Mario Klingemann has made a cool Flash frontend to show where you are.

Pretty nifty huh - just in case you are somewhere in the world, with your laptop, and don't have a clue where you are located. :-)

Its based on a PHP backend that checks your IP address against the NetGeo database to get your location data, and then plot it on a map. Seems to work fairly well. At least it said that I am in Oslo, Norway - which is right.

I did a little research, and found a cool little PHP script that used GD/CSS to show the same kind of data, not as cool a frontend - but might be something to look at if you are interested in such things: IP-Atlas

Robert Hall writes about W3Cs Speech Recognition Grammar Specification which today advanced to "Candidate Recommendation".

The standard itself is intersting enough, especially if all the vendors that have their own proporitary formats would at least add support for it.

Robert has been working with speech for a while (see previous posting about his speaking blog). I have a strong feeling that speech recognition software coupled with speech synthesis and interesting programming should make for some interesting web experiences in the future. (Wired had an article about the adult aspects of speech recognition earlier this week).

Check out Roberts insight into speech recognition, he seems to know exactly what is going on.

Mark Pilgrim (dive into mark) is writing up a whole month of good tips on how to make your weblog more accessible.

Its really a usability exercise - and most of what he is talking about can easily apply to all other forms of web sites too.

I've already implemented a few of his tips. They are probably not obvious to the regular IE-browser-user but to others its hopefully of help. With weblogs most of us are already using template based systems - so taking the time to implement features that helps just a few procent of your visitors is fast and easy - and if you have a few visitors a year - that will quickly add up to at least a hundred persons that gets better access. I think its worth investing a couple of minutes for those people - don't you?

BTW: I would love feedback to what I can do better here - let me know in the thread to this posting.

[Via Mario Klingemann]