SmartyPants is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into “smart” typographic punctuation HTML entities.
SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:

• Straight quotes ( " and ' ) into “curly” quote HTML entities
• Backticks-style quotes (``like this'') into “curly” quote HTML entities
• Dashes (“--” and “---”) into en- and em-dash entities
• Three consecutive dots (“...”) into an ellipsis entity

I was thinking of writing an equivalent for Radio, but even though I'm a trained typographer, I think it's too much of a problem when quoting from sites that use smart punc, I'll skip it.

1472 Also posted to: cyberSaps . At: 8:41:19 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: SmartyPants

An al Qaeda video, which appeared this week on an al Qaeda-affiliated Web site, shows the September 11, 2001, attack on New York's World Trade Center as filmed from an angle sources in Washington said they had not seen before.

Also more chatter in 'the channels.' Let's be careful out there, people.

1471 Also posted to: warBlog . At: 7:37:07 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Al Qaeda tape likely used to rally, recruit

"A search for the mind's "funny bone" has shed new light on the mysteries of merriment, revealing that the reason humour is addictive is that it activates "reward centres" in the brain"

1470 Also posted to: News . At: 7:28:00 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: www.smh.com.au - Cartoons act like cocaine

"Most Little Seen, Quickly Abandoned
Survey of 3,634 blogs on eight leading blog-hosting services to develop a model of blog populations. Based on this research, Perseus estimates that 4.12 million blogs have been created on these services: Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga.

• 92.4% of blogs created by people under the age of 30.
• Females are slightly more likely than males to create blogs, accounting for 56.0% of hosted blogs.
• the number of hosted blogs created to exceed five million by the end of 2003 and to exceed ten million by the end of 2004.
• Those who abandoned blogs tended to write posts that were only 58% as long as the posts of those who still maintained blogs, which simply indicates that those who enjoy writing stick with blogs longer."

1469 Also posted to: cyberSaps . At: 12:55:51 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: The Blogging Iceberg

"Applying the Three-Click Rule leads to a number of design suggestions, such as putting global navigation on every page and making a navigation hierarchy shallow and wide. While these suggestions seem a natural extension of the Three-Click Rule, they assume the rule is worth following."

Very good article. I've always believed that there are no sites on the internet, all pages.
If you enter a site via a search engine, and have the time, you'll look deeper than three clicks if the page you landed on is close enough to your search criteria. If it ain't you're outta there to the next of the search result. If you enter via a link on someone else's site, you'll look for three clicks, possibly more if the navigation is good and informative enough.

In short, most people navigate via search engines. Build your site for these, not testers entering your site via the front page. And, make sure your navigation is detailed, categories/sections well differentiated.

1468 Also posted to: cyberSaps . At: 12:46:51 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Testing the Three-Click Rule

SME workers 'barred from unions'
British labour laws unfairly prevent six million small business employees from joining trade unions, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has claimed.

Chechnya suicide bomb on Russian commuter train
There were three women and a man in the group responsible for the blast. Two of the women jumped off the train just before the explosion. One of them [a woman] was injured and will not likely survive. The man died. He was carrying a grenade attached to his legs. The organisers of this crime wanted him to die.

Lancet calls for tobacco ban to save thousands of lives
The tobacco lobby said it revealed the "true voice of the rabid anti-smoking zealot." In an editorial headlined "How do you sleep at night, Mr Blair?", The Lancet says a ban on smoking in public would be a start but that it is "missing the point." The availability and acceptability of smoking is far more significant. A ban on tobacco would save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

1467 Also posted to: news . At: 11:18:00 AM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Daily news items