Do you think that this is just a little bit derivative, in name and format (requires flash)?

I still get amazed by the ends that people put technology to. I just looked up the forum on UpMyStreet.com for my local area, and found that someone had started a fight (of the cyber variety, with plenty of humour).

Edited highlights:

"BIFF! Take that you bounder!"

"Fine words butter no parsnips, Sir!"

"*bitch slaps* All of you x"

Guess someone's (or a few someones) in my neighbourhood tend to get a bit bored at work then.

The selling points noted on the back of a Spanish phrasebook that I bought earlier this afternoon make sly reference to the intended audience:

"This phrasebook makes a great sangria coaster and provides some protection while sunbathing. Opening it reveals a whole world of other possibilities"

On another note, it's been a lazy bank holiday weekend, the last that I'll be enjoying in the UK. The packers are coming next Monday, and we're at the stage of scratching our heads, wondering what obvious things that we've forgotten to organise before our departure.

Now for the techy stuff...

Many of the currently available mobile phone handsets support WAP, that protocol which was supposed to revolutionise our lives by giving us access to the Internet wherever we happened to be.
After much dot.com era hype and pre-publicity, WAP turned out to be, in the most part, slow, unwieldy, tedious, and limited, in that much of the content of a web page could not be rendered on the small screen of the mobile phone.
What did appear on one's phone screen was often hard to read, if not often incomprehensible because the page information was presented out of context, due to missing attendant graphics and because the information was stripped out of the tables which gave it meaningful structure.
So, as a result many people have given up on WAP, and it's doubtful whether users of the newer mobile phones seldom if ever make us of it.

This is a shame, as there are some good uses that WAP can be put to. Because of the limitations mentioned above WAP is most suited to browsing web pages which have simple formatting with text-based content, and where any dynamic content is near the top of the page, allowing users to quickly view the modifications since the last time they visited the page, rather than having to scroll through a large number of screens (WAP browsers only return part of a web page at a time, resulting in the user having to view a series of WAP screens when viewing a single web page, typically waiting 5-10 seconds for each WAP screen to be displayed).

It turns out that there is a large community of people using the internet to create pages which have exactly this type of structure, as weblogs (of which this page is one example) are largely text-based (fast download), simply structured (no tables or graphics, the absence of which, when stripped out by WAP browsers, render the page content hard to decipher), and have recent content typically added to the top of the page.

Weblogs also often link to other weblogs, which means that the WAP user is able to browse related threads easily and quickly.
However, weblogs have not usually been setup in WAP-accessible format (a special type of markup language is employed, similar but different to HTML, which is used to encode standard web pages), therefore they cannot be directly browsed by standard WAP browsers.
This turns out to be not a problem when a WAP gateway is used. Simpler to use than it sounds when described, a WAP gateway intermediates, processing the request for the web page, and changing the HTML content to WAP content, and returning this to the user.
So, instead of directly trying to access the weblog website with your web browser, one visits WAP-enabled search engine, and enters the address of the web page if known, or searches for it if the address is unknown.

As it happens, Google is one search engine that supports WAP browsing. On my mobile phone Google was pre-entered as a WAP bookmark when I got the phone, but can be reached by inputting the address (www.google.com/wml).
From the Google search page I select "Search Options" and then "Go to URL" and enter the address of the blog web page that I want to visit (in the case of this page, it is twoducks.blogspot.com). Google returns the web page, converted into WAP format. I'm able to read the recent entries at the top of the page, and follow the links to other pages.
Also (which is very handy), I'm able to add this page to my bookmarks. In future, when I want to see the new entries on this weblog, I can choose this bookmark and be taken straight there, without even thinking about Google's involvement.

I've added the weblogs that I follow on a regular basis to my WAP bookmarks, and find it very handy when traveling to visit these pages via my mobile phone and find out what interesting events have been going on with the people who maintain these sites.

And it's not only weblogs that are suitable for WAP browsing - there's also a wealth of text-based websites out there that have been simply formatted for viewing on PDAs (i.e. Palms and Pocket PCs). In my case, I tend to catch up on the news stories on the excellent Guardian site (www.guardian.co.uk/avantgo).

Unbelievable! I still feel close enough to my student years that I'm wary of knocking students without due cause, but in this case someone's having a laugh. Not only do these lucky suckers get iPods to "help with their coursework", it turns out that the course is "Gothic Imagination" - so what exactly is that when it's at home?