Been quiet here as I’ve been busy with the post-mortem of the Ontario Science Centre’s launch. One day there'll be an article about the differences between pushing out a corporate site and a media site. Over this past week or so there’s been a lot of very interesting sites, articles, and issues which have caught my eye, many of which are listed below for your enjoyment:

• Smart Tags: actually, I’m not even going to wade into this one other than to say putting <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true"> in your markup will stop Smart Tags from appearing on your site.
  • Related the new IE6 (oddly called Public Preview - Refresh), which has the Smart Tags, also has excellent privacy support and cookie control.
  • Just prior to posting this, I learned Microsoft plans to share release essentially an open-source version its .NET infrastructure.
• The Smart Tags debate raised the issue of control over content, and in the U.S. this issue just became that much clearer. The Supreme Court ruled that freelancers — surprise, surprise — do own their work. An unfortunate side effect of this is some publishers have begun dismantling their archives rather than pay the writers. Meanwhile, Canada’s own version, Robertson vs. Thomson, is still winding its way through the courts.
• A good Web-series by Salon called “Assimilating the Web” about the independents’ struggle to survive (Feed and Suck being prime examples) in the face of growing media concentration.
• Speaking of which:
  • CNBC and Microsoft’s MoneyCentral have merged to form a new financial MSN-based product called…CNBC MoneyCentral,
  • and the much anticipated creation of Bell Globemedia folds Sympatico-Lycos, globeandmail.com, globeinvestor.com, globemegawheels.com, robtv.com, CTVNEWS.com, tsn.ca, workopolis.com, exn.ca, and a number of city portals (like toronto.com) into one giant umbrella called…Bell Globemedia Interactive.
    Canadian New Media Awards’ Internet Pioneer for 2000 and former globe*.com chief Lib Gibson is running the operation (reportedly, after the former CEO left employees were given the “your work is valued” speech to quell layoff concerns).
• For more media gossip, I found iwantmedia.com, a U.S. site that gathers media-related headlines and facts from around the Web. They’ve got a sobering list of media layoffs, which is a nice compliment to the Industry Standard’s all-powerful layoff tracker.
• Finally, a little article for the copy-editors, fact checkers, and those who insist writing HTML is “programming.”