Dave Winer: “I’m old school. I think the cool thing about weblogs is that they are not discussion groups or mail lists.” What if comments links took you through a wizard that created a weblog for the comment if you didn’t have a weblog. If you did have a weblog then a system that posted remote comments to your weblog with a trackback ping. The latter is easier said than done.

Ben Hammersley.com: Trackback in the saddle again

Macromedia Adds Flash to PowerPoint. This allows you to convert Powerpoint presentations into Flash. If you run a browser in kiosk mode, as in the previous post, create your entire presentation in Flash, with a browser as the container. Powerpoint has always struck me as the worst of Microsoft’s products, sold for money when it looks like bad shareware. Powerpoint is responsible for a generation of bad graphic design, it almost conspires to produce hideous, cheap looking, presentations with drop-shadowed times roman on blue-blend backgrounds. I loved the apocryphal tale of it being banned at Lotus.

Doc Searls links to a piece by Derek Miller who questions the need to use presentation software like Powerpoint or Keynote at all, just use HTML pages, its the message that matters. Here is a tip if you want to do this with Internet Eplorer on Windows. Locate the executable file for Explorer (IEXPLORE.EXE not a desktop shortcut), create a shortcut and add a -k flag to the target properties (e.g. “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE” -k). This will run your browser full screen without chrome, as designed for use in kiosks, ideal for presentations. Ctrl W to shut it down. Derek K. Miller, penmachine.com

Enterprise hosting may be a losing business these days, with a shrinking market and huge over capacity in terms of bandwidth and space. However, lower prices mean that personal managed servers are a reality. The new service below starts at $99 per month: Rackspace founder launches new company offering personal dedicated servers A package with installed weblog software would be a suitable service for emerging business weblogs like Gizmodo. Imagine an entire content management software system, Linux on Intel hardware platform, rackspace, uptime guarantees and burstable bandwidth for $100 or so per month. Compare this with what publishers were spending a couple of years ago with Vignette driven systems on expensive Sun servers hosted at Exodus. As an example of the market for Sun hardware, check Ebay. Not that long ago this would have cost you several tens of thousands of dollars. Current bid, around $500 – it will probably…