Literacy (along with numeracy) is surely one of the most important staples for kids to be equipped with to prepare them to enter the adult world. But is the Web helping or hindering kids’ writing skills?

The majority of kids who are able to pick up reading and writing skills at a very young age without too much trouble. But there are an increasing number who are falling through the gaps in the system and leaving school not being able to spell or use grammar in even the most perfunctory manner.

The big question is whether technology in general, and the Web in particular is helping or hindering literacy levels.

According to BBC News, the National Literacy Trust firmly believes the former is true and that the Web is helping. The organization conducted a survey with 3,001 children aged between nine and 16 and from the results ascertained that those kids who regularly write on the Web are better writers, believe they’re better writers, and are more enthused by the art of writing as a result.

Of those surveyed, 24 percent had a blog, 73 percent used instant messaging services, and a whopping 82 percent sent text messages every month. The children who maintained their own blog or who owned a social networking profile rated themselves as much better writers than those who did neither of these activities.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, said:

Our research suggests a strong correlation between kids using technology and wider patterns of reading and writing. Engagement with online technology drives their enthusiasm for writing short stories, letters, song lyrics or diaries.

That may well be the case, and if so then it’s good news. However, I do wonder how much research has been done into the quality of this writing. Should what has come to be known as txt spk (or text speak) really count towards literacy levels? Because I fail to see the worth in teaching kids to read and write if they are going to use the language in such a way as to make it all but indecipherable to anyone over the age of 25

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Britain’s car industry may be struggling to set the world alight but the talent is clearly still there. And it’s now being utilized to develop a supercar designed to reach speeds in excess of 1,000mph (1,600kmh). The car is codenamed Bloodhound and it could break the land speed record and the 1,000mph barrier by 2011.

The British have a great track record of breaking the land speed record, having set the fastest time in a wheeled vehicle multiple times in the past 75 years. The record is currently held by Andy Green, a Wing Commander with the RAF. In 1997, he drove the Thrust SSC jet-powered vehicle to a mind-blowing 763mph (1,228kmh). But the Bloodhound could blow that record out of the water.

According to BBC News, the development team has now settled on a final design for the Bloodhound. And it looks to me like a cross between a jet fighter plane, a bobsleigh, and something from Speed Racer.

The project was actually launched in October 2008 but it’s taken until now for a final design to be settled on which can deliver the speeds wanted while remaining stable. This is especially important as Green will be strapped into the vehicle feet first and propelled to speeds only experienced by jet fighter pilots. So it’s a good job that’s what he does for a day job.

The Bloodhound unsurprisingly has some serious hardware under the hood. There is a 1000kg Eurofighter Typhoon jet engine, a 400kg rocket and a third engine designed purely to pump fuel through to the rocket. These combined will produce around 135,000 horsepower, or 180 Formula One cars.

The car will be built in Bristol’s docklands area with 2011 targeted for a land speed record attempt. This will take place on the Hakskeen Pan, Northern Cape Province in South Africa. The whole project is expected to cost around £15 million ($25 million). Sponsors include Lockheed Martin and Intel

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Carbon emissions and carbon footprints have been in the news a lot over the past few years. But while politicians and celebrities have taken up the cause of reducing these, it hasn’t really affected the individual, the ordinary man and woman on the street, yet. But the issue could soon be personalized in a very real way thanks to individual carbon rationing.It’s believed, though as yet not proved beyond doubt, that carbon emissions as created by humans, is having a detrimental effect on the health of the planet. And so we’ve all been asked to help lower CO2 emissions by using our cars less, saving electricity, etc. And that’s fair enough because none of these measures are exactly harsh and they may do some good.

However, what would be harsh, in my opinion, is giving everyone an individual carbon allowance which would be used up by car journeys, flights on commercial airlines, electricity and the like. Basically everything that all of us do on a daily basis.

But that is exactly what Lord Smith of Finsbury, the head of the Environment Agency in Britain, is proposing. According to The Times, every British citizen would be handed an allowance which would be used up as we generated carbon emissions through our actions. Should we use all our allowance up then we’d be expected to buy more credits – use less and make a profit.

I’d like to think this is the ramblings of a madman and unlikely to ever actually happen. But Lord Smith holds a powerful position and is genuinely proposing this become reality within 20 years as part of a ‘Green New Deal’. What’s brought this idea on is the challenge of getting Britain to cut its emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. Which unless something radical happens is really not feasible.

I think this is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard. It would basically impose a tax on those who can afford to heat and light their houses, take foreign holidays, and drive a car. As someone who only does the former maybe I should be all for this, but I’m not because this is another idea that stinks of Orwellian 1984-like policy which stamps out freedom. Only this time it’s the environment being used as the scapegoat

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Five years ago today, on November 9, 2004, Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0 and the Web browser has never looked back. In that five years Firefox has grown from an open source product for nerds and geeks to a mainstream product with 330 million users worldwide and a 20-25 percent market share. So, what does the future hold for Firefox?

Five years ago the Internet was a wildly different place than it is now. There was no YouTube, no Facebook and Twitter, no Blorge for that matter. The Web browser market was also very different. Q2 of 2004 saw Microsoft’s Internet Explorer hit its highest market share ever, with a whopping 95.04 percent of Web users sticking to the IE that came pre-installed with their PC.

By Q4 2004 that market share was dropping thanks to new competition in the form of Mozilla Firefox. The browser was initially an experimental offshoot of the Mozilla project which at the time consisted of a full suite of products including a mail client, a feed reader, and IRC client and a web page creator. It was an immediate success, with one million downloads in the first four days of its release.

Five years later and we’re now on Firefox 3.5.5. The look and feel of the browser have improved a great deal, and the 7,000 add-ons developed for Firefox have improved the usability factor and number of features an inordinate amount.

And yet, things aren’t all rosy. A report today suggests that Firefox now leads the browser pack for vulnerabilities, with 44 percent of all those reported hitting the Mozilla browser. And then there is the competition such as Safari, Opera, and Chrome. Google’s Chrome browser is a particular threat as it feels like the natural successor to those ready to move away from Firefox for whatever reason.

I’m sure Firefox will be around for another five years and be celebrating its 10th birthday on this day in 2014. However, Mozilla needs to really pull out all the stops in order to keep chipping away at Internet Explorer while also seeing off the challenge from Chrome. Oh, and fixing those vulnerabilities more quickly and efficiently wouldn’t hurt either

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Carbon emissions and carbon footprints have been in the news a lot over the past few years. But while politicians and celebrities have taken up the cause of reducing these, it hasn’t really affected the individual, the ordinary man and woman on the street, yet. But the issue could soon be personalized in a very real way thanks to individual carbon rationing.

It’s believed, though as yet not proved beyond doubt, that carbon emissions as created by humans, is having a detrimental effect on the health of the planet. And so we’ve all been asked to help lower CO2 emissions by using our cars less, saving electricity, etc. And that’s fair enough because none of these measures are exactly harsh and they may do some good.

However, what would be harsh, in my opinion, is giving everyone an individual carbon allowance which would be used up by car journeys, flights on commercial airlines, electricity and the like. Basically everything that all of us do on a daily basis.

But that is exactly what Lord Smith of Finsbury, the head of the Environment Agency in Britain, is proposing. According to The Times, every British citizen would be handed an allowance which would be used up as we generated carbon emissions through our actions. Should we use all our allowance up then we’d be expected to buy more credits – use less and make a profit.

I’d like to think this is the ramblings of a madman and unlikely to ever actually happen. But Lord Smith holds a powerful position and is genuinely proposing this become reality within 20 years as part of a ‘Green New Deal’. What’s brought this idea on is the challenge of getting Britain to cut its emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. Which unless something radical happens is really not feasible.

I think this is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard. It would basically impose a tax on those who can afford to heat and light their houses, take foreign holidays, and drive a car. As someone who only does the former maybe I should be all for this, but I’m not because this is another idea that stinks of Orwellian 1984-like policy which stamps out freedom. Only this time it’s the environment being used as the scapegoat

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Almost twenty years ago now, Gordon Murray conceived of and designed the McLaren F1 supercar. Only 106 were ever produced and it is one of the fastest production cars in the world, reaching a speed of 391 km/h in 1998. What has Gordon Murray done since production of the McLaren F1 ended in 1998? Why, he’s gone all green of course, and is preparing to unleash his T.27 electric car on the world over the next few years.

I guess it’s a measure of how important green technology is seen these days, especially when it comes to automobiles and vehicle design, that the man who created one of the greatest road cars in history has worked in this field ever since.

Murray has been working on the development of an affordable, electric, urban car for the past decade, fine-tuning his designs since 1999. At the end of 2008 Murray unveiled a petrol driven concept car called the T.25, which is what you can see the British Innovation Minister Lord Drayson taking for a spin in the picture above left.

But Murray and his Gordon Murray Design company are now working on the electric version of the vehicle, currently codenamed T.27. According to BBC News, three prototypes of the car will be developed over the next 16 months thanks to £9 million ($15 million) of investment, half coming from the government’s Technology Strategy Board and half from Zytek Automotive, the company developing the electric drive train.

Technical details of the T.27 are a little patchy at present but it’s thought to have a top speed of 60 mph and be able to travel approximately 100 miles on each charge of the battery. Importantly, it will also meet European safety standards.

Just as important as the car itself if the manufacturing process which Murray calls iStream. The manufacturing plants can be one-fifth the size of a conventional one due to the way each car is built. Rather than using stamped steel, each part is designed by computer and welded together.

Hopefully, the T.27 will be the absolute opposite of the McLaren F1 car, providing low-cost, green motoring for urban environments rather than grossly expensive, environment-killing driving purely for entertainment purposes. Sure, this kind of future will make Jeremy Clarkson’s job on Top Gear a lot harder but that’s a very small price to pay

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As if the e-reader market wasn’t already crowded enough, Creative is preparing its own entry in to the space.Creative, best known for its Sound Blaster computer sound cards, is preparing to enter the ever more crowded e-reader market according to Epizenter.Tentatively named MediaBook, the new e-reader was shown as running on the companies  Zii technology at an annual meeting and is said to feature a touchscreen, text-to-speech function and an SD memory card slot.   Where it gets a bit murky if this is more a tablet computer than an e-reader is that it is also supposed to feature Internet connectivity with support for services such as Facebook and Twitter.  (Are you listening TechCrunch?  You may want to get the CrunchPad in to the market ASAP)

Creative says that it is already in talks with several publishers, and that the MediaBook will be able to display normal books, newspapers, magazines and textbooks.

The new device is said to be at least partially supported by the government of Singapore as part of its FutureBooks initiative which would see traditional books being replaced by e-books in schools.  Essentially it sounds like Creative has gotten a government contract to aid in the development of this device, which could in turn lead to a lower cost for this device when it hits retailers.

Two big questions linger over the project at this time: Will it be sold in countries other than Singapore and what type of screen will it have?  The answer to the former seems like a given, but the latter is monumentally important.  Many pundits have said the barrier to an e-reader being accepted as a text book replacement hinges on it having a color screen for graphics, tables, charts, maps and so on.  If Creative is able to deliver with a full-color screen, it may not matter how late it is to the marketplace.

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Just a couple of decade ago, the only way to have a wealth of information available at your fingertips was to purchase a costly and bulky set of encyclopedias. These could take up a whole bookshelf and cost a month’s wages. Now, the Internet offers that wealth of information in the form of Wikipedia. And the WikiReader brings Wikipedia to your pocket for under $100.

The last two decades have brought us from the space-consuming print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, through the short-lived time of the CD and DVD editions, and onto the present day when the Web has opened up a whole world of knowledge. There are a number of online resources and encyclopedias vying for your patronage but probably the most well-known is Wikipedia.

Wikipedia isn’t without its problems: the open source, anyone-can-edit nature of the site means information isn’t always accurate; vandalism of articles is rife; and a Web connection is needed to access the huge database. Wikipedia is working on solving the first two issues and the release of the WikiReader solves the third.

The WikiReader is a device with one purpose (a rarity in these days when your cellphone is capable of doing almost anything). It exists in order to bring Wikipedia to a wider audience, making it an offline, in-your-pocket entity. And it does this simply, elegantly, and relatively cheaply.

The WikiReader is the size of a drinks coaster and can easily fit in your hand. It boasts a 3.5″ LCD touchscreen, and the capacity for 8GB of memory. It’s small, light, and is powered by two AAA batteries that will last an absolute age thanks to the low power consumption. And it contains the whole of the English-language version of Wikipedia, which currently amounts to 3.1 million articles.

The one obvious downside to the WikiReader is it contains only a snapshot of the Wikipedia database rather than a constantly-updating one. However, according to AP, OpenMoko, the Taiwanese company manufacturing and selling the device, will provide four free updates each year or a subscription service with a new filled memory card mailed out every three months.

Owners of laptops or smartphones permanently connected to the Internet may find the WikiReader pointless but there are plenty of people out there who could find it more than useful. The brilliant thing is this provides everything (and probably more) than you would get from a full set of printed encyclopedias but does so on a device that will fit in your pocket. Which I personally feel is genius.

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In 1999, when the Web was still merely a small part of some people’s lives rather than the behemoth it is today, GeoCities was the third most-visited Web site on the Internet. Today, Oct. 26, 2009, it is being killed off forever, not just decommissioned and archived but actually deleted from the Web altogether. R.I.P. GeoCities – you will be fondly remembered.I cannot remember the date or even year when I first had the pleasure of venturing. Although, in those days it was more of a chore than a pleasure in many ways. But I do remember is that GeoCities was one of those sites everyone knew of. It was a Google, Yahoo!, or YouTube of its day.

It was actually founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet before morphing into GeoCities. It was one of the first Web sites that offered ordinary Web users the chance of a piece of the action. In essence it offered everyone some Web real estate and the tools needed to populate it. And people did so in their droves, creating Web sites and blogs (of a sort) fitting all genres and niches.

At the height of the site’s popularity, and slap-bang in the middle of the dot-com era, Yahoo paid a whopping $3.65 billion for the site which then became Yahoo GeoCities. Two years later and the bubble burst. And out of the ashes came free hosting sites, proper blogging platforms, and social networks galore. Which all meant GeoCities’ time in the sun was pretty much over.

In April, Yahoo announced it was closing the site altogether, with new accounts no longer accepted from then and a date set for the complete dissolution of the site. That date is today, and GeoCities is no longer with us.

Thankfully, the Archive Team’s Geocities Project has been beavering away trying to archive as much of the site as possible before this day came. And although GeoCities and its passing will likely mean little to the majority of today’s Web community, for those of us who used it back when it was all that was available this day is a truly sad one.

I’m now wondering how much the Web will change in the next decade and which sites that are currently household names will be put to death.

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For something like half a year, Google has been both dropping hints and hurling hype about its new Wave product, which is now in beta and may still be as nebulous as it ever has been.

Invites have been fairly difficult to get (though we got one) and Google Wave is now in a good-sized beta state, with approximately 100,000 people signed up to participate. It has been hyped as many things, but it is still a little difficult to tell exactly where Google is going with this program. Wave has been hailed as everything from email on steroids to a collaborative computer-driven wonder to Google’s idea of a social networking and media site. Regardless of what it turns out to be in its final form, it is interesting to participate in the beta and watch it grow inch by mile by inch.

There are still a lot of primarily small flaws, but it is obvious that programmers are working to both fix little glitches and to add new features. Regardless, the times that it has worked as advertised have offered a tantalizing view of a new way to multi-communicate on the Web. If all that Google has promised comes true, they may have come up with a very interesting multitalented service, one which brings together several of the most popular features of the Web.

Yes, it does do email. Yes, it does act a bit like a forum. Yes, it allows you to collaborate with others on documents (when things are going well in the beta software). Yes, it allows you to do real-time IM within a Wave thread. Plus, it all runs in the cloud. And there is more to come, including promised extensions to make the Wave experience even more beneficial and significant. It’s a little rough just now, and we have no idea how it will perform when it comes out of beta and runs into a really heavy load. All that can be said now is that is has promise. Ask around among your online friends and see if you can wangle a Wave invitation. You might be surprised at what you find.

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