Welcome to The Heterotopia Report for December 13, 2005, a new semi-regular feature at this site, where I spend the day simply pointing people to interesting things found elsewhere on the internet. It's worth remembering, by the way, that I do not accept compensation in return for a product or company being mentioned here (aside from the occasional review copy of a product being reviewed), and that I disclose any personal relationship I might have with any group or person mentioned here, when appropriate.

--Are you a person who surfs the web through your cellphone? Ever come across links that are associated with numbers on your keypad, so that all you have to do is press that number to make the link active? Ever wonder how you could implement such a thing at your own site? Turns out that it's a function of a simple, boring, old-fashioned HTML tag - the "accesskey" tag, in fact, originally designed so that people with disabilities could more easily surf the web on their desktop computer without needing a mouse. The tag is as easy as pie to implement (why, I've been using them myself for the last six months in the mobile version of my own website); and the "Dive Into Accessibility" website this week published a very useful tutorial on the subject, for those who might be interested, including specific instructions for those on Blogger, Movable Type and other popular services. (Thanks to Lifehacker for pointing this out.)

--From Dr. Jeffrey Cornwall, author of the exquisite blog The Entrepreneurial Mind (a must-read for all fellow small-business newbies, in my opinion): Tekrati, a new site offering links to over 100 other blogs, all of them devoted to following industry trends. I've been through about 40 of them myself this week, in fact; some of course haven't been updated in months, and some concern only specific industries (like CRM, SEO and the like), but on the whole I've been finding a whole bunch of really useful, really great trend-analysis blogs because of this site. Thanks, Dr. Cornwall, for pointing this out!

--Out of all the criteria, all the standard tests, that have now been invented for corporate job interviews, you know which one is still the absolutely best predictor of employee success? That's right, the boring ol' IQ test, those four-hour monstrosities most of us were forced to endure when we were children. Of course, most companies can't actually administer a four-hour standard IQ test during job interviews; so the Harvard Business Review has an interesting article in the latest issue of their magazine, explaining how to easily implement "IQ-test-type questions" without actually giving a test, and which popular interview questions do in fact reveal nothing at all about what kind of performer that applicant might eventually be. (In a nutshell - devise more hypothetical situations for your interviews, the stranger the better, asking applicants to explain what they would actually do in such a situation, not simply to reiterate what they've done in similar situations in the past.) You'll need to pick up the paper version of the journal for the full article; their website, however, has an extended excerpt from the article up right now, which is definitely worth taking a look at.

--Good news for customers of Virgin Airlines, via Space.com - you can now start applying your frequent-flyer miles towards a spaceflight on the new Virgin Galactic. You know, whenever the hell they end up opening for business, that is. And however much frequent-flyer miles might possibly shave off a $100,000 ticket, which is how much flights on Virgin Galactic are going to cost their first year. Still, a great publicity stunt if nothing else; hey, it got me talking about it, right?

--Wow! Free software for creating and maintaining your own Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (or MMORPG, that acronym that just rolls so gracefully off the end of your tongue every time you use it), as detailed in this CNET article. The catch? It's from a startup that hopes they've come up with a way to compete with places like "Second Life" and "The Sims" for a lot less money - by creating dozens of smaller MMORPGs that all run on one shared user interface, not only allowing the serious gamer to only need one piece of software on their home computer versus a dozen, but also allowing certain game producers to let players hop back and forth between games using the same character. Of course, the startup doesn't have the resources to build and maintain all these MMORPGs themselves; as any serious gamer knows, popular MMORPGs require dozens of administrators, 24-hour vigilism, and sometimes just thousands of hours of pre-game prep. So instead, they've simply decided to release their software for free, let anyone who wants to create a MMORPG, host them all on one network, and keep a portion of all membership fees paid by gamers. They claim that doing such a thing will drop the pre-development costs of a professional MMORPG from millions to under $10,000, hopefully ushering in an age of gaming run by fans and other semi-amateurs; they also intriguingly add that this would be a great way for academic groups to run extended, highly quantifiable experiments in human behavior. Hmm, hmm, hmm!

--How to beat Google at their own game? Well, how about charging them money for all that information that up to now they've been mining for free? An intriguing editorial from the blog "bubblegeneration," on the tiny little cracks in Google's modus operandi, which may spell doom for them once everyone else starts catching on.

--There's a new user-created application out there for Gmail users - Gmail File Space (also known as Gspace), a desktop program that will turn your Gmail account into a file storage and retrieval system. And sure, there's actually been a number of these types of programs invented now; but Gspace is the first one to build a FTP-style interface into it, meaning that it is just as easy to interact with now as something like your desktop's Explorer. Drop me a line if you end up trying it out; I can't myself, of course, because I don't have internet access on my home desktop, but I'm really interested in knowing how well this works. (Thanks again to Lifehacker for pointing this out.)

--Hey, Adobe and Macromedia finally merged this week! But never mind that; the burning question for all us usability geeks, of course, is what went into merging the Adobe and Macromedia websites, in a way so that the merger was clear but that no old customers were lost. Head designer David Hatch reveals all at his blog.

--Donald Watson, the founder of veganism, died this week - and at the age of 95, too, which ain't too bad an endorsement for being a vegan. Blogger Sean Bonner reprinted the obituary of Watson this week, which provides many interesting tidbits about this surprisingly fascinating man. (Did you know, for example, that veganism has actually been around since 1944? Or that there are over a quarter-million vegans just in the UK alone? Neither did I!)

--Oh, what to do that with crappy old Palm III or m100, collecting dust in a desk drawer now that you have your fancy-schmancy Treo or LifeDrive? Well, how about turning it into a touchscreen for controlling various functions of your desktop computer? That's just what one industrious person did recently, in fact, as a way to control his Windows MP3 player without needing his keyboard or mouse at all. And lucky you, he posted the instructions online and everything! (Thanks to MAKE magazine for pointing this out.)

--Prodigy's for sale! And oh, so sad, no one wants to buy it! Oh how the mighty have fallen, I'm telling ya.

--Oh, and speaking of Virgin Galactic, the company also announced this week that they will be building their first spaceport in the state of New Mexico; and the New Mexico state government seems awfully damned excited about it all, too, mostly I think because they were really gunning for NASA to originally build their own spaceports there as well back in the 1950s, before they had made the decision to build in Texas and Florida instead. But I could be wrong about that.

--Well, it's official - the UK newspaper The Guardian now has a free branded feed reader for their customers. And this is something you're starting to see more and more among information-based companies, of course, which I think is just such an intriguing thing - the idea of taking an open-source technology like RSS and feed readers, then tweaking them so that they benefit your particular customers, hopefully inspiring more loyalty from your customers to the brand. For example, many of these branded feed readers will come with certain subscriptions already included, sometimes even in their own special window away from all the other subscriptions, that by their very definition their audience is specifically looking for. (A newspaper's branded feed reader, for example, would of course automatically contain all the feeds that paper publishes; while a feed reader sponsored by a sports team, on the other hand, might have subscriptions built in for easily following that team's news and game scores.) It's an intriguing concept to be sure, one that I imagine we're going to see a lot more of in the future; and in my opinion it's certainly a lot better way to do things than was done during the Dot-Com Years, when proprietary technology was king and keeping it secret from your competitors was of utmost importance. (Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing this out.)

--Big news from Sony; they've released the first digital SLR camera in history with a real-time image playback screen (or 'digital viewfinder,' if you want to call it that instead). And why is this such big news? Well, it gets a little technical, so stick with me.... See, there are basically two types of digital cameras, just like there are two types of popular film cameras anymore - compact, instamatic kinds, and what are called single-lens reflex cameras, those with the larger bodies and the external lenses that stick out from them. (There are of course double-lens non-reflex cameras as well, like those old-timey wooden contraptions with the bellows instead of a hard plastic lens; but these were pretty much made obsolete by the SLR so don't really figure into our conversations anymore.)

Compact digital cameras give you all kinds of great benefits - a battery that last ten times longer, automatic exposure, automatic focusing, and of course a camera you can slip in your pants pocket - but doesn't come with a light sensor on the inside that's very big, which is why pictures from your cellphone (for example) usually look pretty crappy. Digital SLRs, on the other hand, have a sensor that is usually five to ten times the size of a compact's - but requires so much battery juice that you can't have a digital viewfinder to go with it.

So, I guess Sony has been screwing around with their sensors and batteries, and have come up with a brand-new technology for putting it all together, that lets this extra-large sensor work while still having enough juice left over for a little videoscreen on the back as well. And so this means that for $1,000, you too can own a camera with all the benefits of a SLR (like manual depth-of-field selection, manual aperature settings and the like), while still getting real-time feedback about what you're about to shoot. And they even claim that the real-time image will adapt itself to reflect whatever f-stop or shutter exposure you've manually selected - wow, talk about getting rid of the nightmare which is the Zone System once and for all! (Sorry - geeky photographer in-joke.)

--And finally, from the "Timing Is Everything" department, via Gaper's Block: The same week Chicago enacted legislation for a vast city-wide smoking ban, the RJ Reynolds tobacco corporation opened the Marshall McGearty Tobacco Lounge - featuring $8 packs of custom-made high-end cigarettes, rolled right in the store in front of you, an on-premise professional tobacconist, a plush smoking lounge featuring leather furniture, and a cutting-edge air-filtration system. Say what you will about the tobacco industry, but I think we can all agree on this - they've got a lot of balls, man. (I have yet to find the actual address of the store, by the way, and the RJ Reynolds website won't load correctly on my mobile browser; if someone can find this info and send it to me, I promise to visit and to post a text and photo field report here as well.)

(Got something you'd like to see mentioned in The Heterotopia Report? Send it my way via ilikejason at hotmail dot com, although of course I can't guarantee it will appear. Yes, I also do reviews of creative products such as books, DVDs and software; please write to obtain my mailing address.)