titles

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Larry Downes' bio below.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

In 1996, Congress passed the landmark Telecommunications Act. The last major reform of communications law, the 1996 act ended Judge Harold Greene's 10-year effort to run America's telecommunications industry from his judicial chambers after the forced breakup of AT&T.

Since then, consumers have lived in two very different worlds.

One is the land of unregulated "information services." It includes, among other innovations, the World Wide Web, voice over Internet Protocol … Read more

Adobe's Portable Document Format helped transform the business world and bring it onto the Internet and into the paperless age. Today many people use PDF files for everything ranging from important personal papers to service manuals for lawn mowers. If you use PDFs a lot, you'll like PDF Summary Maker from Traction Software. It's a PDF file management tool that lets you change the summary information in one or many PDF files all at once. You can change the creator, creation date, producer, author, title, and keyword fields within your documents. It includes full database import and … Read more

Actual Title Buttons aims to help users shuffle through their open windows. With a subtle interface and effective results, the only question is whether it actually improves upon Windows' own window management features.

Users may not notice this program immediately since it embeds itself in all open windows along the upper right corner where commands for closing, minimizing, and expanding a window normally hide. This program mimics those icons, but offers several more choices. Holding the cursor over each box easily reveals its function and should soon become intuitive to users after trying them out. While the program features a … Read more

Occasionally you find a program that isn't essential, but you find ways to use it just because it makes you smile. Title Bar Changer Studio has a few serious uses, but it is worth it just for the surprise factor. The dialog-size interface includes numerous tools simply designed to alter the text on program title bars. It's so easy to use, there's no need for the usual Help file. Function button labels include all the direction most will need.

Operation is a mere matter of choosing a listed open application title, typing in new text, and pressing … Read more

There is usually a moment in each podcast that defines the title that is created for every episode of BOL. Get ready to hear them all, played in sequential order.

BearFlix roars out of the cave with swarming, hashing, fast downloads and a video player, but hibernates when confronted with proxies.

BearFlix almost configures itself, and its toolbar and icon interface is geared toward novices. (Configuration options help advanced users suit the program to taste.) Based on the popular BearShare, and connected to the Gnutella network, this utility is optimized for video files. Simply enter a search term, and find files immediately. As with all P2P networks, there's no guarantee the files are available, accurately named, or virus-free. However, BearFlix's file-rating option helps users self-police spam off the … Read more

Web site owners might be amazed to learn that one of the biggest sources for duplicate content isn't externally, but rather internally.

Certainly, popular sites and blogs that syndicate a lot of content have to deal with external duplication, but as I already touched on external duplicate content, we know that there are steps to minimize those challenges and to establish your site as the canonical source.

Internal, or on-site, content duplication tends to come in a few key ways, the first of which is within the key page elements. The second is from the content itself; similar to e-commerce sites using stock product copy, you may be using your own copy over and over again on your site. Third, it simply may come from too little differentiated copy.… Read more

Without video games, many of us would have lives, children and permanent jobs.

They're terrific ways to forget that in real-life, like gardens, commitments require regular attention. They can't all be glorious, action-packed tours de force, however -- many video games are nothing more than half-baked rejects, the 'D' students of the electronic world.

But these particular 30 dunces weren't merely bad -- they were never given a chance at success because they suffered epic fails from the moment their titles were conceived. A truly abysmal name might strangle a game's chances, but its prime chuckle … Read more