Jessica Zenner, an employee of Parker Services (a technical recruitment contractor for Nintendo) was fired on the 31st of August by her employer following concerns expressed by Nintendo about posts on her blog “Inexcusable Behavior“.

On the blog, where she talks about herself, her friends and co-workers (none of whom are mentioned by name), Zenner used the identity “Jessica Carr” but did not explicitly refer to her employers. The entries leading up to the firing have since been removed from the site, and there have been many requests to have the archives restored (one of the original posts is quoted at techdigest.tv).

A comment on her blog by Orin O’Neill is extremely critical of Nintendo and the move:

Having survived five years at Nintendo, and having looked at your blog, while I could see no reason for them to fire you because of the blog, I’m not surprised because Nintendo is a top-heavy, bureaucratic organization populated by humorless, grumpy old geezers. That it remains in business is truly remarkable, especially given how completely out of touch it seemed to be with the market it was trying to reach.

The firing follows on from the recent dismissal of Paris-based Catherine Sanderson, AKA “La Petite Anglaise“, from accountancy firm Dixon Wilson for “gross misconduct”.

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Sun has launched a social (and organisational) networking service called OpenEco.org, which is aimed at helping companies and organisations to improve their environmental footprint through best practice sharing.

The site was launched at a New York event attended by members of the Carbon Disclosure Project, and a presentation was given by former US President Bill Clinton.

Normally, organisations must calculate their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with custom or proprietary tools, requiring significant internal resources or external consultancy. Now, GHG data can be created and shared using OpenEco.org‘s “free, open and secure online tools for visualizing and managing carbon footprints”, enabling organisations to benchmark against each other, to set achievable footprint reduction goals, and to share best practices to reach these goals.

Dave Douglas, Sun’s vice-president for eco-responsibility, linked Sun’s history of community building with the new social networking service:

Working together drives progress faster than working alone. Sun was built on the philosophy of openness and building communities to solve problems, which we’re now applying to the environment. When we share, sustainable business can be more attainable – and prosperous – for everyone.

Developers at Intel Corporation‘s research lab at Berkeley have created the Mash Maker extension for Firefox.

The blog post about Mash Maker says that the extension enables mashups to become part of your normal browsing experience – the aim being that mashups can be used by anyone, not just techies. The Mash Maker toolbar displays buttons representing appropriate mashups (from a shared community database) that the service thinks you might want to apply to your current page. Clicking on one of these buttons then applies that mashup to your page.

From the product overview page:

Intel Mash Maker is an extension to your existing web browser that allows you to easily augment the page that you are currently browsing with information from other websites. As you browse the web, the Mash Maker toolbar suggests Mashups that it can apply to the current page in order to make it more useful for you. For example: plot all items on a map, or display the leg room for all flights.

Intel Mash Maker learns from the wisdom of the community. Any user can teach Mash Maker new mashups, using a simple copy and paste interface, and once one user has taught Mash Maker a mashup, this mashup will be automatically suggested to other users. Intel Mash Maker also relies on the community to teach it about the structure and semantics of web pages, using a built in structure editor.

You can view a demonstration of Mash Maker at the Intel Developer Forum on YouTube, as given by the project lead Rob Ennals.

Edit: Some videos with usage examples are available here.

Two articles about two different technologies both bearing the name Atom caught my attention recently.

The first was a blog entry on the 24th of July by Tim Bray on the approval of the Atom Publishing Protocol as an RFC standard by the IETF’s Internet Engineering Steering Group. You may already be familiar with the Atom Syndication Format, which is an XML format similar to RSS commonly used for syndicating web feeds (e.g., from Blogger.com). The Atom Publishing Protocol (APP or AtomPub for short) is related to this, being a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and modifying web resources, and the specification was edited by Joe Gregorio and Bill de hÓra.

The second (unrelated) technology is called the Atom Interface from DERI, and presents an interesting approach to visualise and navigate through tree structures and graphs. The name was chosen as it is based on the metaphor of electrons, atoms and molecules. There is a interesting demonstration of the Atom Interface on YouTube. It uses a “compact radial layout” to organise items around their parents in a circular fashion within a single atom. Although radial layouts and menus are not a new idea and have been around for some years (e.g., Maya’s marking menus, Mozilla’s RadialContext pie menus, Neverwinter Nights’ radial menu), the Atom Interface is novel in that: “(i) it is focused more towards exploring and browsing small and large trees by collapsing/uncollapsing paradigm (as opposite to visualizing the overview of the entire tree or graph), (ii) is more compact in order to emphasize relationships and ease learning and understanding the structure, (iii) preserves full context”. I can imagine this being very useful for visualising one’s bookmarks and tag hierachies, and for navigating the connections to other users’ content (via their atoms).