Hi, everyone. The lack of updates on the site lately has been apparent to anyone who’s followed it from the beginning. There are several reasons for it.

First, I’ve devoted most of my energy to writing on Mashable. This blog, FranticIndustries, has become a vehicle for some web and technology related issues that are either very niche, or somewhat personal. Unfortunately, my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts are often good enough for these purposes, and thus this blog rarely gets updated.

All in all, I don’t think that anyone who follows and likes my writing has lost anything; it’s just not concentrated on this blog alone. I’ll see where I will take it from here when I get back from my summer vacation, which is the most important time of year for me: time when I go dark (very little internet and technology), time when I charge my battery and read some good sci-fi from real, paper books for a couple of weeks.

I hope you all have a nice summer; I won’t be posting anything until September, except perhaps an occasional tweet. Till then, bye.

Hey, folks. I know my writing here has been a bit sporadic lately, but it’s mostly because I’ve been writing posts like these for Mashable. It’s so long that one might convert it to PDF and proclaim it an e-book *cough* Seth Godin *cough*, but I’ve refrained myself from it - this time.

Together with the secret to life, universe and everything, I’ve discovered that Twitter outages have been starting points for the most interesting discussions in the last couple of months. Perhaps we should pray for more?

I’m checking out Time’s list of 50 best websites of 2008 and I don’t get it. Sure, these are all nice sites, but I fail to find any criteria upon which this list is based.

A quick skim through the list reveals very different types of sites and services. Hulu is there, which means that the list isn’t global, since Hulu doesn’t work outside of the US. TinyURL isn’t really a destination site which you’re going to visit often; it’s a service you’re going to use through a bookmarklet. I’m glad that PixelGirl Presents, a long-time favorite of mine, got a mention, but that site hasn’t changed in years; why is 2008 the year when PixelGirl Presents deserves to be in the top 50?

In short, the list is a totally random assortment of interesting websites. Which is not that bad in itself, but I think that Time should try harder to establish some criteria for lists such as this, if it wants to stay more relevant than the next “I’m gonna make a big list, hit Digg, and go away rich” blog.

If the standard way of watching Google Maps is boring you to death, a game in which you can drive several different vehicles all around the map might be a welcome refreshment.

The game, developed by Geoquake, is based on Google Maps API for Flash, which enables it to run at smooth 40 FPS (as always, it didn’t run smooth for me at all, but that’s probably just my bad luck).

Don’t expect hours of gameplay with this one, though: it’s just a simple display of what can be done with an API. You can choose between 4 vehicles and control them with the mouse or the arrow keys, but the fact that you don’t have to stick to the road and can drive over buildings somewhat kills the joy.

Usually, mashups and innovative, alternative GUIs for popular websites are slow and mostly unusable, but Tag Galaxy breaks that habit with being really functional, as well as being really, really cool.

Type in a tag - any word, really - into Tag Galaxy, and you’ll get a small solar system of related tags, with more relevant tags being the inner planets, their orbit decreasing with relevance. It’s a cute little 3D tag world, but what makes it so cool is how responsive and fast it is; for example, you can click and drag for rotation, or use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Click a tag, then click another tag, and you’ll get results for both tags combined.

Half of the fun is in discovering what this tool can do, so I’ll leave the rest of the exploration to you. Be warned, though: it’s addictive.

Twitter, the US-based microblogging service that lets you share your heart and mind with the world in 140 characters or less, is not down. I repeat, Twitter is actually working as originally intended.

For the uninitiated, who are used to Twitter in its regular mode, which is a big sign saying that something is wrong, here’s what it means: the form you see at the very top of your page is for posting messages, while the messages below are from your friends. We know, we know; it’s not as fun as the big sign, but life’s a bitch. For those adventurous enough to try it out, be fast, for we all know that this will not last very long.

I’m just kidding, it’s not fully up yet. Seriously, Twitter, take those servers apart and rebuild them from scratch if needed. This can’t go on forever.

Remember my first article on Spotplex? And the second one? Well, unfortunately, they didn’t wake up: Spotplex is offline and I doubt it’s ever coming back.

This is also a wake-up call for anyone that thinks that getting a wildly positive review on Techcrunch is enough to reach stardom. Spotplex, simply, had done many things wrong, and they definitely weren’t the next Digg; they had a chance and the spotlight for a while, but it wasn’t enough to catch on. Better luck next time, folks.

Ultraedit, Notepad, Joe, Textpad: all those editors are created for people who can’t handle Vi. Give it to a normal user, and you can bet that there’s absolutely no way they’re going to find its functions by simply using trial and error. A diehard Vi fan, however, will rather die than admit that Vi is not the best text editor ever created.

I don’t plan to take sides here, since I don’t want to be abducted and interrogated in an old warehouse by a bunch of Vi fanatics; instead, I’ll merely point to jsvi, an online, Javascript version of Vi.

jsvi is actually rather old, but DownloadSquad just dug it out from somewhere; I haven’t seen it before, and hopefully you haven’t either, so there you go.

I did not expect Microsoft to withdraw the offer, but that’s what they did. I’m relieved that the first season of this soap opera is at an end, as I was getting bored out of my mind with all the speculations regarding the issue. But, I’m afraid that the story simply cannot end now.

Microsoft gave up, but they have another business (actually, a multitude of them) to run. They will probably try to buy themselves a different big entrance into the online ad business, although their options aren’t that great.

It will be interesting, however, to see what Yahoo does next. Having been drawn into this mess against their will, they were forced to do a lot of decisions they normally wouldn’t have done. They also explored almost all viable merger/acquisition/partnership options they have. Will they just go back to business as usual, or will they act on any of it? For example, what happens with the Google ad deal, which was - according to both companies - going so well in its testing phase? Will they just pretend it never happened?

Oh no, this cannot end now. Microsoft has ruffled too many feathers with this one, and now both companies need to do something about it, unless they want to sit at the same table in two years, negotiating the same deal under even worse circumstances for both of them. Interesting times are ahead.

The answer: this. Marc Andreessen is not in it for the money; he’s not trying to be a journalist, and he certainly doesn’t care about posting frequency too much. But, he knows a lot about certain topics (in this case, he gives a very thorough MSFT-YHOO analysis, a must-read if you’re interested in the subject) and he writes about them with ease and authority that very few journalists can hope to achieve.

What’s the secret? It’s simple: a good blog is a guy/girl writing about a topic he/she knows a lot about. The value of such a blog is in the fact that no general-purpose (or even specialized) journalist can come close to the level of knowledge, depth and passion a blogger can reach. Of course, not all bloggers are that good; in fact, most aren’t. But if you want an example of a really, really good blog, in the purest sense of the word, you’ve got one right here.

In a sense, a good blog relates to a bigger media publication in a similar way as a small, specialized IT magazine relates to a daily - it doesn’t cover everything, but it focuses on a specific audience and goes much more in-depth. Good blogs usually deal with their topics with fanatical attention to detail, and that’s what makes them interesting. Pick a topic - any topic, however narrow - and there’s a blogger out there covering all aspects of it.

There’s also the question of what category a blog should fall into - is it a commercial site which earns money from ad revenue, just like any magazine, or must it stay a non-profit affair, with the blogger offering his/her content freely and forgetting about making any money off it? I say: if the blog is great, who cares? I remember a recent article by Louis Gray who says that most bloggers don’t deserve any ad revenue. I agree with some of his points, but some of his economic logic is flawed. If I were an advertiser with a $10.000 budget, I’d rather have my ad shown on 100 small blogs than once on NYTimes. In this sense, bloggers - good ones - deserve not only respect for going deeper than anyone else, but they also deserve some ad revenue.

What Louis aims at, though, although he’s not quite clear about it, are the blogs written by people who don’t have anything to say. I agree: there’s a lot of those, and they all suck. But keep an eye on the ones that are good; they’re definitely worth your time, if you’re a reader, and money, if you’re an advertiser.

The debate on whether printed newspapers and magazines are going to die out or not comes up fairly often. I’m not going to into pro or con mode right now, but I will share a thought that comes to me every time I write an article for a paper mag (I do, now less than before, write for Croatia’s leading IT magazine Bug).

I’ve written thousands of articles (most not in English, mind you) for paper media in the 6 years I’m in this business, and frankly, it feels like wasted time. Unless you’re an avid collector of these magazines, which most people aren’t these days, you can’t read these articles anymore. They’re lost in dusty basements, and forgotten archives, and most of them are - for all practical purposes - non existant.

By contrast, the stuff I’ve written on this blog, however casual, is available for everyone to read, indexed by search engines, saved on social media sites such as Digg and Delicious, linked to by other blogs - in short, it’s there.

And I won’t even go into the financial implications; the articles that went out in print, well, I got paid for them once, and that was it. With the small amount of advertising I have on this blog, my old thoughts are still making me money. We’re not talking huge amounts of money here, but it’s enough for all my monthly coffee needs. Whenever I drink coffee, from now to forever, it’s been paid by this blog.

It’s funny that many of my colleagues and business associates still value the stuff I’ve done for print mags more than the stuff I’ve written online. Many of them don’t even know I have a blog. Little do they know that in fact, if I had started, 6 years ago, to spend my energy entirely on my online endeavors, I’d probably have done better for myself.

I still love print magazines, I always did. I love having that shiny copy of Wired in my hands, even though it’s 90% ads and 10% articles. Today, most printed publications also archive most, if not all, of their stuff online. But let’s face it; today, if it’s not online, it’s dead. Print is just an afterthought, and - unless we see some real breakthroughs in e-paper soon - I expect most of it to fall into the same category as vinyl records and wrist watches; a bit of cool, a dash of retro, a pinch of exclusivity, but not really a necessity.

Back in the day I wrote a review of online photo editors, and my biggest concern with all of them was the lack of some web-oriented options, most notably Photoshop’s brilliant ability to have an image resized and scaled to a certain (exact) size while cropping. It’s an extremely valuable option if you’re working for the web, where you usually need a photo in a certain size (on this site, I usually want photos that are 490 pixel wide).

A friend just told me that one of the best photo editors out there, Picnik, has added a lot of new features. I went to take a look, and lo and behold, Picnik now has the aforementioned option! Now, it definitely gets my recommendation as an online photo editor; if you haven’t, try it out.