Some of you may have noticed that the Skype icons on Ecademy have changed and a lot of them now show a gray question mark. We made a change to the way Skype presence was displayed and these icons are now served direct by Skype's servers. This means that display of whether you're online should be more or less instant rather than delayed by an hour or not at all.



If you want your presence and status to be displayed, then you need to enable it in Skype. Within the Skype program the switch can be found in Tools, Options, Privacy, Privacy settings, and then check the box "Allow my status to be shown on the web". If you can't see the checkbox, click on "Advanced". The default is off, so if your Skype icon shows the gray question mark. you need to change it. [from: JB Ecademy]

Freecom 160Gb USB Portable hard drive for sale.



I had a cunning plan. I'd buy a 160Gb 2.5" USB hard drive. Take the drive out and put it in my portable audio player, put its 80Gb into the hard drive case and have more room for music. So I bought a Freecom for UKP69.99. Got it home, took it apart and found that it's a SATA disk and not IDE.



So does anyone want it for UKP60? email julian_bond at voidstar.com

Dear Google,



Could you build me a very tightly targeted feed of adverts that I really want to see? Can I help you build one by providing simple "Love, skip, ban" feedback on how well you're doing?

Online networking mostly consists of:-



1) Meet: Find interesting people. Collect names.

2) Message: Talk direct to them, One to One.

3) Discuss: Form affinity groups and discuss stuff among the people in the group. Few to Few

4) Publish: Post short or long form content to the web. One to Many.



I'm discovering that I'm really only interested in 3) Discuss. I'm uncomfortable and quickly bored with talking one to one. I'm only interested in 1) Meet and 4) Publish in so much as it attracts people to the party.



So I find myself posting more in clubs, discussion forums, Skype chats and Blog comments and less and less here. My best thinking is being done while talking off the top of my head to groups of other people and summarising it here is becoming a chore. I find I'm using Twitter as well as a way of throwing out mind bombs in the hope of sparking a reaction.

From the "You gotta larf" desk. http://apps.facebook.com/opensocket/ An OpenSocial container that runs inside Facebook as a Facebook app. It's a proof of concept and won't be able to deal with Facebook giving us the finger when we ask for our copy of our social graph.