Jon Udell (writer for both InfoWorld and O’Reilly Network) talks about the evolution of Wikipedia pages here — erhhh, more specifically he talks about the origin of the heavy metal Umlaut page. Paracelsus Rambles did a little writeup on Jon’s work here.

So how cool is Wikipedia?

P.S. Jon talks about the making of his screencast here. This (you’ll need a flash-enabled browser to view the screencast) is a direct link to Jon’s screencast on the Wikipedia heavy metal umlaut page.

P.S.S. More on screencasting soon.

Andy Ihnatko, The Chicago Sun-Times’ technology columnist, talks about how Bluetooth is like bacon. His full — and hilarious — talk can be found here. It’s part of ITConversations’ full series of talks from the recent Mac OS X Conference.

Ok, to be a little more pragmatic, here’s a link to a Microsoft’s Channel 9 video demonstrating a trick little Bluetooth application (Anil Dhawan of Microsoft uses his Bluetooth-enabled phone to control a PowerPoint presentation on his PC).

I first heard about Jotspot when I listened to the IT Conversations podcast of their presentation from the Web 2.0 conference. Here’s a few words from JotSpot’s FAQ:

What is a wiki?
A wiki is a website which can be edited by anyone, without knowing HTML. See also Wikipedia’s definition.

What is JotSpot?
JotSpot makes simple web applications simple to build by combining wikis and web applications in an easy-to-use hosted service for workgroups. Take the Intro Tour.

What is an application wiki?
Most wikis are great at organizing unstructured text: create and edit pages, create links and establish hierarchy, add attachments and comments and basic search. But they quickly reach their limits when you try to add structure. For example, a lot of folks use wikis for a shared task list. How would you assign a due date for a particular item? Can you assign priority? Could you assign a task to a group, not just a single person? Can you flag items for discussion? All of these are possible using our service because JotSpot allows you to easily add structure to unstructured data. JotSpot makes simple applications simple to build using wikis. Take our Advanced Tour to learn more.

How would I use JotSpot?
Use JotSpot for all of your wiki needs. In addition, build lightweight collaborative applications using our platform.

The JotSpot Application Gallery contains applications you can load into your JotSpot including:

* Event Calendar
* Recruiting
* Task Manager
* Customer Relationship Manager
* Help Desk
* Company Directory
* Issue Tracker

It’s a pretty impressive application… something that makes writing niche, department-level applications possible. To find out how, listen and watch Jon Udell’s screencast (a word so new it isn’t even in Wikipedia yet) of a Jotspot demo (this is a link to a SWF file which playable if you open it in a Flash-enabled browser).

I just downloaded w.bloggar a client-side posting tool that is compatible with Movable Type. I’m pretty impressed with w.bloggar’s feature set… it supports a lot of MT’s advanced posting features like extended entries, posting to multiple categories, etc. It has a spell checker, a preview window (which renders your post in HTML), HTML tag buttons (bold, underline, links, image insertion, etc.) and lots of other stuff. Pretty impressive.

Oh, I got the tip on w.bloggar over at Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

This is an open letter to all designers of Firefox toolbars. It’s awesome that lots of companies like Yahoo!, A9 and Google (whoops, why is there no ‘official’ Google Toolbar for Firefox?) are supporting Firefox with their toolbar efforts. However, I won’t use any of them, thank you.

Why not? Because I value my vertical space. You see, as in print/web media, space “above the fold” (as in the fold in a newspaper or on a web page anything you can see without having to scroll) is WAY more valuable than space below the fold. And obviously, space at the top of the page is THE most valuable (why do you think they put banner ads at the top of the page?). That is why I have reduced the top chrome in my Firefox setup to just one line of UI; Because I want to maximize the amount of vertical space for the content. Adding a toolbar uses up one line of the most valuable UI space. No thank you.

However, there is a solution. Companies, please feel free to design toolbars, because there are plenty of folks that don’t mind giving up even three or four lines of UI to toolbars. Rock on. However, please also “part out” your toolbar by designing separate buttons for all of the elements on your toolbar (buttons are things like Firefox’s default ‘back, ‘forward,’ ‘reload,’ etc.). That way I can choose the functionality I want (as in, I really don’t need a ‘highlight’ button, since Firefox’s Find function already does that) while not using up vertical UI space.

One company that gets this is Furl. They don’t even offer a traditional toolbar, just custom buttons that you can add to your existing UI.

OK, so Yahoo!, A9 and others — gimme some buttons, and I’ll add them to my UI. Until then, your toolbars will go unchecked.