Ben Wedmuller has posted a demo of the social user interface features of the OLPC UI called Sugar. I caught the end of a demo at the Boston Gnome Summit last year and noted then the very interesting social software possibilities.

Sugar could just become a revolution in UIs as it tries to escape the ubiquitous WIMP UI and desktop metaphor that  Xerox Star introduced in the early 1980's. Just look at the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines. Although not everyone agrees it is good idea.

Wal-Mart are often criticised for having muscle tactics which can destroy local markets but this use of their huge influence to promote low energy light bulbs could have a big impact on US energy usage and thus the environment.

An interesting twist is that Wal-Mart are asking customers to spend a little more cash, rather than less.

Will we see something similar here in the UK from ASDA, who are owned by Wal-Mart, or perhaps even Sainsbury's or Tesco?

Here's a interesting post from Rob Weir on some issues with Microsoft's alternative to the ODF format.

Ron claims that features in OOXML ensure only a single implementation can meet the specification. Microsoft's. 

So not only must an interoperable OOXML implementation first acquire and reverse-engineer a 14-year old version of Microsoft Word, it must also do the same thing with a 16-year old version of WordPerfect. Good luck.

This one's for all the hardcore geeks. In this article The Register quotes an older interview from Linux Mag with Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, explaining how and why he wrote the Vi editor.

An editor is the most personal of a programmer's tools and Vi is legendary, not least for dividing programmers into 'love it' and 'hate it' camps.. I remember the days when Vi was the only powerful editor you could really use over a slow link. I got to like it's powerful features and used to it's somewhat quirky UI. It was such an improvement on Ed (and Ex which was an intermediate step). However I found when switching between Windows and *NIX development that my habit of hitting ESC at the end of typing meant the dialog closed and I lost all my typing. That got me swearing a lot but I've been known to even fire up VIM on occasion since. I migrated to the wonderfully clean Brief editor on DOS and Windows 3.1 and tend to use SciTE these days.

Mozilla user experience designer Alex Faaborg has been working on projects that develop the concepts of microformats and the browser as information broker. Basically the idea is that much as an operating system passes opened documents on to an appropriate program based on the document type or file extension, the web browser can pass on small chunks of web information on to programs based on markup standards. These programs could be traditional desktop applications, online programs or browser extensions.

As an use of semantic markup this could just be a persuasive application of Tim Berners-Lee's ideas for the semantic web. The main difference seems to be that  microformats focus on information for use by people (e.g. for social networking) and not for machine processing. In addition the technical implementation is rather simpler using (X)HTML and not RDF.

The Microformats site has the detailes and the Read/write web have an introduction to microformats and browser brokering. Roger L Costello has created a comprehensive hCard presentation (using S5) that provides a real-world example.

While work is progressing on microformats support in Firefox 3 there's already a Firefox extension called Operator.

By using microformats to do useful work using minimal user interaction it looks particularly interesting for user with Mobility disabilities and thus may be of use for Jambu.

The browser information broker concept could just add another level of choice in user accessibility options. A user can choose to use programs that support their AT or are suitably accessible themselves, whilst sharing and collaborating on the microformated chunks of data with users using their own preferred  programs. Assuming that microformats are open standards as they must be to be at all useful, any program can access them. This has the potential to enable people with disabilities to more easily participate in online collaborative activities.

To my mind that is removing some of the barriers that ICT places in the way of what we are using it for, namely to communicate with others. The data represents the information we are communicating and microformats provide a standard way of marking the meaning such that programs can understand it. That understanding can allow programs to provide better ways of interacting with the data. At present we battle with application User Interfaces in order to modify data that represents the information and meaning. Users of AT have yet another layer inserted in the stack. Microformats would seem to offer the possibility of a more intelligent use of user focussed data by a wider choice of programs. And with the web browser at the center.

I think a focus on data standards (microformats) rather than behaviour (Ajax) will be a good thing. Like RSS and REST, microformats are a refreshingly simple technology and so may gain wide 'grass roots' acceptance.

Their Space is a new report from DEMOS on research into student use of social software.

Education for a digital generation draws on qualitative research with children and polling of parents to counter the myths obscuring the true value of digital media.

Approaching technology from the perspective of children, it tells positive stories about how they use online space to build relationships and create original content. It argues that the skills children are developing through these activities, such as creativity, communication and collaboration, are those that will enable them to succeed in a globally networked, knowledge-driven economy.

A similar report from Pew International across the pond.

The slides from Miles Berry and Terry Freedman's BCS Presentation at BETT and the Coming of Age booklet give a good introduction into many of the technologies and their use.

[Update 15 Jan 07] Terry has more resources including a podcast (as you knew he would ;-)).

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education.

The 2007 Horizon Report highlights six technologies that the underlying research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years.

• User-Created Content
• Social Networking
• Mobile Phones
• Virtual Worlds
• The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication
• Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming 

Josie Fraser introduced this year's report and sat on the advisory board. The board collaborated using an open wiki workspace. The report is released under a Creative Commons Licence.

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms.

According to Jim Zemlin, new Executive Director of the Linux Foundation

The intention is that the Linux Foundation will become the go-to place for Linux development in the same way that the Eclipse Foundation is already the centre of tools development, the Apache Software Foundation the hub of Web server and middleware work and Mozilla Foundation the heart of browser and Web interface creation.

The ODF Toolkit project proposal looks interesting as it aims to provide a thin API for ODF manipulation. That moves towards a document processing model (e.g TeX, Forrest) rather than WYSIWYG GUI editing and offers accessibility features such as on the fly conversion of documents to user-accessible formats (e.g. Apache AxKit).

One of the project options is to base it on the OOo Universal Network Objects  (UNO) layer and the IBM branch of UNO implements IAccessible2 (IA2). Could allowing AT to get directly at docs without a GUI application being installed be useful?. Even if IA2 assumes a GUI to some extent?

A browser plugin or even rich client could use the ODFToolkit and expose IA2 for AT consumption without providing full editing/rendering. AT could link with ODFToolkit to get ODF access using its standard IA2 access rather than specific API calls.

There's more info on ODFToolkit in this blog post.