20080128

Tweetmeme

Tweetmeme: "Thus tweetmeme was born, put simply it watches what is going on within twitter and picks up anyone posting links to content. We then track how many other mentions of the same content are made (and how influential they are.) and present them in a simple format."

Woe, three more feed buckets. Nice idea which doesn't seem to be yielding much other than itself ...

20080127

FriendFeed

FriendFeed: "Does one of your friends Twitter way too often? Is the long discussion about bacon-flavored cookies getting old? Now you can easily hide individual services from people you are subscribed to, mute individual discussions, and a whole lot more by clicking the 'Options' link under an entry in your feed"

Perfect! One less copy of the tweet. FriendFeed is quickly becoming the best at the morass of lifestream aggregators, comment anywhere weirdnesses, and it'll even toss stuff into your feed with a bookmarklet.

ashton @ FriendFeed

Martian Fluxx


Shown here is a collage made up of some of the Keepers you'll find in the Martian Fluxx: Mars, the Mothership, the Flying Saucer, the Tripod, the City, the Cow, the Ray Gun, the Space Suit, and the Tentacle.

In Martian Fluxx, the players are invaders from Mars, and the Creepers are those pesky Pathetic Humans who are always getting in our way, keeping us from winning. Cows of course are Keepers because for Humans and Martians alike, they're good eating. There are actually two Cow Keepers in the game; if you have them both you can win with the Goal 'Two All-Beef Earthlings.'

The idea of making us the Martians came about as I realized the Martians are the ones who get all the cool stuff!

Wunderland

Yay! Martians and Zombies! Fluxx Roxx!

20080126

Yelp: Events

San Francisco Events, Concerts, Film, Nightlife, Festivals & More | Yelp

Buh? Events in Yelp? No rss feed. Not very well integrated with the rest of the site. Oh, well, not like I need another event system.

20080125

Few crying into beers at decline of big six breweries

Few crying into beers at decline of big six breweries: "Many of the great names of British brewing have downed their final pints and headed for the exit.

Once there was Bass Charrington, Allied Breweries, Whitbread, Courage Imperial, and Watneys. Scottish & Newcastle was yesterday added to that list of once-mighty brewers.

Who will mourn the passing of the so-called “Big Six”? Not the British pub-goer who long ago signalled indifference to the brewers’ product. New generations, led by women, demanded something else – and got it in the form of lagers, wine, soft drinks, alcopops, cocktails, spirits and Babycham."

Sigh, the Multinationals just keep killing them and giving us Zima.

20080123

Blue Bottle Coffee

Blue Bottle Coffee opens in Mint Plaza!


Professionals have long been willing to pay prices in the five figures for the perfect espresso machine, but the siphon bar does not make espresso. It makes brewed coffee, as does another high-end coffee maker, the $11,000 Clover, which makes one cup at a time. Together, they signal the resurgence of brewing among the most obsessive coffee enthusiasts.

New York Times

Wasn't much local coverage, which let me to TheShot. New Feed!

"“Blue Bottle was way cooler when you could drink espresso shots made by a tattooed slacker over a sewer cover in a back alley,”"

Trip Report: Blue Bottle Cafe @ Mint Plaza � Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Also: Flickr: Photos from bluebottlemintplaza

20080119

What’s a Troubadour to Do?

Brand Autopsy: "Why give away her recorded music for free? As mentioned, a CD or an MP3 file is essentially a direct mail piece to get someone to buy a concert ticket. If indeed a musician can make more money from selling tickets to a live show, shouldn’t they market themselves to sell tickets and not CDs?"

Free mp3s and more concerts sounds like a great result from the major labels flailing about.

Delicious Integrated Into Yahoo Search Results

Delicious Integrated Into Yahoo Search Results: "Yahoo is testing the integration of Delicious user generated bookmarks into Yahoo search results pages (Yahoo acquired Delicious in late 2005)."

Nicely integrated searches. One less search engine in the old browser!

Blogger as OpenID provider

Blogger as OpenID provider: "As we hinted before, we’ve been working on making Blogger an OpenID provider. With our latest Blogger in Draft release, we’ve done just that. You can now use your blog’s URL as an OpenID URL on any website that accepts OpenID 1.1 authentication."

Yay! I've been using this dumb dump blog as a landing page for years. Perfect to use it as a login for the many places that point here ...

20080116

Bloglines | My Feeds (375) (6)

93/813

The Forbes Fictional 15


He’s mysterious, he’s innovative, he’s probably a little insane, and he’s rich. According to Forbes Magazine, Mr. Willy Wonka is currently the 13th richest fictional character in the universe, ranking just above Lucius Malfoy. Take that, Slytherin!

Willy Wonka: Billionaire

Check the The Forbes Fictional 15 for more, including Ming!

Free Bothel Visits Webcast


Big Sister is marrying 21st-century technology with the world's oldest profession to profit from the public's appetite for ever-more graphic reality TV. Every move is recorded by more than 50 video cameras mounted everywhere from the toilets to the bed posts.

At Big Sister, about a dozen guests perform on camera each night, and the Web site gets 10,000 to 15,000 hits a day.

Bloomberg

Ack! Even more Reality? Sheesh, Cyborgs R Us.

20080115

A new McBrew threatens Starbucks


Yet in its efforts to expand and attract less affluent customers over the past couple of years, Starbucks has started to become more like McDonald's -- even as McDonald's, for its part, has been moving upmarket to become more like Starbucks.

Last year Starbucks' share-price fell by 42 percent, making it one of the worst performers on the NASDAQ exchange."

McDonald's has already made smaller forays into the coffee market, and with some success. Last year Consumer Reports, a trade magazine, rated its filter coffee more highly than that offered by Starbucks.

A new McBrew threatens Starbucks

Sheesh, good McCoffee? Next, Starbucks will have food and then it won't even matter what grey water we drink. Oh, they already did?

20080114

With friends like these ...


Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship?

Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

With friends like these ...

True That. Although the pubs around here are full of ubergeeks.

20080113

Startup Schwag

Startup Schwag: is a web2.0 startup schwag tshirt of the month club. It’s based on a simple, wonderful idea recently abandoned by RubyRed Labs in San Francisco: Valley Schwag. They shipped Silicon Valley schwag to subscribers every month."

A Barnacle Startup? Are the shirts stamped 'beta'? Certainly a sign of Bust 2.0 ...

20080112

Bloglines | My Feeds (162) (5)

12/809.

FriendFeed Blog: See popular items from your friends-of-friends

As of today, you will start seeing your friends' comments and "likes" in your own feed.
FriendFeed Blog: See popular items from your friends-of-friends

Ah, a friendly feed. The social feed got three sizes larger that day ...

Why CondeNet Is Banking on Facebook

Why CondeNet Is Banking on Facebook: "Flip.com launched in February as CondeNet's effort to target teen girls with an ambitious social media site. Less than a year later, the digital arm of Conde Nast is reversing course to embrace a distributed media strategy and converting the destination site into a series of applications that will live on social networks, starting with Facebook."

Funny, I didn't figure that flip.com would fly. "Hey, this site would make a great widget".

Ten Reasons We're Doomed: CES Edition


it might look like it's all product announcements and good times, but that's far from the truth. In reality, it's a vile clusterfuck of nerds, sluts and suits; a deadly combo.

1. Booth Babes
Are we such simple people? Are we so easy to manipulate that all it takes for us to decide that a product is worth writing about or purchasing are some out-of-work strippers in skimpy outfits handing out 64MB thumb drives? Yes!

2. Gimmicky Booths
Cheesy fake game shows? Yes, that'll make me take your company seriously. Magicians? Wow, I am optimistic about your company's potential in the CE marketplace.

Ten Reasons We're Doomed: CES Edition

Oh, yea! Almost makes me want to wander the floor of Macworld with a clipboard and a TV-B-Gone.

Bloglines | My Feeds (1284) (7)

187/817.

A couple of nights out will do that ...

And yea old greader is stuck at 1000+.

FindMeOn.com : Intellectual Property Announcement

FindMeOn.com Blog: "As one-of the earliest, if not the first, entity dedicated to Social Network Portability, FindMeOn.com pioneered many of the systems, methods, and techniques now common to online identity indexing, standardizing, searching and porting."

Oh, great. In the deadpool and evil to boot. They should at least get the service up if they want to dibs on the obvious.

Strip clubs | The Texas pole tax

Strip clubs | The Texas pole tax | Economist.com: "On January 1st the state's strip clubs began imposing a $5 surcharge for each visitor. The “pole tax,” as it is commonly called, is expected to bring the state an additional $40m in revenue each year."

Ah, I'm afraid that these words have been altered forever for me ...

20080111

Facebook Profile

Facebook Profile: "this tool will give users the option to move extra profile boxes to an “extended portion” of their profile. Users can choose to move these boxes; we will recommend that they keep the Friends Box, Mini-Feed, Wall, Basic and Personal Information as well as the top 12 application boxes they have added. At the bottom of the profile will then be a link to “Show Extended Profile”. Any user will be able to expand the profile at any point in time to see all the applications a user has added to their profile."

Whoa, a nice piece of ajaxy goodness. A big yellow 'move stuff' banner turns into a box with recommended moves checked, then the profile rearranges without repainting. No choice to drop the wall into the extended bit, though. Wall seems like an old bit of MySpace lingering on.

Twitter Jobs

Twitter Jobs: "Twitter is seeking a Business Development Manager who is focused on bringing Twitter's potential to mobile and IM operators the world over. You'll be tasked with building and maintaining strategic partner relationships and dedicated to producing results in the form of cost-reduction, localized promotion, and revenue."

Ah! There's a bit about that revenue stream that everyone was going on about a few weeks ago. Never saw anything that came out of the chatter ...

Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES

Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES: "CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn't stop."

video

So much fun! And here I only turn off the bellowing at sports bars ...

Nick Bradbury: Feed Overload? Hit the Panic Button!

Nick Bradbury: Feed Overload? Hit the Panic Button!: "The 'panic button' in this case is a feature I've added to the next pre-release of FeedDemon 2.6. FeedDemon will automatically detect when you've got a ton of unread items, and then offer to mark them (or a subset of them) as read."

Oh! Nice. I need several of those! I would be great if Google Reader trends would do that and even suggest feeds to drop.

20080109

A Taste for Brews That Go to Extremes - New York Times


Many beer lovers are aghast at the creative liberties American brewers are taking with traditional styles, feeling that the bigger-is-better principle is reducing American brewing to the equivalent of a frat party.

To judge for ourselves whether these transgressive beers were simply stretching boundaries in creative ways or were the doomed siblings of cars with tail fins, the tasting panel sampled 25 examples, all from American brewers.

Phil likened the appeal of these beers to the macho allure of hot sauces, which almost dare enthusiasts to try the hottest ones.

A Taste for Brews That Go to Extremes - New York Times

Nice! I'll take my Pliny young, please! Odd selection of beers, guess I'm just spoiled with all of the west coast hop bombs ...

Knights of Moleskine, Spirit and Ale

Knights of Moleskine, Spirit and Ale: "the Knights of Moleskine, Spirit and Ale are dedicated to Journaling, Drinking Good Beer and a Spirtual Way of Life. 'Libertas de Juditium. Unitas per Variantia.'"

Whoa, alternate universe. A beer Moleskine mashup?

20080107

Bloglines | My Feeds

0/803. And they said that it couldn't be done ...

20080106

klostu.com

About us - klostu.com: "A Klostu account is also a powerful unified identity which can be used to automatically signup and login effortlessly to any board"

Sheesh, and here that I though that last year was "get out of beta free". I was beta begging for 'super early beta invites' last year around this time.

10 things I hate about your social network

I don’t want to give you my photos. I already have them at flickr. Let me stream them in, avatar and all.
I don’t want to post anything on your wall. It’s lame - I do my blurting at twitter. And pownce.
I don’t want another blog. One and a half is plenty.

It’s time to make the portable bits portable. Focus on people vs users. Presence vs profiles.
Aaron Mentele, Charisma 18 » 10 things I hate about your social network

Heh! Just so. One day they will learn to play well together. They probably just need a time-out ...

Not as punchy as my usual YASN 'about me'.

Why can't social networking sites bother to network with one-another?
Are they that anti-social?

http://hownottoblog.com/index.php/2005/03/18/ (domain gone)

Bloglines | My Feeds (25) (3)

5/807!

Dragged some noise (like the BART feed, which is useless) and some postless wonders to the delete folder. We'll see if they fall out ...

XING: Update: No Online Ads On Premium Members’ Profiles

XING: Update: No Online Ads On Premium Members’ Profiles: "Premium Members are exempt from all advertising on the XING platform – both in terms of their own profile page and their general user experience on the XING platform. Basic members will continue to see ad banners on their start page, on profiles of other basic members, the search and search results pages, and other parts of the platform."

Oh! Another goes ad or pay. Livejournal seemed to do well with that model, sort of doubt that Tribe will make a go of it ...

What This Gadget Can Do Is Up to You

What This Gadget Can Do Is Up to You: "Neuros Technology International, based in Chicago, is providing full documentation of the hardware platform for its recorder, the Neuros OSD (for open source device), so that skilled users can customize or “hack” the device — and then pass along the improvements to others.

Because the OSD saves the recordings in the popular compressed video format MPEG-4, the programs can be watched on a host of devices, including iPods and smartphones.

The OSD has not only open hardware, but also open software: it is based on the Linux operating system."

Nice! They certainly got the jump on Android for TV

social-network-anti-patterns

social-network-anti-patterns: "Since so many sites seem to use your uploading of your address book as tacit/implied permission to spam all your friends with invites, this will annoy your friends, and make you look foolish."

Ah, quechup! That's what it's called. It gives a flavor to bacn and spam.

20080105

Bloglines | My Feeds (25) (3)

5/819

singlism

singlism - Double-Tongued Dictionary: "This notion that you can live a full and completely happy life as a single person is so underrecognized that people who feel that way are reluctant to say so"

Singlism is very bit as ugly a word as Quirkyalone. Come on people, put your heads apart and work that OED!

"obiticide"

"obiticide" citation from Double-Tongued Dictionary: "the Star did in fact kill a couple of well-known people by mistake, a practice known as “obiticide,” or death by media"

FriendFeed - Account Settings

To make it possible for you to subscribe to your personalized FriendFeed in feed readers, iGoogle, and a number of external sites, we generate a secret key for every user that lets those products get a read-only view of your FriendFeed without knowing your password.
FriendFeed - Account Settings

Ah, and another fine idea.

ashton @ friendfeed

Jaiku

Jaiku's main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams.
Jaiku | About Jaiku


Oh! You can subscribe to people and then drop specific feeds. Instead of seeing the twitter and then the copies from pownce, friendfeed, facebook, jaiku, and YAPresence. Now I can see one less! What's a word for an item that you see multiple times in various feeds? It's certainly going to get worse downstream from Google Reader ...

Per account api keys is something that every service should do.

ashnod @ jaiku

Bloglines | My Feeds (489) (4)

90/817.

Oh! The paywall for Adweek and Brandweek seem to be gone. Yay! More feeds.

14 American Apparel Models Freed In Daring Midnight Raid

14 American Apparel Models Freed In Daring Midnight Raid: "Acting on information gathered from billboards, alternative weeklies, and Internet banner ads, an FBI strike team liberated 14 dazed, sallow, and undernourished American Apparel models in a raid on the controversial organization's downtown Los Angeles compound early Monday."

Perfect! Every once in a while I'm sitting on the Muni reading the Onion and when I reach the last page, I realize that I've been mooning the grandmother with the sleazy ad on the back page. copyranter's been all up in AA's business ... and we have yet another feed!

darkgate comic slurper

darkgate comic slurper: "The latest strips of your favourite web-comics slurped from the internet."

Best comix feed evar! You don't even have to create Yet Another Account, just pick 'um, grab your feed, and enojoy.

20080104

Bloglines | My Feeds (638) (8)

89/814. It never stops!

Now, about that 1000+ over in greader ... I am enjoying Google Reader trends, though.

Facebook's "Secret Crush" malicious widget

Facebook's "Secret Crush" malicious widget: "Secret Crush appears so far to have infected about three million Facebook users."

'Secret Crush' malicious-code widget tells you someone has a 'Secret Crush' on you, and if you want to find out who it is, you first have to invite five friends to use it by using the Facebook invitation process,"

Instead, Lovet says, the application displays a small iFrame with a download link that will try to infect the user's computer with the Zango spyware software to serve up ads."

Nice! Overdue, I'd say. Facebook's got the viral ...

Who will be the next Open Source Public Enemy #1?

Who will be the next Open Source Public Enemy #1?: "The SCO Group was delisted by NASDAQ. It was the latest bump down for SCO, best-known in recent years for claiming it owned Linux"

Sheesh, I'd forgotten all about sco. Good riddance.

Facebook | US Politics

Facebook | US Politics

ABC / Facebook / Politics. I certainly didn't see that coming. They're even getting good response numbers.

Haute Barnyard

Haute Barnyard - BuzzFeed: "for you foodies out there, it's the phrase that Adam Platt coined for restaurants that only serve food that's in season."

Funny. Surprised that the term so sticky, though. Especially with the food freaks who seem to have small humors, artfully arranged. I'd guess they'd go with "Seasonality" or "Freshies" or the ilk.

20080103

Facebook to Scoble: all your data belong to us

Facebook to Scoble: all your data belong to us: "intentionally or unintentionally, celebrity blogger Robert Scoble has put himself right at the center of the data portability issue, and at the same time is helping to expose the fascicle nature of Facebook’s claims of openness."

Great title! The blogging anthill was certainly overturned. For a while there you couldn't get a meme in slantwards. Turns out that Plaxo was scraping Facebook. Sheesh, it wasn't so long ago that Plaxo was spewing bacn. I'd certainly never trust them with any credentials. Seems overdue for a LOLSocial ... Plaxo, Fail!

Ah, luckily captured on this video of 50 hours of Techmeme in 50 seconds.

20080101

Airport profilers: They're watching your expressions

Airport profilers: They're watching your expressions:
TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program -- called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) -- that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent.

"Ordinary people who are feeling anxious are 'much more open with their body movements and their facial expressions as compared to an operational terrorist (thinking) 'I've got to defeat security,' ' Maccario said. 'We're looking for behavior indicators that show a certain level of stress, fear or anxiety above and beyond that shown by an anxious member of the traveling public.'"

Avram Grumer draws a vivid parallel to Orwell's facecrime

Google Reader/Share

Updates from Your Gmail Contacts

Ah! Finally found shared stuff. It used to be on the same page as Google Reader - Shared, but, guess it found a new home when Profiles came along. Still finding it quite odd to have feeds in the reader via chat.

Google Reader - Ashub

Google Share - Ashub

Google New Year's Logo With Easter Egg

Google New Year's Logo With Easter Egg: "there’s a sort of easter egg hidden in the Google-colored confetti at the bottom of the logo. If you look closely, you will notice it reads SYN SYN/ ACK ACK"

Sweet. Plenty of Google Doodles to choose from!

Bloglines | My Feeds (181) (9)

33/805. Keeping it down!

Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments | 43 Folders

My suggestion for this year addresses a problem I suspect many of the people who read this site have: the sheer number of online commitments—that is, blogs, social networks, message groups, IM accounts, Flickr, Twitter, and any other online time sink that ends with an R—that we try to maintain.

but I knew I had to scale back or else I was going to end up speaking only in 140-character, hyperlinked sentences.

Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments | 43 Folders

Funnee. I just started putting accounts on a reading schedule, maybe I should put some of them on a deathwatch, as well ...

BoardGameGeek Forums

With this extra support, I will definitely be hiring some additional programming and design help. We'll be able to roll out some really great new features, along with a lot of enhancements and fixes that you guys have been suggesting forever.
2007 Support Goal Met! And 2008 Info | BoardGameGeek Forums

Congrats! BBG is a fine social network that continues to improve: have and want lists, geek buddies, rss feeds, and tagging. As well as a ton of content and very active use community.