A Whole Lotta Nothing

links for 2005-03-31

• www.zoomquilt.org
  hit the flash link and start zooming. Incredible bit of artwork.
  (tags: art flash continuous)
• consumating - Hot nerdy girls and indie rock boys! With glasses!
  tagging meets dating!
  (tags: tags folksonomies dating socialsoftware)
• Overshadowed-flickr on PSP on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  wow, flickr on a PSP
  (tags: psp flickr hacking)
• Burningbird � The Little CC license that could, or When Technology is All Busted Up
  Shelly's saying we need to make CC output more precise, and she's right. It's tough to do while keeping it easy to license though.
  (tags: creativecommons rdf usability)

links for 2005-03-30

• posterwire.com the movie poster weblog
  Man, there's a blog for everything now
  (tags: blogs movies posters)
• Wired News
  Hey, it's my old pal Kragen on the steps of the supreme court!
  (tags: iplaw wirednews photos)
• [delicious-discuss] big news
  The belle of the ball just got a boyfriend
  (tags: delicious joshua funding startups)

Since U Been Corporate Slides

(Since U Been Corporate Slides, originally uploaded by mathowie)

Have you seen "songs as outlines?" I couldn't help but notice the funniest ones were the ones that looked like believable corporate slides from a powerpoint deck. I couldn't get this idea out of my head and thought of some outlines for Since U Been Gone. Then I nabbed Alan's slide templates and dropped them in, and Merlin kindly added many funny suggestions to it. I bet an enterprising youngster could code up an automatic way to pull the outlines off that LJ page and into a HTML slide template like this one.

I give you: Since U Been Gone as a corporate presentation

links for 2005-03-28

• AlterNet: DeLay's Dirty Dozen
  Tom Delay is pure, unadulterated evil.
  (tags: politics GOP asshat)

South by Etech recollections

During breaks in travel last week, I wrote a bunch of notes about both SXSW and Etech conferences and finished it off last night while waiting for a flight. What follows is a loose bunch of thoughts on various subjects.

SXSW

SXSW was fun, and good to catch up with everyone. At this point, I think it's officially a conference by and for bloggers, as the number of mentions of code or new products was minimal and every panel seemed to focus on the ins and outs of blogging, with some CSS thrown in. I enjoyed myself and the party atmosphere of the week even though I was nervous about having two talks. I don't recall anything too mind blowing as the conference has turned into a mix of summer camp reunion with friends and a four-day excuse to party. About the only interesting panel I recall was the one on minorities in blogging. Even though anyone can blog, it's still the domain of white males by and large, and while the speaker list at sxsw has plenty of women now, there were few people of color. The panel was a good one to have since it was just about the only one to force everyone to take a look at the medium critically. There's a difference between navel gazing and critical introspection and I think this one handled it well. I'd like to see more panels challenging conventions instead of celebrating them. One weird thing I noticed is that I rarely brought out my big digital SLR camera. Usually on a four day trip like this, I'd take probably 100-150 shots but thanks to my cameraphone and flickr, I left my SLR at the hotel and ended up taking barely a dozen photos with my full-sized camera, while I probably uploaded 30-40 shots to flickr that week. I imagine if cameraphones get up into the 3-5 megapixel range, people will just use those instead of dedicated cameras. There's no photo downloading, manipulation, or resizing necessary. You just shoot, mash a couple buttons, and send it off to flickr. It's a lazy photographer's dream.

Etech

Etech and SXSW used to be quite similar, with one a bit more technical than the other, but I think this year they really diverged. Etech felt a bit weird this time around, much less hackery and technical and much closer to what I assume conferences like PC Forum or Web 2.0 are about. The long story short is that Etech suddenly seemed to be about money. Everyone talking about getting or giving angel funding, dropping tips on talking to VCs, and half the crowd sported gray hair and suits instead of fauxhawks and cargo pants. It was odd. The cutting edge geeks at etech have always pushed code and potential product trends but it seems the bubble is back and the money guys have wised up, and they descended this year to check it out. In this year's money-ified etech, Joshua from delicious seemed like the last unfunded, unincorporated guy with a great idea and he was the belle of the ball. I saw him get mobbed after every talk, surrounded by what appeared to be VC types.

O-fucking-deo

Every time I attend SXSW or Etech, it seems like the really amazing moment doesn't happen until the final day, when for one reason or another a panel or demo blows my mind. Late on the last day of Etech, that demo was Odeo. I've long thought of podcasting as being technically cool, but problematic. You basically only have two options: download mp3 files off a website one by one by hand, or subscribe to a podcast and get everything, whether you wanted to hear it or not. There has to be a bandwidth-saving happy medium right? Odeo looks like it, offering in-browser previews and playback, a shopping cart-style download system, and the ability to subscribe in classic "download everything" podcast style if you want. The biggest innovation of Odeo in my mind was the browser-based multitrack recording studio. You don't need to own expensive, sophisticated audio software or hardware, you can just use your browser and built-in mic to record your voice and add music bumpers or other recorded audio. You can even edit your final tracks, all in the browser. It has to be seen to be believed. Powerful tools, all inside the browser and they'll work with any browser on any system with the Flash plugin. It makes basic audio technology available to anyone, and I can't wait to see what kinds of shows pop up on Odeo once they lower the technology bar for all. I got to talk to Ev for the first time in a couple years after his panel and I told him that while Odeo seemed to have a lot in common with flickr (you have friends and contacts and can easily find new tracks by your circle of friends), the in-browser recording set it apart. I remember telling him "It was like a flickr that included a free camera for every user." Just as Blogger+Blogspot lowered the bar and let anyone with an idea share their thoughts with the world, Odeo appears to be poised to do the same for sound.

Damn that Merlin Mann

While stuck awaiting delayed flights on the return home, I finally gave in and downloaded quicksilver and read all the tutorials. The strange thing is that while sometimes I feel like a slow, money-losing contestant on jeopardy when tabbing and auto-completing, the simple app launcher stuff is great. After training it to grab my ten favorite apps with just a couple keys, I closed down my dragthing launcher. Then I got used to the "open files with..." feature and cleaned my desktop of clutter. Now I have this zen-like clear desktop and anything I want is a keystroke away in quicksilver or expose. It only took a couple hours of tinkering but I definitely see what everyone is raving about. It feels like my mac just got that much easier and faster to use, and I finally got rid of my desktop clutter. I'm a bit of a lazy slob, often having dozens of folders and files on the desktop and now I have none. I've added App Rocket to my PC for the same effect and it's working pretty well as an app launcher too.

Conference IM stalk hacks

I was poaching folks from rendezvous in austin one day when I started to feel guilty and asked the person next to me if they ever felt pangs of guilt when doing this. "When doing what?" I heard back. I asked around, and no one among my friends had discovered a great (and potentially problematic) feature of iChat, so I might as well tell everyone here. Open your rendezvous buddy list and your aim buddy list and put them side by side. Now, in the conference-populated rendezvous list, look for a name of someone you've always wanted to talk to over IM but haven't yet. Click, hold-down, and drag their name from the rendezvous buddy list to the aim buddy list. Ta da! You just poached someone's public aim name onto your perma-buddy AIM list and they have no idea. When you leave the conference and return home you can chat with them over AIM. This is incredibly useful for getting friends onto your buddy list that you know personally but didn't know they used AIM. The more sinister fun/scary/stalky part is that you can also add famous people you'd never have aim names for, but that you happen to be on the same network with. When I first discovered this, I checked to see if it worked by putting Tim O'Reilly and a bunch of famous tech journalists on my list. The following week I realized I could tell when they were at their desk and it sufficiently creeped me out so I got rid of them. iChat should probably have a preference for whether or not you want to allow this feature (I would allow it personally, it's fun to touch base with conference goers afterwards), but for now it's a handy dandy free-for-all that no one seemed to know about. Now you know, so remember to poach everyone you'd like to talk to after the conference the next time you're at one. (update: several people emailed to say that it's in iChat's preferences, under privacy, so turn if off if you're concerned about this)

On Speaking

This year's conferences were a bit stressful for me because I had to talk three times in the span of four days, and two of the three talks were on subjects at the edge of my grasp. I don't get much practice talking in front of crowds so I always sweat these sorts of things. I think my community panel went well even though I prepared the least of all three talks. It was almost completely off the top of my head and fun to dive into the ins and outs of community management with Craig and Molly (it helped that she was an incredible moderator). My second panel at SXSW was my first time ever as a moderator and I think I did an ok job letting everyone talk and keeping the panel moving, but I did a terrible job introducing the subject and delineating the scope of the talk. My talk at Etech was more of a classic powerpoint-bullets-for-20-minutes kind of thing and in the formal confines of a standard lecture format, I think I did pretty bad. That kind of speaking takes practice and right before my talk I got to see a seasoned pro. I think I've honed in on what it takes to give a good talk in that format. Clay's talk that preceded mine was fantastic, one of the best I've seen at a tech conference. Clay teaches at NYU and his polish from regular lecturing showed. He knows how to work the crowd and drop jokes at appropriate times and he moves his arms and body enough to keep you from drifting off but not so much that it's annoying. What really wowed me was his command of audience attention span. I've seen Lessig do it well but I think Clay does it even better. Most folks have an attention span that cycles every 90 seconds or so, as they drift between total concentration and something less so. Clay had a knack for doing two things: he'd stay on a slide/point for about that long, and when he went to the next thing you were always ready to take it in. The other thing he did well was work with attention span on the macro level. He'd have pauses between shifts in subject matter to let the audience relax and cue everyone up for the Next Big Point he wanted to make. This entailed having a title slide for every section of the talk (maybe 8 or 9 of them in 40 minutes), which was completely black and only contained one or two words centered. Your eyes and mind could rest a bit on each one, which he used as a quick intro to a section, then he'd dive into charts 'n graphs or a meaty slide filled with bullets. After 3 or 4 slides on that section, he'd transition to another title slide that you could rest on. On an even more macro level, the entire talk created a thread between each section and made sense, and his conclusion simply reiterated the connections. It was just about as perfect as a talk could be and I can tell I have a lot to learn and a lot of practice ahead of me if I ever want to get any good at it. Until next year...

links for 2005-03-27

• Archinect : Schoolblog Beta : All Schools : Gorgonzola Catfish Pizza
  "Baking cookies is like meditation, but it tastes better." -- Bryan Boyer
  (tags: quotations quotes meditation)
• A Day at the Races
  My best shot from today at Santa Anita
  (tags: horses horseracing photos flickr)

New Feature

I jotted down a bunch of thoughts during SXSW and Etech. They're not entirely related to one another, but I promise if you read through the whole thing you'll probably pick up one new idea or trick from it.

links for 2005-03-26

• Flickr: Stakeholders United
  The lame part of a buyout: Yahoo backlash coupled with users feeling entitled to payment/rewards
  (categories: flickr yahoo community)
• Furdlog: Pew Internet & American Life Project's Say Going Into Grokster
  Great roundup of pew reserach data on music downloads
  (categories: furdlog iplaw music mp3)
• Absenter
  Awesome gallery design. Combines the best of bigempty.com with easy navigation.
  (categories: photos photoblogs css design)

SXSW 2000, milkshake media party

(SXSW 2000, milkshake media party, originally uploaded by mathowie)

The VH1 "Where are they now?" webloggger special.

links for 2005-03-25

• Gear Live | SLEEPTRACKER Watch Review
  Back in my college biology class, we came up with this watch/clock idea too. Great to see it come to life.
  (categories: sleep wishlist gadgets)
• Universal Desktop Station
  cellphone "base" to make it feel like a real phone at home
  (categories: wishlist phones cellphones)
• Help the Decemberists!
  All their gear is gone. I like their music, so I pitched in enough to cover the two albums I downloaded plus more.
  (categories: music fundraising paypal)
• IP Funny -- Intellectual Property Humor
  Great roundup of hilarious patent application illustrations
  (categories: iplaw patents trademarks blogs)
• I-Hacked.com Taking Advantage Of Technology - Hacking Coke Machines
  this could be fun
  (categories: hacks soda coke)
• Apple - iPod - Download - Thank You
  Apple's iPod updater page is broken, here's the final windows download page you would get if it worked.
  (categories: ipod windows apple)
• New York Auto Show: 8:30 - Scion Unveils New t2B Concept : Jalopnik
  For some reason, I love boxy cars. This looks like a great update to the xB
  (categories: cars design scion)
• WSJ.com - Many Advertisers Find Blogging Frontier Is Still Too Wild
  WSJ on blogads, with a tiny MetaFilter mention
  (categories: wsj blogs advertising mefi)

Y! CC

Yahoo just released a Creative Commons Search that kicks all kinds of ass, drawing upon their massive database of webpages featuring CC licenses. In my tests it is returning as good or better results than the main Creative Commons search, and it's doing it instantly thanks to Yahoo's muscle.

I used to think of Yahoo as the CBS of search engines -- it's the search engine your grandma probably uses to find Murder She Wrote episode guides. But in the past few months they've really turned it around. My Yahoo continues to impress, they picked up Flickr, and now Creative Commons search is baked in. This is not your father's search engine anymore.

links for 2005-03-24

• Driving 280 Movie
  I once wrote a post about how beautiful the 280 is, since they don't allow billboards. This proves my point.
  (categories: freeway sfbayarea video)
• Introductions on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  I love this shot.
  (categories: rollerderby flickr motion photographs)
• Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects | Mountain Tree House
  freaking gorgeous home.
  (categories: architecture modernhomes wheniwinthelotto)

links for 2005-03-23

• Extension Room :: SessionSaver .2
  insanely useful firefox extension. Your browser never forgets where you left off.
  (categories: firefox mozilla utilities extensions)
• UncommonGoods: "I MIGHT BARF" INFANT SNAPSUIT
  awesome
  (categories: baby shirts wishlist)
• Thoughts of a Dreamer
  dude that shot up a school's LJ page
  (categories: rippedfromtheheadlines LJ blogs)

links for 2005-03-22

• Giant Computer Key Seat
  we could dork it up on the deck with a couple of these
  (categories: nerds furniture)
• Mathowie is Having A Massage
  will return soon. (edit the subdomain to get anything you want to have a massage)
  (categories: 404 flickr comedy)
• Treehugger: Q&A. Getting Started with Prefab
  A zillion prefab links
  (categories: architecture modernhomes sustainabledesign)
• Smith&Hawken solar lights
  clean looking solar lights
  (categories: backyard garden lighting)

links for 2005-03-21

• bitter pill: phun with fotonotes
  mark does gina's fotonotes
  (categories: dhtml flickr photoannotation)
• Malcolm Gladwell on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  When flickr adds photo printing, I will totally get a poster of this
  (categories: malcolmgladwell sxsw photos)

flickrhoo

(flickrhoo, originally uploaded by mathowie)

'tis true!

links for 2005-03-20

• buyolympia.com: bo5_wwdd
  They should sell a "Mark Mothersbaugh is my co-pilot" bumpersticker with this
  (categories: wishlist tshirts for-preshrunk)

links for 2005-03-18

• Josh Rubin: Cool Hunting: PodShanking
  I'm very happy to see this hack released
  (categories: ipod mp3 music sharing)
• Six Apart - Professional Network - Power Tools
  cordless drills from 6A
  (categories: blogs programming api webservices)

More fun with etech audio

Ev gave an amazing demo of Odeo. That thing is going to be as big (or bigger) than Flickr, I'm sure of it.

Here's the whole talk as a ogg file (my mp3 export in audacity refuses to work) and some photos of the screens on my feed (lots more I'll upload later).

Danny and Merlin's lifehacks talk was good too, here's the whole thing as an ogg file as well.

Lessig Keynote from Etech

Lessig Keynote and afterwards discussion and questions, recorded on my iTrip and very lofi (9Mb and 12Mb, respectively). I'm sure high quality versions will be online in the next few weeks, but for now there's this.

Lawrence Lessig Keynote, Etech
2005
Keynote talk and discussion at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference.
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig Keynote, Etech
2005
Keynote talk and discussion at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference.
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig

-->

Put your apps into a COMA!

After hearing so much about Ruby on Rails at etech, I think it's time to announce my new approach to web application design:
ColdFusion On Molasses.

The marketing people tell me that it will be known as COMA and I expect an Adaptive Path article any day now, as I embark on this new revolution.

MetaFilter, my opus, is the first public application written exclusively in COMA.

links for 2005-03-16

• SXSW 2005 Notes: "How to Grow an Online Community" Panel SXSW 2005 Notes: "How to Grow an Online Community" Panel SXSW 2005 Notes: "How to Grow an Online Community" Panel
  Almost word-for-word transcript of my community panel
  (categories: sxsw conferences transcriptions)
• Treehugger: Voltaic Solar/Electronic Backpack
  cellphone charging solar powered backpack
  (categories: wishlist brucesterling ecodesign)

Etech05: Cars

(Etech05: Cars, originally uploaded by etech)

Something folks have been talking about for months now: a mac mini embedded in a car dash, running an entertainment OS

Two spur of the moment zingers worth sharing

Zeldman: What's your shirt say?
Me: Please Mess with Texas
Zeldman: You know, that original slogan was for a anti-litter campaign
Me: Yeah, well, it's certainly taken on a life of its own since then
Zeldman: True
Me: It's now the official US foreign policy

Me: Kathryn, we should get going to make the Wonkette panel
Kathryn: You think it'll be busy?
Me: Imagine Malcolm Gladwell... with breasts
Kathryn: ...
Me: That's how busy it will be.

links for 2005-03-13

• Forward Ever: Boycott "White" Runner's World Magazine
  I have to agree, this doesn't make much sense considering the dominence of Africans at marathon events
  (categories: running magazines boycotts)

Fun with perception

I just got off the weirdest plane flight. It started in line to get my ticket. The guy two people in front of me was checking his bag and casually leaned down, picked up a wastebasket and began to hurl into it. Odd, but it happens to all of us, sometimes.

After I got into the plane, I noticed Mr. Hurl was two rows in front of me and soon after we started off, his sickness continued. But before the vomit vapors could reach me, I couldn't help but notice the plane filled with the most pungent of other bodily vapors. It didn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out the nervous sweaty guy looking all around across the aisle was probably to blame. After just a few more minutes passed, the beverage carts began rolling and the woman in front of me, trapped from the bathrooms at both ends by carts, decided to change her baby's diaper on the seat immediately in front of me. No lie.

These seemingly random, everyday things combined into a sort of "perfect storm" that resulted in the worst case of stink plane I've experienced. I wondered if I could survive the next two hours.

But something amazing happened soon after. A flight attendant manning a cart pulled out a big bag of Foldgers brew, poured half a water bottle through the unused coffee grains and into a stack of paper towels. She then took these coffee-grain soaked towels and walked the length of the plane several times, wiping the sides and undersides of the luggage compartments. Suddenly I was whisked away from the bowels of the stinkiest plane on earth to the tasty hills of columbia. I could swear I saw Juan Valdez picking coffee beans out the window below.

The flight wasn't that bad from there on out. My hat's off to flight attendant's MacGuyver-esque skills in saving us from hours of smell torture.

Me and Malcolm

(Me and Malcolm, originally uploaded by Ben Brown)

Ben Brown, starfucking

Malcolm Gladwell, slumming

links for 2005-03-12

• Open Source P2P: No Malware, EULA
  Want to use a file trading network without fear of infecting your computer? Go open source.
  (categories: p2p malware spyware opensource)
• Sneak preview: Engadget RSS feed as seen via Tiger Quartz Extreme - Engadget - www.engadget.com
  RSS + OS 10.4 = Pointcast reborn. And I really loved pointcast's zooming news screensaver (no, really).
  (categories: rss osx pointcast visualizations)

links for 2005-03-11

• cheesedip.com: everybody just say the word, oh!
  ODB covered Sussudio. Amazing
  (categories: music mp3 covers)
• Flickr Photo Download: ANILOMIC
  Superman's Dad Anil
  (categories: blogs flickr comedy comics)
• Is your iPod spying on you?
  The USA Today wrote a terrible misleading column, which Pete dismantles here.
  (categories: engadget usatoday ipod mp3 fud)
• LiveModern - Catch the Breezehouse at Sunset
  This looks even better than the Glidehouse. Can't wait to see images of the real thing.
  (categories: architecture modernhomes prefab)
• Flickr Selects EZ Prints to Provide Fulfillment of Photo Printing
  Flickr will finally have a "order prints" button! Yay!
  (categories: flickr photos prints)

Is Gmail registration open to the public?

(gmail, originally uploaded by mathowie)

Today was the first time I ever noticed a gmail signup pitch on google.com. Maybe they've opened it to all finally?

This week's best thing ever

Kelly Clarkson, the first American Idol winner, has a breakout hit called "Since U Been Gone" that you've probably heard. It's totally addictive and I think may just be this year's Hey Ya. Even my indie rock friends all adore the track (even Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing fame puts it in his top three favorites).

So when word got out that indie rock legend Ted Leo covered it, we searched and searched and a bounty was even offered. Eventually, it was found, at UGO.com. Worlds colliding!

I ripped the audio from the streaming video file on their site and here's the song: Ted Leo doing a cover of "Since U Been Gone" (192kbps, MP3)

It was worth the search and the wait.

Wrens promo out

I was happy to see Kathryn's documentary project just released a preview.

Merlin turned me onto The Wrens a year or so ago (and it looks like he'll be opening for them next month), and I've grown to love their music. The preview gives a good insight into the band and really does start to tell the story that basically boils down to "The Hoop Dreams of indie rock."

Congrats to the crew on getting this out.

links for 2005-03-09

• Lanovision Beta
  For sharing video on campus. I wonder if the MPAA will get this kid booted from Yale over it.
  (categories: napster video p2p)
• Colicky Baby? Read This Before Calling an Exorcist
  note to self: read and retrieve later
  (categories: nyt baby)
• Nike Considered.
  Nike's new push for eco-friendly footwear. I want a pair of these.
  (categories: wishlist shoes enviornment)
• Photobloggies
  Cool, can't wait to see the winners. Hopefully a bunch of photoblogs I've never heard of.
  (categories: photos blogs awards photoblogging)
• An Artsy Fartsy Weblog
  I love Scott's illustration style
  (categories: blogs illustration artists)

links for 2005-03-08

• fredflare.com | Peeps marshmallow maker
  Create your own peeps! Finally!
  (categories: peeps easter diy)
• Lance Arthur's Conspicuous Consumption
  O to be a gay man making lots of money
  (categories: wishlist livingvicariously stuff)
• nickdenton: Writing over at Gridskipper
  Denton actually blogging is like when you see a store manager stoop down to bag groceries. heh.
  (categories: gridskipper blogs gawker)
• rc3.org | Politics and conscience
  "Reading every piece of news and pondering how it helps or hurts your side in the political debate is no way to live." Amen, Rafe. Amen.
  (categories: politics redstates bluestates democrats GOP)

The efficiency of markets

1). I've been meaning to pick up a copy of Blink ever since it came out, because I'm a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell's writing. But then I thought...

2). Ever since I heard him talk about his work, I would prefer hearing the new book rather than reading it, so I...

3) Searched and searched for a paid, downloadable audio version. Surprisingly, there was none to be found on iTunes or Audible for this best selling author, so I eventually...

4). Broke down and purchased the unabridged CD set for about $10 more than the book, and I had to wait several days for it to show up via UPS, and now...

5). I am importing the tracks into iTunes, one CD at a time, with barely any metadata since CDDB knows little about the discs. The process has taken me about 90 minutes to get through, loading and ejecting discs one by one, while I work on other things.

Blogspot is hurting America

Blogspot is currently broken. While it always aimed to be the place to get a free weblog, it has been the subject of various exploits and gaming.

Case in point: yesterday I got a porn spam that slipped through since the from: line was set to my own email, and amid the garbage text was a URL on blogspot. This URL:
http://trampling-high-heels3169.blogspot.com/

If you go there and check it out, it pretty much as the exact same text as the spam, but the URL leads to the spammer's real target site.

A friend recently returned from a anti-spam conference and said someone gave a demo of a spamming tool. They showed how it grabbed a zillion email addresses from a database, started churning out the email while hopping from one free open proxy server to another, and one curious last step was to automatically create a new blogger account, create a new site on blogspot, and load the email text from the spam as an entry. The last step was to raise the search engine position for the spammer's site and message and was completely automated.

When folks are using a blog host for spam and it becomes a key feature of automated spamming tools, I think it's time to fix it.

How about adding a captcha at the very least, to thwart those doing automatic script-based spaming of blogspot?

links for 2005-03-05

• Work Magazine
  This looks cool. I like seeing that new magazines are well designed, even though design isn't the subject of them
  (categories: magazine work printdesign)
• fliker.com
  A pretty cool visual real-time image search engine with an unfortunate name
  (categories: search shockwave ajax)
• The Portland Mercuryr: Feature (05/02/02)
  Spiderman's Greatest Bible Stories!
  (categories: comics spiderman comedy religion)

YHBT

I've been on Declan McCullagh's mailing list for the past 3-4 years and when I saw him pimping his article about a possible blogging crackdown from the FEC, I had a strong feeling everyone was being played. The title and lead-in are finely crafted to rile most any blogger, be they right or left in political persuassion. The concept of blogs as regulated speech also seemed a stretch and I had to keep in mind that Declan, though I like him for the most part and love his mailing list, is a libertarian that wants to see completely unregulated speech and spending. Every six months or so Declan sticks his neck out and is shown to be incorrect. Then a few months pass and people forget, then another crazy headline shows up one of his articles. He's really good at writing headlines that make people talk, it's just that accuracy doesn't always follow.

I'm glad to hear from James that my first impression was likely right, and this is much ado about nothing.

Blogosphere, you have been trolled.

links for 2005-03-04

• Techdirt:Who's To Blame In Cameraphone Recording Of Teacher Outburst?
  Teacher freaks out, gets caught on video, school wants to ban video. Stupid. Also, not a cameraphone as the articles state.
  (categories: video schools)
• Bains Software: accessTunes
  listening to iTunes shares remotely
  (categories: mp3 itunes utilities)
• Land Living: Modern Lifestyle Design
  yeeeow. This is the kind of house I want in Portland.
  (categories: architecture modernhomes pdx)
• prolific.org: Sorry, but I hadn't heard it before
  best font joke ever.
  (categories: fonts comedy)
• Goldfish Racetrack : Racetrack Fish Bowl - Postmodern Pets
  A $100 on the orange one.
  (categories: fish pets fun)

links for 2005-03-03

• 90% Crud: Lessig on C-Span
  set TiVos to stun
  (categories: whereintheworldislarrylessig cspan tvworthwatching)
• NPR : Lorne Michaels: 35 Years of 'SNL'
  The father of modern sketch comedy on fresh air
  (categories: npr freshair SNL comedy)
• Whiskey Bar: Greenspan at the Bat
  This is a work of genius.
  (categories: gop bush politics socialsecurity greenspan)
• ABC News: Kansas Voters Keep Anti-Bias Ordinance
  yay, the phelps clan lost one.
  (categories: TheGay(TM) kansas gayrights)

When bad copyright law hurts good singers

My one reality TV show indulgence is American Idol. I accidentally caught an early episode during the second season and I haven't missed one since. During the two years I've watched it, I've long wondered why singers choose the songs they do, since song choice is everything in the competition and frequently folks seem to choose from a fairly narrow pool. At one time I thought that maybe they could only sing songs that 20th Century Fox had the rights to, or that labels were friendly with.

(51 sec, 17Mb mpeg2)

Tonight, during the voting off phase, a contestant let slip that they do actually have to deal with song rights clearance, right up to the moment the show airs. Watch the clip to catch the explanation, and how the chosen song didn't work out. She was voted off the show moments later.

I know there are rights built into music law that anyone can do cover songs, but I suspect that's only for recordings, not performances, and the rights holders of songs have a say whether their song can be sung on a national show or not. It's a shame because often you'll see someone do really well in the audition phase where they seemingly can perform any song they want, then flounder on stage when limited to the cleared song pool. Aloha was a pretty good singer, but I guess performance rights can get in the way.

links for 2005-03-02

• blo.gs: for sale
  Damn. I use this instead of RSS for the most part, so hopefully someone picks it up and runs with it.
  (categories: blogs blogservices blo.gs)

iTalk

(iTalk, originally uploaded by mathowie)

I've had my new iTalk unpacked for about five minutes and I'm amazed by how simple it was to use (just click into place, and push to record). Playback is easy and you can even use it as a small, tinny speaker.

It's crazy to think you can store something like 20 hours of your own recordings with this and my mind races when thinking of how I would have used this technology when I was in college (napster could have been loaded with lectures, not music). I'm also thinking it could serve as a pretty cool way to record Kay and I talking about the upcoming baby for later (much later) playback.

Imagine how freaky it would be to hear a recording of your parents from 20 years ago, debating what to name you, talking how much you kick everyday, and how much they're looking forward to meeting you.

update: this is exactly what I'm talking about. A great use of available technology.

The elusive Make

I've been hearing nothing but rave reviews for Make in the past two weeks, but I haven't seen one yet, and it's not for a lack of trying. Here's the response so far to my requests of "Do you carry the new magazine called Make?":

Powell's Technical Bookstore (last week, in Portland): "Hmm, never heard of it. It's by O'Reilly? Huh, we should carry it but I haven't seen anything about it"

Borders Books (last night, by PacBell park): "Nope."

Fog City News (hip newsstand in SF, today): "We've had several requests for that, but we don't know who is distributing it so we can't even order it."

Stacey's Bookstore (SF, half a block from Fog City, today): "No sign of it as far as I can tell. Try the newsstand down the street."

I tried to subscribe a couple weeks ago, but the page spit out an error when I forgot to check off a select box, and it refuses to accept or submit my card now. Ugh.

update: turns out that you can only order it from Amazon, at least for the first printing. I heard about the new issue on so many blogs I just assumed you could find it on a newsstand, but I guess folks just got freebies or subscriptions directly from O'Reilly.

links for 2005-03-01

• Economist.com | Obituary
  HST obit at the Economist, a rocking good read
  (categories: huntersthompson obits gonzo)
• Watch free Live Broadband tv broadcasts
  claims to offer streaming TV from all over the world. Hope it actually works.
  (categories: tv netvideo)
• Making the video for "Drive" - a photoset on Flickr
  Woot! New Citizens Here and Abroad video in the making
  (categories: indierock musicvideo citizenshereandabroad)