Good to see that Mandleson's new best buds in the entertainment industry aren't calling the shots with regards to the Governments plans for the Digital Economy Bill.
The British government has brought down its long-awaited Digital Economy Bill, and it's perfectly useless and terrible. It consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry (including the "three-strikes" rule that allows your entire family to be cut off from the net if anyone who lives in your house is accused of copyright infringement, without proof or evidence or trial)
The worst thing is since he's in the House of Lords we can't even vote the twat out.
Google are going to start automatically captioning YouTube video, starting with the Education channel.
They are also launching automatic timing for all YouTube videos, so if you already have a transcript file you can create captions for your video easily.
Recently two Edinburgh conferences of interest to me have opened for registration.
The Highland Fling
The Highland Fling is an annual one-day conference aimed at web developers and businesses with an interest in web standards and accessibility.
Now in its second year, this years event takes place on Thursday 3rd April at the Symposium Hall, part of the Royal College of Surgeons, and focuses on the topic of "The Browser & Beyond". Here's a summary from the Highland Fling website outlining what will be discussed:
In the world or modern web development we can no longer consider the browser as the end point of our product which is our content. More and more devices and applications are being released that can access our information and more importantly do not even require a browser to do so.
For The Highland Fling 2008 we're bringing into focus how the landscape is changing. API's, desktop apps, ambient devices, mobile and much more are helping us break out of the browser and potentially reaching an entire new audience as a result.
How do we embrace this, how do we take our existing skill set and transpose it into new mediums? How do we expand our skill set? What is our skill set going to be? Where is it all going?
The sessions look quite interesting and I'm particularly looking forward to hearing what Aral Balkan has to say as I saw him at d.Construct in 2006 and was exposed to Flex for the first time.
Scotland on Rails
Coming hot on the heels of The Highland Fling is the inaugural Scottish conference on Ruby on Rails — Scotland On Rails.
This is the first UK-centric Ruby on Rails conference and is a two day event on Friday 4rd and Saturday 5th April. When you consider that this is a regional conference the organisers have pulled off quite a coup with the quality of talent that they have assembled to present.
This will be my first conference I have attended that concentrates more on the back end of developing web applications and I'm looking forward to learning some exciting new things and meeting some interesting people.
If you're attending either of these events don't feel shy about saying hello.
I'm literally stunned by the news that Microsoft has offered $44.6 Billion for Yahoo!I can't say I'm too thrilled with the prospect that popular web apps that I like to use such as Flickr, Upcoming and del.icio.us are going to be owned by Microsoft.Obviously this will have to get approval from the appropriate regulatory body, but if this comes to pass then it looks like Google is going to have some serious competition in the search and web app fields.
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