Links for Monday

Time for a few links to neat things. I haven’t done a post like this for ages:

* I’ve only just noticed the Chaser Crew’s lovely social engineering of the ridiculous security at the APEC summit in Sydney. The chaser boys drove a totally fake Canadian motorcade right up to the hotel Bush was staying in, and then an actor in an Osama Bin Laden costume got out of the Limo. Brilliant. Security were clueless. “It’s a motorcde, just wave it through…”
* [Commentary by Bruce Schneier](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/apec_conference.html)
* [Video footage from The Chaser's War on Everything (scouta/youtube)](http://scouta.com/faves/5T3qWroUH90/)

* A really nice [timelapse video of Burning Man 2007 (scouta/youtube)](http://scouta.com/faves/hEbTYkubwNe/)

* Make custom short urls with dave and josh’s £5 app, [icanhaz.com](http://icanhaz.com/). More kittys and less obscure than tinyurl. Made in Brighton.

* [Why Do You Stay Up So Late?](http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/whystayup/project.html) – an interactive multimedia poem.

Keeping it simple (and not scary)

Bret Treasure [writes about our ajaxy menu planner](http://freebeer.com.au/2007/08/17/finger-food/) over at [Free Beer](http://freebeer.com.au):

>The site is very simple to use and deliberately collects very little information from the window-shopper. The role of the web site is to generate phone inquiries and web forms frighten them off.

Scalable Internet Architectures

Scalable Internet Architectures (Developer’s Library) is a great read for those times when you are deploying or designing or thinking about deploying a web application.

This is a great book, because it keeps things simple, it explodes the myths nicely, and it avoid expensive vendor solutions.

I don’t quite buy the ’scale later’ mantra. I’m all for thinking about these sort of things nice and early.

Business Week on Second Life

Business Week Online article about business going on in Second Life: My Virtual Life.

MP3 First Aid info for your iPod

The Guardian Online reports that the Sussex Ambulance Service are providing free MP3 downloads giving basic first-aid information for those walking around with an iPod.

What a great idea. Presumably the files are small (compared to most MP3 players) and can be quickly called up.

Update:  Have just downloaded the files and stuck them on the iPod.  Small, easy to keep there.  This is such a good idea.  I’d expect a flood of similar ideas coming soon.

An adoption strategy for social software in enterprise

Over in Strange Attractor, Suw Charman has written An adoption strategy for social software in enterprise.  She makes the point that you can’t just install a wiki or blog and expect it to ‘work’.  Community building is needed, and the article explains  how and why. Good, insightful reading.

Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?

While we are poking fun at Web 2.0 fever, see if you can pick, from a set of weird sounding names, whether they are Web 2.0 apps or Star Wars characters.

thanks Smart Mobs.

“The Future of Web Apps” Podcasts

Carson Workshops have put up a series of podcasts from their “The Future of Web Apps” summit. I haven’t listened to them yet, but everybody is talking about them.

They had a few probs meeting demands for the downloads, so it might take a couple of days to succeed in downloading them.

Using Google for site security testing

The Ethical Hacker has a set of top ten searches you can perform with Google to see if you site leaks security information. It all starts with using the site: prefix to target your site, then see what you can find.

Blog Design for Beginners

Here’s a nice article on Blog Design for Beginners from Darren Rowse’s Problogger. Problogger is a great resource for people trying to make money out of blogging itself.

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