Beer And Movies At The Red Vic!

SFist: "The Board of Supervisors has agreed to allow beer and wine to be served at the Red Vic movie theatre. "

The Independent has a good run of silly movies but you have to have a couple of drinks. (Darn!)

Star Trek!

G4 breaks out a whole set of Star Trek: The Original Series. Check out the action figure promos, the karaoke one cracks me up.

Jive Magazine sez "G4's four on-air promotional spots use stop-motion animation to bring Star Trek action figures to life in contemporary urban settings: a coffeehouse, a swimming pool, a karaoke bar, and Spock's "crib." In "Karaoke," the first of the spots to air on YouTube, Spock performs Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative" -- complete with Vulcan salute -- to an enthusiastic, jumping crowd that includes Kirk, Scotty, Bones, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov. The characters are voiced by comedic actors, including Craig Kilborn as Captain Kirk, and Charlie Murphy of "Chappelle's Show" as Mr. Spock."

USGS Latest Earthquakes: Feeds & Data

USGS has real-time earthquake maps for Google Earth! As well as rss feeds that contain basic information (date, location, and magnitude) about each earthquake and a link to a detailed report.

My feed reader does the happy earthquake dance!

San Francisco Rising

San Francisco Rising

1906 Earthquake Centennial

SFgate: The Great Quake

Memorial at Lotta's Fountain, Market and Kearny Streets
Tuesday, April 18, 4:30 a.m. – 5:30 a.m.

Golden Hydrant Painting Celebration, 20th and Church Streets, Dolores Park
Tuesday, April 18, 7:00 a.m.

The Golden Fire Hydrant at Twentieth and Church was painted gold and returned to service, where it remains. Each April 18, it receives a fresh coat of golden paint. To this day, nobody knows where the water came from."

Muni is offering Free Service on All Lines 3am Tuesday, April 18, through 3am Wednesday, April 19, 2006. They'll even open the Metro subway at 3:00am!

Da Slickster has asked that any "places of worship" and fire departments to ring their bells in a citywide cacophony ensured to wake up just about everyone in the city at 5:14 am tomorrow morning.

Bloglines

Bloglines | Clip/Blog: "There is a problem with the database. Please try again later"

Sheesh, bad week at bloglines. (wish that I could googlefight 'bloglines sucks' vs 'bloglines rocks'). Glad that I moved a stack of feeds over to rojo, even if their flag feature is a poor way of holding them until I can clip them to bloglines. Sheesh, they're even forcing me to blog. Bah!

Tags: bloglines, rojo

South Park

BBC NEWS: "Comedy Central prevented Matt Stone and Trey Parker from using the image after the furore caused by a Danish newspaper publishing caricatures of Muhammad.

"Either it's all okay, or none of it is," Kyle tells the executive. "Do the right thing."

It's all in the timing ... last week, South Park won US broadcasting's prestigious Peabody prize.

Seems like the banned episode is floating around ... as is Trey and Matt singing "What would Brian Boitano do If he was here right now?" and, someone actually asked Brian what he would do!

New lingo sweeping London

Aljazeera.Net: London's cockney rhyming phrases have been taken over by a new type of multicultural-influenced speech, dubbed Jafaican and Tikkiny.

Researchers found that a new type of speech, influenced by a dizzying number of foreign languages and pronunciations, rap music and popular TV programmes, have altered traditional cockney."

the Daily Mail: "What has emerged is a distinctive inner-London patois which borrows heavily from Jamaican creole, lifting some words unchanged.

But it has been influenced by other speech patterns, mainly Bangladeshi and West African, with a little South American and Arab thrown in.

An analysis of vowel sounds has shown the traditional long Cockney vowels are becoming shorter. The word 'face' sounds like 'fice' in cockney but more like 'fehs' in Jafaican."

Mark Pincus Blog: Today marks the peak of social networking

Mark Pincus: "Today marks the peak of social networking at least that's my prediction. in the past week i've been pitched on three more social networking ideas. while i like and respect the people, i got a queezy (sp?) feeling hearing the ideas. painful reminders of march 2000 when the last people to show up were still pitching ecommerce it ideas."

Heh, Social 2.0. I think that I've signed up for one beta a week for months now.

All hail Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf in his ceremonial robes.

Sex Sells in Second Life

Second Sex: "The May issue of Computer Gaming World looks at the online sex trade in Linden Labs' Second Life. The article, 'Escort Mission,' includes interviews with digital escort girls and johns.

However, the CGW piece isn't just a romp into the underbelly of Second Life, but also looks at the real world cost of sex in Second Life. The article points out that for clients a penis, simply to participate costs L$1500, (that's Second Life's currency) or a little under six dollars. Similarly, the CGW piece points out that an online brothel collecting 20% per 'trick' would net roughly $47,608 dollars a year. And that figure isn't in Second Life money.

Tag: mmorpg, money

Britain's new FBI-style agency logo are all Thundercat!

SOCA: "If you're launching yourself as Britain's FBI and say you will make the lives of organised criminals 'hell' then you need a dynamic logo to match the job. The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has chosen a fierce big cat bearing its fangs and leaping over a stylised silver globe, with a crown capping it all. It's bold but bears a striking resemblance to the logo of the 1980s children's cartoon series Thundercats. "

Someone with a brand clue rips the logo ...

SOCA are Go!

Wired News: Antisocial Networking Gets Hip

Antisocial Networking: "Snubster is among the latest in a series of sites created to poke fun at social networking. Others include Isolatr, a spoof site that claims to be 'helping you find where other people are not,' and Introverster, which bills itself as 'an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing you online.'"
Snubster is among the latest in a series of sites created to poke fun at social networking. Others include Isolatr, a spoof site that claims to be "helping you find where other people are not," and Introverster, which bills itself as "an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing you online."

head-banging bookworms

Heavy metal's unalloyed love for the literary: "So what's with all the head-banging bookworms?

The Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura latest release is 'Dante XXI,' an album based on the Italian poet's 'Divine Comedy.' And Mastodon recently became metal's newest stars with 'Leviathan,' a 'Moby Dick'- inspired album with songs like 'I Am Ahab' and 'Seabeast.'

Sepultura and Mastodon are only the latest metal bands to raid their Norton Anthologies for inspiration. Perhaps more than any other genre, heavy metal and the classics are joined at the hip.

With his clumsy prose and often meandering plots, H.P. Lovecraft still struggles decades after his death for respect in the literary world. But in the metal world, his weird tales blare from Marshall amps the world over."

Clawing to the top of the Lit-Core stacks, would be Bloodhag who even name songs after authors. "Our mission is to spread the gospel of Edu-Core. Bang The Head That Does Not Read. Everyone Smarter Than Everyone Else. Use Heavy Metal music to promote literacy and vice versa."

Tag: metal

MySpace phones, rings.

Cingular to sell ringtones from MySpace bands: "Cingular Wireless said on Thursday it plans to sell ringtones from bands that put their music on MySpace.com, the social Web site that is popular among teenagers."

and

The Helio Mobile Phone, a joint venture between Earthlink and SK Telecomaa has announced plans to allow subscribers to read and post to the MySpace site for free."

The "wiki" in the swicki

swicki: "we released a nifty new feature on the results page that allows any user to delete, promote, edit or add search results right from the results page. Now, in addition to the 'implicit' votes that users cast by clicking on results, they can vote 'explicitly'."

Mucked around with a Strange Food swiki. It's cool, but, takes a fair amount of care and feeding. Dunno if I'll ever really get it tuned. I use it for researching posts and I can see how it could sing if you had a few people banging on it ...

tribe.net

tribe.net: "We need your help! Based on feedback from our members, it's pretty clear that the Members icon (in the masthead, with the smiling people) has got to go"

Heh, guess that they got tired of the 'corrections'.

Tags: tribe.net

Zombie!

I love the Weather Zombie in The Cron's 96 Hours. Seems like Sacha Eckes did the pix.

zombies also rule Consumating, probably because of the Feedback Zombie, "a 66-year old boy in san francisco, ca. He last logged in on March 31, 2006. He is in an open relationship."

Heck, they even asked "What would you do if zombies walked the Earth?" My fav answer being The power of Christ compels you!

Tags: zombies

Nearest Neighbor News Network

Nearest Neighbor News Network: "was a student project, created by Jacob Lee and Ben Hodes at UIUC, that operated from around January 2005 until October 2005. It combined an RSS news aggregator with a collaborative filtering system for article recommendation."

Whaa! I still miss it (and the feeds that it took with it). I shuffled an old ompl export from it (along with a few from bloglines) to another 'river of news' feed aggregator, rojo. Mostly 'low value' and 'high noise' feeds like news and web2.0 feeding frenzy. The view is simple and clean and having multiple tags (as folders) per feed is nice. 'Shared Mojo' on stories is more useful if you don't read everything all the time, as I do. The today view certainly helps, even if I do tend to see stories multiple times.

I still 'triage' feeds into bloglines, much because of the brilliant firefox extension LiveLines, and frankly the subscribe dialog in rojo is poor, and it's a huge pain to get to a feed homepage.

Tags: bloglines, rojo, aggregator

Paying For a Muni Ride

SFist: "The best part of The Examiner's article is a quote by Muni's official apologist Maggie Lynch: “People think paying their $1 doesn’t matter, but it does.' That's nice. Does paying the additional 50 cents matter, too, or is that optional? Because the fare hasn't been $1 for a long time, you know, Maggie. Sigh. We can't help but wonder how Muni might improve if the people in charge of it actually rode it every once in a while."

"Hey, take one guess: what's the worst place on the web for finding up-to-date news about Muni? That would be Muni's very own website, of course, which despite having a section for "new links" bears abosolutely no mention of its new study showing that fifty percent of riders don't pay."

Hrump, looks like they forgot they used to have rss feeds. Bart has one, but, they don't bother to feed us anything but marketing.

Controlling RSS Overload

Controlling RSS Overload: "I've found a solution Dean Wormer would be proud of. Probation, double secret probation.

Most aggregators allow you to create 'groups' for your blogs. Into the Probation group goes every new blog I add to my aggregator. EVERY one. Consider it a quarantine tank for your RSS aquarium. Once a month, go through your Probation group and cull the herd, promoting some to the big leagues, while giving others the boot."

That's just what I do. Everything ends up in a Bloglines folder called 'Add'. Sometimes they get moved to a high value folder on Bloglines, sometimes they get moved to a low value 'river' on Rojo, and sometimes they malinger until cleanup. I also move (or retag) feeds to 'Kill' to take a second look at them on the way out ...

Tags: aggregator, bloglines, rojo

Identity Production in a Networked Culture

Identity Production in a Networked Culture by danah boyd

"What we're seeing right now is a cultural shift due to the introduction of a new medium and the emergence of greater restrictions on youth mobility and access.

Having to simultaneously negotiate youth culture and adult surveillance is not desirable to most youth, but their response is typically to ignore the issue.

Teenager's space segmentation is slightly different. Most of their space is controlled space. Adults with authority control the home, the school, and most activity spaces.

MySpace is both the location of hanging out and the cultural glue itself. MySpace and IM have become critical tools for teens to maintain "full-time always-on intimate communities" where they keep their friends close even when they're physically separated."

The Mark of the Card

Contactless cards work when you hold them 1 or 2 inches from a special radio-frequency reader. Because you don't need to show them to a cashier, swipe them, sign a receipt or enter a PIN, they speed checkout.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover are promoting the tap-and-go cards for use when buying something quick and cheap -- garlic fries at AT&T Park, a Slurpee at 7-Eleven, a prescription at Walgreens, a Happy Meal at McDonald's, or movie tickets at AMC, Loews, Regal and Cinemark theaters."

Discover is testing cell phones with contactless chips.

American Express offers the cards, which it calls ExpressPay, under its Blue line of credit cards"

It used to be that when you lost your phone, you lost all your friends. Now you can loose a credit line along with them!

Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams

Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams: "After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams."

Whoa, weird. I've never even seen one. I missed!

Stuperbowl

What was that Dr. Seuss/Harrison Ford/NFL thing? That was just wrong.

Full Throttle (an new energy drink from Coca-Cola) showed male clichés chasing after a advertising can. The tagline is "Let Your Man Out." As SFist sez: "because Full Throttle is for men. Men who like the taste of ass"

The Seahawks ran out to "Bittersweet Symphony" by The Verve and I said "What the hell? What kind of theme song is that?" Then the Steelers had with "Right Here, Right Now" by Fatboy Slim. They win. Game over. Sheesh, you'd think that they could have found something that rocked in the last 5 years.

Burger King puts on a Busby Berkeley musical number. All Singing, All Dancing! Whopperettes had funny burger bit costumes (loved the Onion). Each bit flopped down to make the hambuger, making a grunting noise. They even said 'Freaky King'.

Jennifer Loves the Robot a site created by the Monster to commemorate their love. Funny. The monsters were done by Stan Winston! The monster mix mp3s were fun, too. I've seen it before, and still Hummer wins!

Go Daddy couldn't get the right tone to get a decent commercial on the air. You can see the duds at ifilm.

The Leonard Nimoy/Aleve bit worked. He "couldn't do it", took Aleve, and was able to give the Vulcan salute to an audience of Trekkies.

The Beer Institute's Superbowl ad 'Here's To Beer' had people from all over saying "cheers". I thought that it was Yet Another Bud Ad until near the end. A really nice ad on any other day.

"According to a National Retail Federation poll, this year 15.3 percent of respondents said the ads were the chief reason they tuned into the game, as opposed to some 33 percent who said the game itself was the main draw." - Daily News

ifilm

Google Video

Tags: Super Bowl

The Cookie Monsters of Death Metal!

Cookie Monsters of death-metal music: "Death-metal vocalizing is also known as Cookie Monster singing, if not in tribute to, at least in acknowledgment of, the "Sesame Street" puppet that blurts in a guttural growl, his words discharged so rapidly that they tend to collide with each other."

"The term also signifies a level of incomprehensibility of the lyrics, which in most cases is absolute. Given the subject matter, that's probably for the best"

Whoa, Wall Street Journal Online is Metal!

San Fransicko is certainly doing it's part with both Cookie Mongoloid and The Dead Hensons crumbling the cookie.

Cartoons of Muhammad

Ah! The dreaded Cartoon of Muhammad

Cagle has a pointer to a 'particularly offensive collection' on the subject.



A Pakistani cleric announced Friday a $1 million bounty for killing a cartoonist who drew Prophet Muhammad.

If Big Brother is watching us, let's give him something to chew on

If Big Brother is watching us, let's give him something to chew on: "A Knight Ridder report revealed that in 2003 lawmakers attempted to rein in Bush's abuse of signing statements by passing a bill that required the Justice Department to inform Congress whenever BushCo decided to ignore a legislative provision. Bush signed the bill into law -- but then immediately issued a signing statement asserting his right to ignore it. Ah, the nauseating poetry of it all."

Finally! E Ink for the masses!

Screening the Latest Bestseller

The Sony Reader might be just the ticket to kick the e-book market into high gear.

Scheduled to go on sale this spring for between $300 and $400, the Reader is a compact slab about the size of a small paperback book (5-by-7 inches, and a half-inch thick). But it's the 3.5-by-4.8-inch display that made it the buzz of the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month in Las Vegas.

"Sony has said that the Reader will be able to display content from RSS feeds and from PDF files in addition to e-books in Sony's own BBeB format."

Loompanics, Exit stage left

Loompanics: "Welcome to our Final supplement, and sadly our going out of business sale. All books are 50% off their original price (including everything in the large 2005 Main Catalog). "

Gmail delete!

About Gmail: "Now there's an easy-to-find delete button for those messages you really don’t want."

Finally! Sheesh.

SFist: Muni to Presidio Commuters: "F**k You All"

SFist: Muni to Presidio Commuters: "F**k You All": "Case in point: the temporary re-routing of the 43. We don't know where to begin with the number of ways this could have been a minor inconvenience, but morphed into a major s**t-storm due to -- what? Incompetance? Laziness? Malice? We just can't figure out how it's possible for transit to suck so bad.

Our guess is that it has something to do with their allegiance to Satan."

Heh! The N has certainly been sucking recently. Impending Second Meltdown?

Ah! The Great Renamaing as in the 22 Fillmore is Twenty Too Late to Matter

Road music

Road music: "Datebook writers and critics have compiled their own playlists", even one for the 22 MUNI bus.

It would be fun to cut soundtracks for a commute and then jack them ...

Upcoming.org: Groups: SF Metal

Upcoming.org: Groups: SF Metal. Mucking with groups ...

SF Metro Improvement Project

Metro Improvement Project: as of January 17 the Metro Underground (Embarcadero through Church)will be closed after 10pm.

Poking around, I did find the Metro Map online!

eStarling Flickr Enabled LCD Frame

ThinkGeek :: eStarling Wi-Fi Gmail / Flickr Enabled LCD Frame: "The eStarling frame is a standalone Wi-Fi LCD photo frame that connects to a wireless network and automatically displays photos e-mailed to it in a slideshow format. Additionally you can specify an RSS photo feed from Flickr based on your own tagged keywords. You can even shoot photos on your mobile phone then e-mail them directly to your eStarling frame for display. If you install a CF or SD card with photos into the eStarling frame these will go into rotation on the frame along with any photos received via e-mail or Flickr photo feeds"

Now there's a strange bit of tech. A picture frame that supports rss and pop!

TribeIdeas - tribe.net

TribeIdeas - tribe.net

Ugg. That's quite enough of that. So much whinging! Unsubscribing from even the rss feed ...

Tags: tribe.net

How many RSS feeds do you track?

The RSS Weblog: "For now, let us know the number of feeds you track in total"

Early results surprising, there are as many 80-90 feed readers as 390+ readers (I clearly fall into the later category).

Oakland Tribune Op-Ed

"We are fighting a war with no end to create a peace with no defined victory.

We occupy a foreign land that doesn't want us, while at home our civil liberties are discounted.

We are told that it's better not to know what our government is doing in our name, for security purposes. Meanwhile, our government is becoming omnipresent, spying on us whenever it deems it necessary.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

Oakland Tribune Op-Ed

Tags: 1984

Impeachy

'Impeachment' Talk, Pro and Con, Appears in Media at Last
"Suddenly this week, scattered outposts in the media have started mentioning the “I” word, or at least the “IO” phrase: impeach or impeachable offense."

West Virginia’s senior Democratic senator, Robert Byrd: "The President claims a boundless authority through the resolution that authorized the war on those who perpetrated the September 11th attacks. But that resolution does not give the President unchecked power to spy on our own people. That resolution does not give the Administration the power to create covert prisons for secret prisoners. That resolution does not authorize the torture of prisoners to extract information from them. That resolution does not authorize running black-hole secret prisons in foreign countries to get around U.S. law. That resolution does not give the President the powers reserved only for kings and potentates."

Jane Smiley: A Ten-Step Program: "I began considering the possibility that what we see around us might indeed constitute success, as far as the Bushies are concerned, when I read in a post by Karen Kwiatkowski that three witnesses had confirmed that Bush referred to the Constitution as a “just a god damned piece of paper.”


Let’s take a look at the “mistakes” the Bush administration is said to have made, and, instead, ask ourselves if they are actually realized intentions"

Tags: impeach

Tribe's Black Tuesday : Fleshbot

"in a sad turn of events yesterday, Tribe has voluntarily applied 2257 record-keeping requirements across the board for all users and groups in its architecture, thus removing a lot of worthwhile content and making group leaders like me feel more like the headmistress at a very bad boys’ school … and not in the way I’d like."

Effort: A +
Community Spirit: F
Excecution: D
Critical Thinking: F

Someone needs to be kept after school and made to write “I will not use 2257 laws for my own site administration tactics” on the chalkboard at least 100 times. Or else I get out the real paddle."

Tribe's Black Tuesday : Fleshbot

Tags: tribe.net

MySpace Head Fall In

MySpace users angry over News Corp censorship of YouTube: "There was an outcry by some members after MySpace’s acquisition by News Corp. People were afraid they might start monitoring or censoring MySpace. At the time their CEO said that nothing like that would happen. Well, now it has."

Guess embedded YouTube videos were popular. Why not block the service and suggest replacements? Sheesh. Adrants sez: "MySpace came out of nowhere as the single most popular place to go for...well...anything. It can disappear just as quickly and be replaced by another."

Tags: myspace

Bloglines 3.0

Bloglines rocks. Since I started collapsing more feeds and using the Hotkeys I can plow right though my whole feed (clipping on the way). Firefox 1.5 seems to has hosed clipping and I did loose some related extensions, until I downgraded, upgraded, and didn't check for updates to extensions.

And I'm awaiting Bloglines 3.0 "Bloglines switched it's user-agent from 'Bloglines 2.1' to 'Bloglines 3.0-rho' on Tuesday afternoon. ... there could be some big changes coming in near future."

Tags: aggregator, bloglines

myspace

Poked at the malingering myspace user. Little joy. The blog/subscribe mechanism seems good, if underused. Subscribed/friended a few bands and venues.

Google Homepage

Google Homepage Module Directory has hardly anything on it. Thankfully there's the Google Modules site (with rss feed!), which just kicked down the Bizarre Holiday Module.
And there's the Google Homepage API if you want to try your own hand at it ...

Impeach Bush Coalition

Kooky. I post about the Impeach Bush Coalition and then Technorati spits me out as a 'Coalition' member.

Unchecked presidential power

Schneier on Security: The Security Threat of Unchecked Presidential Power: "This is about the Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search. This is about circumventing a teeny tiny check by the judicial branch, placed there by the legislative branch, placed there 27 years ago -- on the last occasion that the executive branch abused its power so broadly.

This is indefinite dictatorial power. And I don't use that term lightly; the very definition of a dictatorship is a system that puts a ruler above the law.

Laws are what give us security against the actions of the majority and the powerful. If we discard our constitutional protections against tyranny in an attempt to protect us from terrorism, we're all less safe as a result."

Tags: impeach

Tribe's head fall in

Tribe's always been such a permissive environment. What gives?

SFist: Big Changes at Tribe.net:
"The very definition of a 'chilling effect' on free speech is when legislation or enforcement of new laws are so potentially onerous that people and organization self-censor out of fear and potential liability."
"The exodus is already being planned, according to moderator scuttlebutt, and it sounds to be big enough that even Tribe's dense management will feel the breeze; which is sure to make their parent company, Knight-Ridder, wince. If Knight-Ridder thought Tribe was a money drain before, after December 20th, when all those moderators with all those Tribe members hit the delete key and move on, it's going to feel like a broken dam."

Brian a Tribe employee, said:
"Perhaps it is best to say that we are a technology company with a cultural component, and not a culture company with a technological component. "

I read feeds from tribe, but, poke my head in seldom anymores ...

Tags: Tribe.net

Impeachment Pie

What a fine Xmas present! Both the blogs and news were singing my song today. Check the Technorati Mentions by Day

Bush’s Snoopgate
"This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced."

Governor Dean
"It's un-American, and it's unacceptable. Americans need a President who will keep them safe and enforce the law, we don't need a big brother. Americans know we don’t have to sacrifice our basic liberties in order to fight the terrorists. Together, America can do better."

"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”"

and even a A United Coalition of Blogs for the Impeachment of George W. Bush"

Tags: impeach

Google Press Center: Zeitgeist

Google Zeitgeist 2005: Top Gainers of 2005

1. Myspace

5. orkut

I can believe orkut from all of the invite requests cluttering up any given inbox ...

web 2.woe

del.icio.us was offline for a couple of days. I felt quite retro grepping my backup ... now the Bloglines Pirate has made off with the servers. Woe! Gotta nip over and have me some Nearest Neighbor News.

comment spam

Yeash. Just tossed a slew of comment spam. Turned on comment moderation (which seems to have been added since I was mucking with this). Wheeee.

My Life in Tees - a photoset on Flickr

Jackson West's in Tees - a photoset on Flickr: "A selection of various free t-shirts I've managed to collect over the years -- a strangely accurate form of autobiography."

Funny, I'd do it, but, it would take months ...

Yahoo! Cacophony

Yahoo! Directory (archived): "If you ever pulled another child's hair and made them think someone else did it, you were engaging in anarchy. The Cacophony Society, a group of radical adults, are still tugging the proverbial hair of society."

Eeep! Their out of the closet. Just in time for Santarchy!

15MB of fame: More progress

15MB of fame: More progress: "We just released a pretty big update to the new site. We also basically opened the site up to everybody."

43 People looks great, is fun to poke at, and brought over plenty of goodness from 43things/places. Cheer this!

Explore Google Reader

Explore Google Reader: "Reader makes it easier to keep up with your ever-expanding reading list of content from across the web."

Haven't taken it for much of a spin, but, it includes a BlogThis! button.

YASN Invites

Many-to-Many: YASNS: ICQ Universe: "This takes the AOL Lobby/LambdaMOO closet pattern and adds it to the YASNS world -- an entry space where you're in the system, but not yet part of the social world. The dynamics of the 'Why I Should Be Invited' box could be amazing, since it will be people lobbying for inclusion by people who aren't, by definition, their friends."

Laughing Squid Stickers

Stickers! "Some of you have asked us where you can find our Laughing Squid vinyl stickers that you see around on laptops, cars, notebooks and other things. I usually have some with me when I’m out and about, leaving them at events, cafes, etc., but if you send a self-addressed stamped envalope (SASE) to our PO Box, we will just mail some out to you, for free of course."

Wow, I got quite the care package from the Primary Tentacle! A selection of stickers (I'm used to seeing the green, but, the purple is mighty tempting) and some postcards. Now I have to stalk some prime real estate ...

Tags: laughing squid, stickers

Google ig

Google personalized homepage now has bookmarks, news search, and arbitrary rss feeds. Plus it's fun to drag the boxes around ...

Last of WWII Comanche Code Talkers Dies

Charles Chibitty, the last survivor of the Comanche code talkers who used their native language to transmit messages for the Allies in Europe during World War II, has died. He was 83.

They recently had a Living Museum for the 60th Anniversary Commemorations of the end of the Second World War, in England, but, said that that would probably be the last since there were so few survivors. The The Last Days of WWII on the History Channel has been all about "60 years ago today." Which is kind of odd as that means that they can't play it again next year without editing.

I note that a G.I. Joe Navajo Code Talker was made some years ago.

Dead Tree Edition

It's been a week of dead tree media with some BBC news thrown in for good measure. It was interesting trying to get news out of the likes of the Daily Mail or the Guardian Weekly ... I'll be glad to settle back into the high-signal world of The Financial Times and the Economist. The cover pictures alone have been quite surreal.

Orkut

orkut is certainly a poster child. Plenty of interesting people have accounts, yet, there are few posts. Heck, the social software community has 2425 members and almost no traffic. I get more requests for invites to orkut than all other 'limited beta's combined. They're selling some mighty fine sizzle over there ...

Infoware

'And once you start thinking of web sites as applications, you soon come to realize that they represent an entirely new breed, something you might call an "information application," or perhaps even "infoware." - Tim O'Reilly

"Next-generation infoware ... because both of them let you quit

Syndicated news (and blogs) succeed because they only trade in meta-data and thus are fully shareable; it matters not one iota to anyone if you read that BBC story off a weblog sidebar, inline on a portal page or on the actual BBC.

picking up my signal across a network of enthusiastic relays each aggregating, reformating and rebundling in their bid for your membership attention." - TeledyN

"But I'd love to see competition based on the value that's wrapped around the portable data we choose to mesh with infoware services, rather than on data lock-in." - Jon Udell: Next-generation infoware

Tag: infoware

Tribe.net

Tribe 'open container' profiles allow one add and arrange modules in a two column format (plus one for ads). The modules can contain pictures, lists, rss feeds, a blog of sorts, and tribe content like friends, tribes, events, etc. I'm quite fond of the stalk module that shows your recent posts to public tribes.

The modules allow one to pull in rss feeds, so you could create a public
Digital Lifestyle Aggregator of sorts ... Livejournal posts of what they had for lunch seems to be popular. I have seen a few people put the rss output from a tribe into their public profile, mixing metaphors nicely. Ironically, tribe itself is not producing rss feeds for the in-profile blogs making the place smell of walled garden. In spite of former Tribe CEO Mark Pincus arguing for interoperability and open standards to allow users to interact with members of different networks without having to join those networks. Add the injury of no discussion post edits (every word is sacred) and no html markup we've got a near miss. Heck, even Friendster has Typepad blogs bolted on.

I've shifted most of my community reading to rss since discussion threads load like slow snot and now that people can put all sorts of interesting content on their profile page those often load even slower.

For some occasional under the hood data, check the Briatribe.

Tags: tribe.net, social network

Meta Social Networking Coming Soon

Something that looks like this is going to do something somewheres, Real Soon Now. Pull one of the others, it's got bells on.

tinytoolsmith YASN

Wanted: a social network to aggregate the toolsmiths: "I want something for folks building TinyTools: extensions, hacks, automator actions, dashboard widgets, cron scripts, Wordpress plug-ins, and the like. Since I’m nodding to Lazyweb anyhow, I may as well ping… anyone interested in building a tinytoolsmith YASN"

Humm, sort of a call to arms/request for widgets? More than a blog or del.icio.us pool, but, not quite the walled garden of a SN? We're already lousy with blogs, wikis, (anti-)social networks, source control repositories, search engines, and clipping and tagging services. No need to build a place for the widgets, just center of linking, tagging, and annotation. Color me interested.

However, we do need a SN just for invites to betas of SNs ...

Weekly Word War

The SFWeekly.com has huge SFWarfield/Fillmore ads this week. The
San Francisco Bay Guardian has full page whinge about it. (and this in a ish with the huge pull out Rasputin Manifesto section)

"'Under the terms of the deal, New Times will pay Clear Channel a sum in the high six figures for naming rights to the Warfield Theatre, which for the next three years will become the SF Weekly Warfield', BGP representatives said. In exchange, Clear Channel will spend so much money on advertising in the Weekly and Express that there will be little or no money left for competing print media." - San Francisco Bay Guardian News

Thankfully, Dog Bites throws the Guardian a bone.

Rojo - Your news, your way

Ah! I've hit upon an ideal use for Rojo. LazyWeb! Subscribe to lazyweb itself and a stack of searches then use Rojo's sharing and taging ...

profile if you want to play along.

Etc

Stacey's Literary License members save 20% on everything in the store, Thursday, July 14th through Saturday, July 16th. Including the paperback edition of A Hat Full of Sky by PTerry.

The Onion weekly in SF has good event listings and a newsletter. Dunno why you can't get to any of it online .... A new occasional paper, The East Bay Daily News which doesn't seem to have any news in it.

Rand McNally closed the Market street store. Looks like they only have a couple open nationwide, anymore. The Disney Store is also going the way of FAO Schwarz.

Typepad: New sidebar feed

Whoa, check out the preview of a sidebar feed at The Long Tail "So if you'd like me to serve as your filter and aggregator of Long Tail comment around the web, just copy the 'syndicate this sidebar' link into your favorite feedreader."

There are also reBlogs, that facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds, such as Eyebeam reBlog, unmediated reblog.

My tool of choice is Bloglines Clipping Blogs, even though
they point back to bloglines and don't expose the source url ... hence, not playing well with others.

Rojo has both shared and recomended links. But they're only good for other people using rojo. No rss feeds outbound that I've located.

London Online

Nice to see Wikipedia, Flickr, and Technorati, do good work and get props for it. (Technorati got Slammed. Flickr moved to Yahoo in a timely manner. Oh, and Yahoo provided hosting capacity to Wikimedia, too.)

Yahoo! launched a news blog. A first for Yahoo! News. Oddly enough, the blog had no feed listed, but the general feed page had one.

Transport for London feeds have been quite good. (and really show up BART)

People turned to the Londonist for news (which is more known for snark and event notices), so, they started to provide it.

One of my most treasured news sources remains Cagle.

Joi Ito's Web: HonorTags

Joi Ito's Web: HonorTags: "They are soliciting feedback. Maybe I should suggest HonorTagJoker."

HonorTagJoker is certainly catcher than HonorTagUnTag ...

orkut - communities

Invited some people to orkut and was surprised by how quickly it was running. Poked around a bit more and it turns out that all of the communites have no topics or events. That's one way to have a snappy anti-social network ...

Orkut is certainly the most anti-social of anti-social networks. Profiles are not visible without logging in, there are no rss feeds in or out, and they seldom even bother to post any news (much less server status reports).

Feednation

Feednation YANaggregator. Interesting in that you can subscribe to other peoples groups of feeds and copy them around (not sure what happens if the owner alters the group). Clumsy in that adding a feed can only go into 'new feeds', actually the entire UI is nonintuitive. Feeds can be turned off, which more sites should certainly adopt, and also copied to email. Mark All Read is nice, I'd really like a Mark Folder Read. Searching for feeds doesn't work well.

Profile

Technorati Tags: agregator, feednation

Google OS in the Works?

Google OS in the Works points to Google's Master Plan. Why is it always Orbital Mind Control Lasers? They need new Illuminati (or better Hats anyways).

Bloglines

Bloglines 325/761 and discarding rapidly.

Introducing HonorTags

Introducing HonorTags!

Wow! Massively incoherent. Citizen Journalists everywhere weep. Honor Tags is an idea introduced by Grass Roots Media (Dan Gillmor, Michael Goff and Jay Campbell) to put some really ugly self-tags on things that should be obvious by reputation at best or used to fib at worse.

I'd have to go HonorTagUnTag "I hate your tags. I'd rather not say anything and my work doesn't fit your categories." on everything.

Nearest Neighbor News Network

Shifted a stack of reading on human rights and media over to Nearest Neighbor News Network a collaborative filtering RSS aggregator. The Recommended Articles haven't been that interestng yet, Recommended Feeds have been medium, Similar Users has led me to several excellent feeds. Reading everything in time order without marking anything read is appealing for some types of feed.

Technorati Tags: aggregator,

Bloglines

Bloglines 366/840. Shifting stuff over to nnnn and perhaps Rojo today.

US casts doubt on new leader's legitimacy

US casts doubt on Iran's newly elected president: "Speaking on Fox News, Mr Rumsfeld admitted he did not know much about 'this young fellow'.

'But he is no friend of democracy. He's no friend of freedom. He is a person who is very much supportive of the current ayatollahs, who are telling the people of that country how to live their lives."

Oh no, in a civilized country the freedom fighters would never ally with the religious right and tell people how to live their lives. Throwing black kettles in glass houses after the horses have bolted, and all like that. Democracy good! (may not be valid in all countries).

reBlog

reBlog by Eyebeam: "A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software. "

There is a short stack of live reblogs to read from. Clippings.reblog says "I was using an RSS reader called NetNewsWire which has a weblog interface and allowed me to post items of interest directly to this site. However I have recently started using reBlog by eyebeam which provides a web interface for RSS aggregation filtering and publishing via moveabletype. Reblog is a more efficient method that allows for better attribution of sources."

I'm quite fond of Bloglines Clip Blogs that lets you easily create a blog while reading feeds or in the wild with the Firefox Toolkit.

Bloglines

Bloglines 348/826. Moved a few feeds elsewhere. Maybe Org/O43 too ...

Bloglines

Bloglines 375/825. Moved a stack of news over to Nearest Neighbor News Network but didn't unsub from them, yet.

head hat

head hat followed, of course, by a body T-shirt

Bloglines

Bloglines 356/829. Looking at other web-based rss aggregators, but, finding little of use.

Bloglines

Bloglines: 305/829. So noisy! Whatever do you think they are going on about?

Poo-rer

Winnie the Pooh took a hit over the weekend ...

John Fiedler (Piglet)
2/3/1925-6/25/2005 (80)

Paul Winchell (Tigger)
12/21/1922-6/24/2005 (82)

I was going to write this up more, but, Dossy got there first ...

Latte Art

Today I received a three-leaf clover latteart, which was kind of surprising. Usually I get spiders that are probably accidental. I'm quite fond of these ones ...

Bloglines

Bloglines: 267/828. Not too noisy ...

Bloglines

Bloglines: 266/816. I'll probably loose some org/o43. I should move a whole vertical (way?) to another service ...

Help Cameron finish his Ph.D. by filling out a survey “about how people use
their weblogs and their general communication behavior”.

Technorati: survey

E-ink

Sony's e-Book reader, the Librié, has a black and white ink-on-paper look, combined with a resolution of approximately 170 pixels per inch (PPI), gives an appearance similar to newspaper. Because the display uses power only when an image is changed, a user can read more than 10,000 pages before the four AAA Alkaline batteries need to be replaced. Some pix ...

Apparently "the combination of organic electronic backplanes and electrophoretic frontplanes could produce truly rollable, albeit monochrome, displays in the not-too-distant future." "this year you'll see real product prototypes. Then you'll see real products in volume within two years."

Finally!

LiveJournal tags

FAQ Question #229: "You can specify whether or not you want to allow your friends to tag your entries for you. By default, you are the only one who can edit your tags. If you want to let your friends tag your entries for you, you can change these settings"

Of couse, that ment biting the S2 bullet which has lead me in many circles this morning ...

Bloglines

Bloglines: 288/811. Bleh.

RedTacton

RedTacton is a new Human Area Networking technology that uses the surface of the human body as a safe, high speed network transmission path. It induces fluctuations in the body's electric field. They claim a data rate of 10 megabits per second. As opposed to the Blueskin rates of 3.7 kilobits per second being squeezed out by Matsushita.

I had no idea that personal-area networks would be colored ...

Les Claypool

Les Claypool put on a fine show at the friendly neighborhood Independent. It was very sold out and the place was packed (so packed that it really heated up the old tin can). I was hoping for Buckethead, but, wasn't surprised to see Gabby La La, a percussionist, and a drummer. There was a sitar, a ukulele, lead xylophone, oh, my! There might still be tix for Gabby La La with Les Claypool on Sunday. The show was so good that I am mighty tempted.

Bloglines

Bloglines: 343/810. 823 real soon now!

43 Places

43 Places is the next new thing from the Robot Co-op, the folks that brought you 43 Things.

Friendster

Friendster unclenched a little by letting the outside world see profiles. The TypePad blogs still seem bolted on (and I'm not sure why the controls are behind https). The blogs have both rss and notices mailed for friend blog updates.

Latte Art

latteart always looks like leaves and hearts. Why do mine always come out looking like spiders?

Bloglines

Bloglines: 293/805. Time to drop another vertical?