Overall, like last year, although I didn't necessarily learn a lot, I came away from the conference with a renewed passion for the Web, and couldn't wait to get back to a computer and start tinkering with ideas which welled up throughout the day.

You can read the whole review over at the Creation news section.

Best Actor

• Johnny Depp - Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
• Daniel Day-Lewis - There Will Be Blood
• George Clooney - Michael Clayton
• Tommy Lee Jones - In the Valley of Elah
• Viggo Mortensen - Eastern Promise

I have heard amazing accolades for Daniel Day-Lewis, so I'll be suprised if he doesn't win best actor this year, although Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" hasn't been released in the UK yet, so I haven't seen it. Of the films I've seen in this category, I thought both Viggo Mortensen and George Clooney were both outstanding.

Best Supporting Actor

• Javier Bardem - No Country for Old Men
• Casey Affleck - The Assassination of Jesse James
• Philip Seymour Hoffman - Charlie Wilson's War
• Tom Wilkinson - Michael Clayton
• Hal Holbrook - Into the Wild

Both Casey Affleck and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Charlie Wilson's War) were amazing in their roles. And although I haven't seen "No Country for Old Men" or "Into the Wild" I would have to give this Oscar to Casey Affleck for his role as Robert Ford in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford". It is a shame Ben Foster didn't receive a nomination for his supporting role in the western "3:10 to Yuma".

Best Animated Feature

• Persepolis
• Ratatouille
• Surf's Up

Out of those nominated I have only seen "Ratatouille", however, this was a brilliant film - not just a brilliant animated film. It stood up to the hype from critics and the standard of other Pixar films. Persepolis is a very stylistic foreign animation with a more serious storyline, which has also been heavily commended by critics. I highly doubt Surf's Up in a serious contender.

Best Director

• Julian Schnabel - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
• Jason Reitman - Juno
• Tony Gilroy - Michael Clayton
• Joel Coen and Ethan Coen - No Country for Old Men
• Paul Thomas Anderson - There Will Be Blood

This is the category I'm most interested in, but I've only been able to see one of these films so far; Michael Clayton. Although the film was well shot and acted, I thought pacing and storytelling were slow and confusing. Juno has been raved about, but I don't see it pushing any directorial boundaries. The Coen-Brothers are supposedly back on top form for "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood" will no doubt be an epic like his previous films "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights". It'll be a tough call between these two veteran filmmakers.

However, I am most looking forward in seeing "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly". The French film about the true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffers a stroke and has to live with an almost totally paralyzed body; has been reviewed as "imagine a Spike Jonze-Charlie Kauffman-Michel Gondry-style film" - I envisage a rewarding masterpiece.

Best Documentary Feature

• No End in Sight
• Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
• Sicko
• Taxi to the Dark Side
• War/Dance

Again, I've only seen one of the nominated films; Sicko. It was a very poignant documentary, however, it is too American-centric and I feel a lot of people outside that culture will not be able to relate to the gravity of the situation, due to the free health-care many viewers in Europe receive.

Best Picture

• Atonement
• No Country for Old Men
• There Will be Blood
• Michael Clayton
• Juno

I am very doubtful that "Juno" will win Best Picture, it is looking to be a great indie flick, but shouldn't be in the running for Best Picture. "Michael Clayton" was good, but I don't think it is Best Picture material. Atonement was a box office success but I hope that either "No Country for Old Men" or "There Will be Blood" will take home this Oscar.

Pulse RSS is a new web service which provides you with statistics for your website. OK, there are enough statistic services out there nowadays, with Google Analytics providing a full-blown solution, and Mint giving you some pleasant data - but most of the time this is overwhelming for a client.

However, Pulse RSS is different, providing you with a very simple solution - giving you vital statistics. After you have registered, you're given a code which you place at the bottom of your site. Now you can login a check your sites statistics. Visits, incoming links and search keywords are displayed for each domain you've added.

Pulse RSS is different in one way - it is a web service. You can easily subscribe to individual RSS feeds of each of the vitals (visits, incoming links and search keywords), but this service also provides XML. Using the XML data, you can easily plug the statistics in to your own personal interface/website.

Why not give it a whirl, 'coz best of all... it's free!

This years nominees for the Best motion picture of the year are:

• Babel
• The Departed
• Letters from Iwo Jima
• Little Miss Sunshine
• The Queen

Unlike Robert Nyman I have only been able to check out two of those films - Little Miss Sunshine and The Departed.

Unfortunately, Letters from Iwo Jima is yet to be released in the UK, but I am definitely looking forward to it. This film is the second film about the Japanese battle on the island on Iwo Jima by Clint Eastwood. The other movie Flags of Our Fathers focuses on the life stories of the six men who raised the flag at The Battle of Iwo Jima which is ultimately from the perspective of the Americans. Whereas Letters from Iwo Jima follows this turning point World War 2 battle from the Japanese, which is admirably films with native Japanese actors and in their native language. I have only seen the trailer for this film, but the actual war scenes look comparable to the groundbreaking and spectacular (but not glamourised) Spielberg epic Saving Private Ryan.

My local cinema hasn't started showing Babel yet (but I have been told it will be showing it soon, although it was released back in the middle of January). I have been reading many mixed reviews about this movie, with some people complaining it was too self-indulgent, pretentious and the fact one of the stories didn't really conclude. However, I'm looking forward to this movie solely because of it's director - Alejandro González Iñárritu - directed 21 Grams which is an extremely recommended movie and Amores perros, a highly-acclaimed Mexican movie, which follows "a horrific car accident that connects three stories, each involving characters dealing with loss, regret, and life's harsh realities, all in the name of love" ...which I'm yet to watch.

Finally, I have had the opportunity to see 'The Queen' twice now, but, even after all the massive reviews and what has been said about Helen Mirren's performance, I am uninterested in the subject matter.

The Departed is definitely everyone's favourite, and it is about time Martin Scorsese won. It was a good film, well acted, interesting story-line, direction, comedy (Mark Wahlberg), action and cast. The twist/conclusion was pretty cool, but it didn't standout entirely for me. Although, I will definitely be buying it on DVD when it has become a little cheaper (and I've watched all the ones I've currently got!)

About the other nomination I've seen - Little Miss Sunshine - I thought this was an original, funny, extremely well shot, sad, yet strangely uplifting movie. The attraction about this movie are the small details and quirks which are often quite subtle and very pessimistic. Yet when this is combined with the premise of the movie - dealing with loss, disappointment, rejections and family - it relates to a lot of situations many people find themselves faced with. The climax to the movie is incredibly funny and heart-warming. I already own this on DVD and I highly recommend anyone to watch it.

I would also like to make a special mention about Pan's Labyrinth, which is notably up for 'Best foreign language film of the year' (amongst other nominations). I felt the movie was advertised as a fantasy - but certainly not for children - yet lacked equal screen time between the fantasy storyline of Pan and the harsh nature of her Nazi-occupied war-time reality. The fantasy had some great character design, which Guillermo del Toro is renowned for. But the Nazi storyline and cinematography was dark, scary and torturous and, for me, stole the movie away from it's fantasy roots.

Firstly, they are creating two limits (to all accounts). The first limit - you can have a maximum of 3,000 contacts - doesn't really bother me, although I can see people's gripes with it (such as the private sharing of photos, although people have given solutions to this - add photos to a set and create a guest pass).

The other limit is allowing each photo on to have a maximum of 75 tags. One of the reasons stated in the 'Official contact and tag limit changes topic' is to stop 'spammy tags'. This may curb this activity, but it certainly doesn't stop it. Again, I think the limit is fairly high, and I've never come close to reaching it, but this is the problem with folksonomies. The whole idea of folksonomy tagging is the user creates them based on what they think is correct, and will be useful for them in the future, if this means adding a lot of tags, then that is the user's choice.

The main reason stated for both of these seemingly arbitrary limits is server performance. Although, I'm certainly no expert in creating scalable web-apps, I don't believe having a lot of contacts should affect the general use of the site - this is viewing the photos. Having hundreds of tags could impact performance, but I'm sure they've got the experience, money and resources to make this problem insignificant.

Although this news has stirred up a few people, the main outcry is the forcing of Flickr accounts (old-skool) to be merged with Yahoo! identities.

When Yahoo! acquired Flickr in 2005, there was concern about what would happen and how much weight Yahoo! would throw on to Flickr. After a while new accounts required a Yahoo! identity and you could merge your Flickr account with a Yahoo! identity, but it was purely optional. Now Yahoo! have given a cut-off date - 15th March 2007 - after which you must merge your account to use it.

Other people have voiced their distaste with this move. Thomas Hawk, the CEO of Zooomr has written on his blog stating that 'Flickr needs to reverse the asinine decisions made today to force people to merge their accounts with Yahoo and to place new limits on your contacts and tags.'.

The BBC has even got a news story about the change - Flickr to require Yahoo usernames - also mentioning a backlash from the Flickr community.

Personally, I am apathetic to the changes. I'm never going to have that many contacts and probably won't ever use more than 75 tags a photo. However, hopefully the recently announced change for 'machine tags' won't be included in the total tags. I already have a Yahoo! identity, but never use it. I didn't bother merging when it was first announced, but now I have no choice I've done it.

Today, the World Wide Web Consortium forged an important link between Semantic Web and microformats communities. With "Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages", or GRDDL (pronounced "griddle"), software can automatically extract information from structured Web pages to make it part of the Semantic Web. Those accustomed to expressing structured data with microformats in XHTML can thus increase the value of their existing data by porting it to the Semantic Web, at very low cost.

You can read more about the group in the W3C GRDDL Working Group working draft documents.

The Multipack had it's first anniversary last weekend and overall the event was pretty successful. There was about twenty people in total, including some new members as well as the regulars. Half of the founding members were at this first anniversary, Chris Lysaght entertained with his stories and Si Jobling (the founding father) gave a quick speech before the cake and free wine was distributed! Paul Lloyd, is now living the Web2.0 life over in Silicon Valley, California, so we'll let him off and Jon Roobottom the Multipack logo designer was no where to be seen! The event was the first proper 'multinational' meet, with Kate (a regular) originally from the USA, joined by Leevi Graham all the way from Australia.

The event started out in the Wharf 10 bar at 2pm in Walsall, the town which held the first event last year. We left the Wharf after the sunset over the industrial chimneys and headed in to the town. A group of us grabbed some grub and talked about politics, the Daily Show and even some web-related topics. Finally, most of the group parted company around 9.30pm. So, go check out some of the photos on Flickr and what the others who attended have to say on the Multipack blog post 'The Multipack Is One'.

Hot on the heels of this event, the next meeting has already been organised. The next meeting is on Saturday 11th November 2006, starting at 2pm. The venue is the Lloyds No. 1 bar in the Broad Street area of Birmingham, UK. You can find about more information about the even on Upcoming, remember to add yourself if you are planning to come!

The new A List Apart article about the quote element seems pretty bad in my opinion. I would have posted a comment there, but you have to register, so no thanks.

It mentions the following as a non-ideal solution, stating the problem as well:

Using JavaScript to render the quotation marks.

• Many people disable JavaScript, so the people using IE/Win with JavaScript disabled still won't see the quotation marks.
• Double quotation marks will appear if and when IE/Win fixes the problem in a future release.

First of all, if they fix the implementation, then you simply remove the JavaScript. And, what are the percentage of users with Internet Explorer, which have JavaScript disabled (OK, sure, in corporate environments maybe).

The "solution" which is touted mentions removing the styling in standards-complaint browsers, using the before and after psuedo-elements. Then you do the following:

...add quotation entities outside the Q tag and now all the browsers, including IE/Win, will display quotation marks-and we won't have to worry about the other browsers having double quotation marks because we overrode the Q style with our own.

WHAT? Are you serious?

So, you're adding extra physical markup, and styling out the specification implementation. Instead if patching the majority (of the minority) of users, with the use of JavaScript, only targetting browsers which have the issue, you're adding extraneous markup. And why must you add the quotes outside of the q element? Why? This is insane to me.

People in the discussion mention:

Until of course I viewed the page in a text browser and found the quotation marks were being displayed twice.

This is because obviously there is no CSS support in text browsers and without CSS support you cannot hide the text browsers default style for the Q tag which is to show quotation marks.

The JavaScript solution quoted above is disregarded in the article, because it doesn't accommodate a small minority, a specific browser with JavaScript disabled. Viewing a page without styles is probably a similar small minority, but you're messing with the hardcode instead of progressive enhancement, yet this is the solution?

Also brought up in the discussion is the question mark of internationalization, where quote marks are different in different languages.

It essentially removes good rendering behaviour from good browsers in order to facilitate bad mark-up behaviour by authors to accommodate bad rendering behaviour by buggy and soon-to-be-obselete browsers.

Exactly. You can discuss this on the Multipack forum.

So, if you're interested in the web and you want a pint or four, you should come down. It should be fun (as always).

The application seems to use photos which are 'geotagged' (over 300k) and longitude/latitude coordinates, from Flickr. These photos are then plotted on a map of the world, courtesy of Google Maps.

There are a few ways you can geotag photos for use on Flickr. One method involves manually looking up the postcode of the area and then searching on a mapping service for the longitude/latitude information. Obviously this is far from ideal as it requires knowing the postcode of the area, and then manually (meh, effort) looking up this information.

Richard Rutter recommends using Multimap for manually finding out this geo information.

You can find the coordinates of your chosen location (perhaps your house, office or just the centre of your city) using Multimap - the latitude and longitude of any location is displayed in the Map Info box below every map.

A more automated solution involves installing an application on your mobile phone. ZoneTag, from the research lab at Yahoo! uploads photos automatically annotated with the location (usually based on cell tower) in which they were taken. Merkitys-Meaning also adds locational information, such as cell information, country, city and GPS (if Bluetooth GPS device). This is fine, but many people won't be taking photos with their mobile and certainly won't want to waste money uploading them through these services. (I'm not sure whether the informtion is saved if the photo is uploaded via a computer).

What is needed is a super digital camera. Instead of adding more and more megapixels to consumer cameras (which most do not really need, it just eats up memory cards and use up too much space if you're taking a lot of photographs), I think camera manufactures should be adding in new features.

I would be very interested in buying a camera which had moderate megapixels (4-5) but included a GPS device (to record the longitude/latitude coordinates), a compass (for direction) and an altimeter (to measure the altitude of the device). If all this information was recorded automatically and stored on the photo, much like EXIF data (exposure time, aperture size, date etc) currently does, then it would provide a phenomenal amount data for processing and comparing.

If a camera featured everything mentioned above, Loc.alize.us would work a infinitely better. There would be far more accurate information, from a wider demographic (not just geeks with toys) and possibly even more cool features - such as the possibility of panoramic photos (taken from multiple photos with different compass directions, but the same, or very similar, coordinates).

So, please, someone develop and sell me one of these devices. That is all, thanks.