Peter has added a “Sites I’ve started” section to the navbar of his blog. I like the idea and I started thinking about doing something similar here. Unfortunately, virtually all of the sites I’ve created have vanished into the cgi-bin of history. Most still resolve to something, but bear no resemblance to the sites I actually built. Finance.com goes to Citibank’s home page. AboutWork.com goes to a “temporarily unavailable” page. Ironically, the site with the most staying power turns out to be the first one I launched: Asia Inc Online, which is now in its 12th year of continuous operation. OK, it’s gone through a ton of owners, and it doesn’t seem to have been updated in about six months. But at least it’s still online, and still has something to do with Asia Inc magazine. That’s more than I can say for MediaCentral and ka-Ching, which have completely vanished. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive; even if I can’t find these sites anymore, at least there’s proof that they did exist at some point, and weren’t part of some boom-era fever dream (on the other hand, some of these old sites look like they were built in a fever dream, but that’s another story).

Props to Engadget for making it to the top of Technorati’s list. I may not be part of the gang anymore, but I’m still impressed by what they’ve accomplished. And beating both Boing Boing and Xu Jinglei is definitely a major accomplishment. Congrats, guys. But don’t rest on your laurels for too long; Xu’s got a posse, and—sorry Pete—she’s a tad more photogenic than anyone in the Engadget gang, which will always get her at least a few more links, even if her actual blog consists of just the kind of ruminations you’d expect from a popular actress/director.

Great post from Scoble about why the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop is the lack of readable fonts. As he says:

Why is this important? Name the #1 thing you look at most on your computer screen. For me it’s the characters on the screen. If one OS has better looking characters than another (Windows Vista has a whole set of new fonts coming) then that OS will win with most users who aren’t geeks.

Now that I’m switching among Ubuntu, XP and OS X on a daily basis, I’d have to agree. Text definitely looks better on the other platforms. The Linux community has done an amazing job of addressing many of the major usability problems that used to plague the OS (plug-and-play, drivers, decent GUIs), but type is still a big issue. And given that, as Scoble points out, leading typographers “don’t do their work for free,” improving the situation may require some intervention by either a corporation with a vested interest in building the market for Linux (hello, Novell!) or a sugar daddy with a personal interest in the same (hello, Mark Shuttleworth!). Otherwise, as Scoble says, “Microsoft and Apple will win this game.”

Update: Here’s some good info about improving font quality under Linux. I won’t say this completely invalidates Scoble’s comments, but it definitely shows that the game isnt quite as one-sided as he believes.

While Ryan may have boldly switched over to the Jobs OS, I’ve recently gone the other way. No, I haven’t abandoned OSX or XP; I’ve got boxes running both (or rather, I’ve got boxes running each; no dual-OS Intel box for me—yet). But when the hard drive on my venerable HP Omnibook 510 notebook gave up the ghost recently, I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on a replacement drive, instead of XP (and instead of buying another laptop; I got this one on eBay for about $150 a couple of years ago, and it’s served me well). I had practical reasons for doing so—one of the main ones being that the five-year-old laptop was pretty sluggish under XP (despite the fact that it came with XP Pro preinstalled, with just a 1.13 GHz processor and 640 MB RAM, it was starting to show its age). That, and I didn’t have any install or recovery discs, and I wasn’t willing to deal with jumping through the many hoops required to get replacements from HP. So, Linux it would be. Installing went relatively smoothly—though relatively is, er, a relative term. Since I don’t have a CD-ROM for the 510, I decided the easiest thing would be to install directly to the hard drive by hooking it up to a desktop with one of those newfangled IDE-to-USB cables. I downloaded an ISO of Ubuntu, burned it to a CD, and rebooted my desktop. After the obligatory BIOS tweak, the PC booted from the Ubuntu CD, and I ran the installer. About a half hour later, I had a working Ubuntu drive, which I slotted into my laptop. And here’s where the relative part comes in: Though Ubuntu has a well-deserved reputation for being easy to install and use, that rep is based largely on the assumption that you’re going to install it directly to a computer from a CD, not to a drive that you’ll then be installing in a different computer. Bottom line: I ended up having to edit the GRUB menu to recognize the new drive as hda1, since the installer had automatically set it up as sda1. Hardly major, but I was glad I knew how to do it. So, now I’m a happy Ubuntu user. And I really am happy. Last time I tried using a desktop version of Linux was about six years ago, and I found it to be more trouble than it was worth (I was using Caldera OpenLinux, from the company now known as SCO Group—and also known for suing Linux distributors for allegedly violating its patents). Ubuntu is a completely different beast, with a ton of preinstalled software, including Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the usual suite of Gnome apps. The few Microsoft apps I need for work (Outlook, Project) all function reasonably under Wine. And the software has recognized just about every peripheral I’ve thrown at it, from USB pen drives to a PCMCIA WiFi card. If this is the future of desktop Linux, Microsoft—and Apple—had better watch out.

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border-width:1px;” />Did DCI, Exxon’s DC lobbying firm, have a hand in producing the recent YouTube hit, “Al Gore’s Penguin Army,” which pokes fun at the president-in-exile’s global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth?” It certainly looks like it. Though the video’s creator is allegedly a 29-year-old hipster called “Toutsmith,” his email account has been traced to computers owned by DCI. Exxon denies any role in the creation of the video, but DCI is more circumspect, telling reporters that “DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients’ behalf.” Ironically, the Toutsmith/DCI relationship was uncovered by conservative bastion The Wall Street Journal, which also pointed out that the video caught fire not due to natural, viral growth but thanks to text ads purchased on Google against keywords like “global warming.” When the Journal asked DCI about the video, the ads suddenly vanished. Nice try, DCI. The debacle is a good lesson to astroturfers everywhere: you can run the video, but you can’t hide. (Though I do suspect that Toutsmith has a bright future in the video news release biz.)