Sjoerd Visscher respondes to Dave Winer’s concerns with CSS. [Via Scripting News]

I have to say that the only site that I’ve been truly successful with CSS is this one. The reason - it’s simple layout. But even that simple layout took some energy to work out - and the people at glish.com were the reason I was able to create a “pure” CSS design. I’ve been building websites since 1994, and been using CSS for close on 2 years now, and I still can’t get it to work properly across browsers in many instances. For example, how do I get the Login box on the Macromanage home page to align the way it does without resorting to tables?

Sometimes I’ll get the CSS working in one browser, just to see another browser choke on it. IE6.x and Mozilla 1.1+ seem to do a consistent job most of the time.

Sjoerd mentiones the -moz-flex element. YES, YES, YES. PLEASE! This, to me, is just one of those “why wasn’t it there since day one” kinda things.

Anyways, enough ranting…

Scott Rosenberg has a great piece on spam and spammers.

Spammers are “free riders”; their defenses are ludicrous, and their abuse is a classic instance of the “tragedy of the commons.” The Internet is our commons. We need to keep working on better ways to keep it from getting choked by spam.

For years I didn’t know why all these tech heads were complaining about spam. Since I had my first email address (about 1994) through to about 2 years ago I rarely got any spam - maybe 2 messages a week if I was unlucky. Then the deluge came…

I now receive on average 40-50 spam messages per day. I think it has a lot to do with having more of an “imprint” as it were on the net - my email address pops up in mailing list archives, this blog, my band’s website and other places around the net. Plus I use an email aliasing service, which I know has a lot to do with it as well (I’d estimate over 90% of the spam I get to that one address).

The problem is, that is the address my friends know they can always reach me on. I’ve had it almost as long as I’ve been on the net, and I get friends who email me on that address that I haven’t heard from in years.

I’m lucky, OddPost, the mail service I use, has an awesome spam filter - about 99% accurate, and very few false positives. But that’s still a lot of bandwidth being chewed up with crap.

And my colleagues wonder why I have a problem with sending unsolicited emails from our business (and thankfully, I’m winning so far).

Ray Ozzie on News.com: “The next 10 years will find us moving decidedly from an era of personal productivity to one of joint productivity and social software.”

Diego wishes the Mosaic web browser a happy 10th birthday.

It’s a little scary to think, but the anecdotes he mentions ring true to me. The first websites I created (using SimpleText on a Mac) were tested across Netscape 0.96b and Mosaic. That was the “browser war” of the time… Mmmmm… Techy nostalgia…

For some time now I have been interested in how technology can be used to help in the growth of the global justice movement. Recently Jim Moore posted a thought provoking paper The Second Superpower. Joi Ito also posted another interesting article Emergent Democracy.

Both of these articles got me thinking, but I kept struggling with a couple of issues:

• How many people, outside of technologists, are likely to partake in a tech-based democracy?
• How many people, outside of activists, are likely to want to become more heavily involved in the political process?
• How many people, outside of the affluent “Northern” states (or even the more affluent within them), are able to participate in a tech-based democracy?

For my Communications and Information Environments class at UTS, I have taken on the topic of Information Inequality, interested particularly in the third point above. As part of our readings for that topic in the subject I read the first chapter of Digital Divide?: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty & the Internet in Democratic Societies by Pippa Norris.

It examines many of the issues that this discussion has raised for me, and it seems the book goes into greater depth on all of the topics. Looks like a must read.

Despite it being out for a while now, I just downloaded and installed Safari Beta 2. It’s worth it for the tabs alone. Despite my initial scepticism it is now my new favourite browser. Highly recommended if you’re using Mac OS X.

Dave Winer posts an interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain on what he calls “The Google Death Penalty“. [Via Scripting News]

Joi Ito has a great entry about RIAA claims that P2P is reducing music sales.

Right on.

Jon Udell blogs about Blogs, scopes, and human routers. Interesting…

Joey, the main focus of the doco I mentioned, has a blog. Check out Seeing Is Believing too.

And the chat is archived (bravo SBS).