During my third semester at school in Clay Shirky’s Social Software class – my group worked on a lightweight multimedia groupware collaboration tool called Catayst which was a fun project but never ended up getting finished. Since then, I’ve been running across many of these tools – such as Ray Ozzie’s Groove but I just ran across another one (with less of a multimedia development focus) called Confluence. Confluence looks like the arranged marriage of a Blog and Wiki in a Java chapel with some slick design as the best man. Apart from the Java and the slick design, I’m still not sure what the core differences are between this and free wikis like Twiki or UseModWiki etc.

Actually, they just mentioned in passing that there is another serious security hole in Internet Explorer and that the US Computer Emergency Reponse Center (Cert) recommends that you should “use a browser other then MS Internet Explorer until the current vulnerabilities in MSIE are patched.” That sounds logical – switch to a browser which hasn’t been compromised (such as Firefox – because it’s actually good) and then switch back to IE once they’ve given you some tape to patch it.

I was messing around with some tools that you let you easily edit your blog and I’m still a bit undecided. I tried w.bloggar and I’ve been using Zempt for the last few months and it’s been fairly good. The only drawback was that it wouldn’t let me insert the song I was currently listening to in iTunes (it insisted on using Winamp or [gasp] Windows Media Player). Enter Ecto a descendant of the much-praised Kung Log.

I’ve been playing with it for about half an hour now and it’s working pretty sweetly – the interface is great, the features are cool – apparently you can even edit images (I’m assuming I’ll need ImageMagick server-side tho, because it doesn’t work right now). The only problem I had was when I crashed at startup after giving it a bad API End Point address, but a simple restart sorted that out.

Bobbing my head to Funkstorung:03 Chopping Heads:Disconnected[3:47]