AP -- A new system of sign language developed by deaf children in Nicaragua may hold clues about the evolution of languages. When the country's first school for the deaf was established in 1977, children were not taught sign language but developed a system of signs to communicate. Childhood learning may determine linguistic rules.

MOVABLE TYPE -- Movable Type 3.1 is out and will be used in Tipperary Institute.

There's another fork in the road worth investigating--Six A-Partners. Mena Trott explains. "If you're interested in making money with weblogs, making cool tools, or just making your work with weblogs easier, the Professional Network is designed for you. So, if you're interested in joining the network (it's free), be sure to visit http://sixapart.com/pronet/ for more information."

SOFTWARE GARDEN -- Dan Bricklin writes an excellent primer on RSS. He explains "in addition to notifying you about news headlines and changes to websites, RSS can be used for many other purposes. There does not even have to be a web page associated with the items listed -- sometimes all the information you need may be in the titles and descriptions themselves."

LIBRARY STuff -- Spurl is like Furl and Del.icio.us in that you can save and correlate groups of links. Spurl has something distinct--it can cluster groups of like-minded links in an online bookmarking collective. It's explained well on the site. Plus, you can syndicated your Spurl.net streams.

CADENHEAD -- After the Democatic National Convention of 2004, Rogers Cadenhead said "Collectively, weblogs represent a mass consumer revolt against the giant electronic media and the bottom-line fixated, risk-averse, synergy-loving infotainment cesspool that it has become."

CLONMEL -- The Skunk Works has started development of an online course, taught through Moodle's Virtual Learning Environment that leads to European Credit Transfer System certification in Web Writing Skills. The core of the course revolves around effective composition and blogging.

BLOGADS -- Surveys continue to show that blog readers are older and more affluent than typical Internet users: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year. Blog readers are more cyber-active: 54% of their news consumption is online. 21% are themselves bloggers and 46% describe themselves as opinion makers. And, in the last six months:

CSS ZEN GARDEN -- Beautiful uses of CSS.

WEBPRONEWS -- Steve Shaw flicks through 15 RSS readers and suggests how browsing the Web goes much faster when viewing it through RSS. His listings do not recommend Newzcrawler, Windows software that works well for me.

THURLES -- One of the most important facets of web publishing is audience and from the looks of things, Google is considering a syndication feed that expands the audience of the earliest microcontent publishers. It looks like Google is embracing RSS (Really Simple Syndication). If Google actually continues its development aling this line, it will mark a possible return to course for the search engine company in a standards war over technology and it will affect how people read the news.