Information Aesthetics lots of information visualisation projects. Interesting. 

Happy Year of the Dog. I like Shanghai during Chinese New Year - it is relatively quiet. Every day is like Sunday. Today we walked with the twins in their Baby Bjorn’s to Times Square (about two miles). Good exercise for all concerned. There go the fireworks...again. 

Fascinating study from Google on HTML tag usage in over one billion pages. Also gives useful references to other similar studies. It makes sense for a search company to be interested in this kind of information since what make a page relevant is what is unique or unusual about the page. Here’s a tip - start using the least used valid tags and watch your sites Google ranking climb.

I have Apache with SSL installed using Fink. Every time I try to upgrade to a new release via ‘fink update-all’ Fink gives me an error about conflicts with the installed DB library and the new one it wants to install. This is because Fink picks the wrong upgrade package - the non-SSL one rather than the SSL version which I am using. This is easy to fix - just ‘fink install apache-ssl...’ by hand. But I keep forgetting - so here it is so that Google can remind me next time.

Bill Thompson of the BBC’s Go Digital blogged recently that Macs are just as vunerable as PCs to security issues. It generated quite some feedback. Well, he’s right. I just discovered a virus on our Macs. The virus we had was in MS Word documents - this is a MS Office feature taking advantage of Visual Basic for Applications rather than a Mac OS X issue. However, if you exchange Word documents (or any MS Office file on any platform) you really should be scanning before opening. We used to have Virex installed on our Macs but…

Flip4Mac have released Windows Media components for QuickTime. This as MS announces the end of support for Windows Media Player on the Mac (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Given the plugin extensible architecture of QuickTime this is how it should have been done from the beginning.

One more thing...Steve Jobs gives a good keynote and now thanks to The Joy of Technology you can see how its done.

Generate your very own meaningless mission statement via Dilbert. Put this together with Web Two Point Oh and you’ve got a business plan. Start looking in the Yellow Pages for VCs now.

Guy Kawasaki on the Top Ten VCisms

A font walks in to a bar: The barman says, “Sorry, we don’t serve your type here.” <cymbal crash>