h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've been elsewhere in Cyberspace these last few weeks.

Fame has come my way in some small part, as a travelogue which I wrote for Whispers - one of the web's top online magazines - has picked up the Whispers Readers Choice Award for January 2000. It feels like a great achievement and I am deeply honoured. I wrote the 3600 word travelogue in less than 24 hours, mostly during the night, and added 20 images from the travelogue on my website. Maybe I should consider being a freelance travel writer.

I discovered that somebody registered earthdweller.com just after Christmas so I am working hard on my website's branding to protect the image that I have created. I have the EARTHDWELLER TRAVELOGUE AWARDS and EARTHDWELLER TRAVELOGUE DIRECTORY due to start in the next few days and I don't want somebody else creating a brand which is in competition to what I am doing and using the same name. It is good in that it is helping me to focus on what I want to do with my EARTHDWELLER site and the brand that I am building, but I am also having to move quickly to protect my interests. I am having a similar problem with my community site as somebody has registered a similar name and their M.O. seems to be to link to other people's hard work rather than creating their own content and once again I feel the need to protect my interests. It is one of those problems about the WWW which has not been addressed yet, but the need to protect intellectual property on the Web is becoming very serious. I was recently in a lecture where the lecturer was asked about copyright on the Internet, and he said there is no copyright on the Internet, and at the same time I know he is very hot on plagiarism from books. If academics do not recognise that copyright exists in all material on the Internet then we have a serious problem.

I discovered recently that 8.5% of men have defective colour vision and that the defects vary widely. I am now tackling the whole area of accessibility in relation to my websites - I had no idea that up to 8.5% of men couldn't actually distinguish some of the text highlights on my site from the background colour, or that browsers for the visually impaired sometimes isolate links from their context in to a separate list, so I now need to revisit my site navigation and how I actually word the links. A document which deals with some of the issues can be found on the W3C website.

That's all for now. I'll drop by again in a few weeks time and let you know what's happening in my little corner of our planet.