice case against them for anti-competitive practices, is it really any surprise at all that MicroSoft are still at it?

Not to me, and I’m starting to wonder if switching to Opera as my default browser isn’t such a bad idea after all. This is the wrong time for MicroSoft to be playing games, really – Mac users are probably stampeding to use the new Safari browser and PC users have been making do with the limited features of IE6 for some time now. (The new Opera 7 leaves it standing feature wise.)

After five years with Internet Explorer at the top of the pile… maybe it’s time for a revolution.

With the release of the first instalment of the Animatrix project, I promptly downloaded the same from The Matrix website.

I have to say I am so impressed with Warner Bros. in the way that they have handled the online side of things regarding the franchise. It’s all too easy for the movie companies to create a fancy, usually Flash driven website which is abandoned once it has served its purpose. (i.e. When the release run of the movie ends or when it’s released on DVD at the very latest.)

What Warner have done is to create an extension of The Matrix universe, full of resources delivered in keeping with the premise of the first movie. This is the way it should be done – not a glossy flash showcase for the design company portfolio – a proper community focal point for fans of the soon-to-be trilogy.

At no point, ever, ever ever, have I ever, ever called updating my website “blogging”. The viral craze that has been the Next Big Thing ™ for the last year on the internet is leaving me feeling a little concerned. What is all the fuss about? Who are all these cliquey fuckers who have suddenly realised that you can be self published?

I’ve been putting my thoughts and links onto an evolutionary chain of websites since my humble members.theglobe.com/infoxicated/ beginnings five years ago. I never presumed this habit was anything other than just recording occasional thoughts or having the occasional rant. And I don’t update every single day because, hey – call me boring, but my life does not change that much on a daily basis.

A couple of years ago having your own web cam set up so you could lose your virginity online was the number one way of attracting legions of visitors to a humble me and my dog “home page”, as they were called back then. Now you gotta have a Blog, man, and you gotta update every day – heck, make it several times a day, and you gotta link to an army of other Bloggers who will reciprocate… and so on and so on.

I’m not bitter about being or not being part of any kind of scene – I’ll gladly miss out on being defined as a blogger. I just think that this whole thing is as over rated as the dotcoms of 2000 were. Surely we’ve learned from that year to see through the hype of the Next Big Thing ™ and recognise each NBT’s place in the evolution of the internet?

Nobody is going to make their fortune with a weblog and the chances are that updating a blog every single day with something worthwhile will just burn you out.

And for what end?

What is it with this thing that has reached saturation point on the web? It is actually working against the use of the net as an information source.