The BBC have recently released a plugin for totem which allows users to view some of the BBCs content though a pretty interface in totem.
This allows users to access the beebs content though a nice interface.
George Wright,Portofolio Manager at the BBC's Research and Innovaton department talks about the plugin on video (ogg theora, ogg dirac, mpeg4, flash)

This article introduces Empathy, a new Instant Messaging client in
GNU/Linux which supports Google Talk, Yahoo, Jabber and several other
IM protocols. Empathy is now a default application in GNOME-2.24 and
available in all the latest release of popular GNU/Linux distributions
like Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu.

Firefox is a great browser. However, it's a tad on the bloated side (even though the new version is definitely better!). Also, Firefox is focused on cross-platform compatibility.

Instead of an introduction, I'll answer the question 'Why did you left out wonderful applications like Scribus, Inkscape, Cinelerra, Wine, QCad etc?'. Well, because the article is about applications which I consider essential for daily use. Of course, some work with those every day, but not the majority.

My recent post about Mono was sincere, and Boycott Novell has the story about Debian wrong, but Gnome actually is pushing an alternative. Before I introduce you to the programming language Vala, let me give you some background on programming for Gnome as I understand it (note that I am not a programmer and haven't done anything real since the mid-80s).

"...So much effort still seems to be put into porting prorietary garbage like .NET to GNU, and producing a Gnome windowing environment which has all the faults of MS-Windows. Why not concentrate on producing something better. Emacs is far nicer to work with than GNOME. So why the interest in making Emacs fit in to this inferior MS-Windows like environment. Why not make GNOME work more like Emacs.

First of all, I think that the GNOME project is in a really strange place right now. Others called it “decadence” but I’ve been thinking of it more as a state of transition. Things are changing in GNOME and I think that it’s largely just a reflection of time. GNOME has been around for more than a decade. Leadership is changing. GNOME is evolving into something else.

An interesting trend Ive noticed over the years is the thought process of how users install applications. Most of the time, a KDE user installing an application won't care what the application uses or what desktop it is designed for. They just simply install the application, use it, and get on with life.