I was, err, honored to be advised today JonathanFren.com has been awarded a Webby Honoree for the 2008 Personal Website category.

“Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video, and Mobile Websites. The awards are judged by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, a global organization that includes David Bowie, Harvey Weinstein, Arianna Huffington, AKQA Global Creative Director Rei Inamoto, Matt Groening, Jamie Oliver, Internet inventor Vinton Cerf, and RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser.”

More about the Webby’s here.

Sue Jenkins talks about MarkupNow on her blog.Sue runs a creative firm, Luckychair, and has written and contributed to several HTML, design and Dreamweaver books, including Dreamweaver 8 for Dummies, Dreamweaver for designers and Web design express line to learning.

Way to go for sticking it to Myspace - Fuser, a company who’s main product is an online email account [and more] aggregator, has released a Facebook app that brings in your Myspace comments, messages and bulletins. I’m betting MySpace isn’t gonna be too happy about this, and the issue these apps. is it’s too easy for MySpace to just block access. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s a great idea.

Mashable has more..

Ok, well you don’t *need* to yet, but Google is rolling out a new tracking code, which will replace the long-lived urchin.js script, to a new, lighter, more customizable ga.js script.

The new code will let you benefit from a bunch of new features now, and in the future, as they won’t be rolling out any new features to sites using the current tracking code. The current code will continue to function for at least a year from the time they release ga.js.

Among the immediate features are a bunch of customization options to the script, such as cross-domain tracking, file download tracking, better e-commerce tracking and better virtual page tracking as well as automatic HTTPS detection, and a smaller, faster loading source file.

All you need to do is change this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js"
type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    _uacct = "UA-12345-1“;
    urchinTracker();
</script>

to:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ?
  "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
  document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost +
  "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
   var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1“);
   pageTracker._initData();
   pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Obviously changing the red tracking number to your own.

Google has a more detailed integration guide, with info on how you can customize this code further for different uses here.

Important! Don’t use ga.js and urchin.js on the same page. They won’t work.

Digg just released a new photo application to Digg Labs for visualizing photos added to it’s new photos section announced last week. See the application here.

Ahh. Finally it looks like Internet Explorer will follow the rules. The folks at Microsoft have been working hard (well, they’re probably trying to reduce the pain), and they now pass the infamous ACID2 test (you would see a smiley face on the second link if your browser passes), which even the current version of Firefox can’t claim.

Microsoft’s channel 9 has more, including a video with IE’s GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson. Oh yeh, but you need silverlight to watch it. Doh.

Anyway, congrats to the IE team, and keep working hard at it. This is good news for both developers and users (which latest figures show are anything from 30% to 90% of web users).

Photo credit: Ben Crowder

Nanosolar, a valley startup has started shipping solar panels priced at $1/watt. That means nothing to me, but apparently it’s pretty darn cheap as far as watt prices go.

I don’t know anything about this market, but it even sounds good to me. Especially when you consider IBM’s top manufacturing exec has joined them, they have $100m funding and already have orders to keep them at capacity for 18 months.

The company has more info here..

I often get asked about what’s best e.t.c. when it comes to technology products, and cameras is one of the most difficult items to choose. Recently I’ve seen a few friends getting totally ripped off on camera purchases, spending a ton of money on a bad photo-taking brick, and I hate to see that happen. There’s plenty of good cameras out there, and more expensive isn’t always better.

So here are my current hot picks for various budgets, and they’re all good cameras. This isn’t intended to be a big list, more a hand-picked selection of the best. (more…)

Heathrow Airport will soon get the world’s first driverless personal rapid transport (PRD) system. Sounds cool.

They’ll be on-demand, with no no timetables, no emissions and no rails. They can technically be programmed to go to any destination, with touch-screens inside each pod to choose the destination. 18 of these pods will ferry you at up to 25mph to & from the business car park to the new terminal 5 building currently being built. It’s already under construction and should be completed in less than two years, at a cost of £25M.

According to the people implementing this, ATS from Bristol, the maximum wait time is only 12 seconds. Whats more, vehicles will have their own dedicated paths, with no congestion and no traffic lights, so they’re promising a non-stop journey. Sounds awesome.

uTest has reaised $1.7m for it’s croud-sourced QA service, which is expected to launch in early 2008. It’s very oDesk’y, and if they pull it off, with the right testers, I can see it becoming popular within it’s niche market, which will likely mostly be web and software firms.

QA is something that is better done by people other than the team who built the application or website, and because in most cases there are little privacy/legal issues with outsourcing this element of a development project, it’s a popular option.

I’d still like to play with it before deciding whether I like it, especially how it covers the different levels of QA. E.g. I kinda doubt they’ll have a group of novice web users to test usability issues, I feel it’ll more be the Elance or oDesk crowd. But if they can do the former, great. Pricing will also be interesting to see. I’d like to see different depths of testing, say for 500 “general surfers” or one or two in-depth pro reports e.t.c.

Thanks to Roi Carthy @ TechCrunch