Category: Internet

Some very good news for the good guys today. Watertown blogger Lisa Williams was among several local bloggers who won a NewsChallenge grant today. The grants are being given in honor of “ideas and projects that will transform community news”; certainly H2OTown qualifies, as does Ethan Zuckerman for his work on Global Voices (thanks to Universal Hub and Doc Searls for pointing me in their direction).

Another mazel to Feedburner, who is being purchased by the omnivorous Google for $100 million. Guess that says one of two things: there is real money to be made in advertising in RSS feeds, or there’s a buying war on in the online advertising inventory market.

New York Times: How to Make Your Cellphone Act Like a BlackBerry. David Pogue discusses three options for doing email on a regular cell phone: Google, Yahoo, and Teleflip. Who? I first linked to Teleflip almost two years ago, in the context of their still-free universal email-to-SMS gateway (now rebranded as FlipOut).

The new service, FlipMail, apparently will allow checking any email account from the phone as SMS messages, provided you’re ok with reading only the first 120 characters, and eventually with seeing ads. But there should be a lot of people for whom this will beat investing in a smartphone so that they can run the Gmail Mobile client or Yahoo Go, and Teleflip stands to make some revenue from the ad stream, which will be nice for them.

Pogue misses the point, too, about the Gmail and Yahoo offerings. They are almost certainly intended first for preloading on smartphones, second as downloads for power users.

The passive-aggressive notes blog (see my prior post) is a great example of a subgenre of blogs that neatly illustrates the idea that there is an advocate and observer for every possible peccadillo in life, no matter how modern. I refer to them as the Obsessively Tracking Mildly Objectionable Things blogs, and their main value is that they provide great sociological data about phenomena that would have previously gone uncommented on because the cost of complaining about the peccadillo is higher than the cost of putting up with it. (The Internet: lowering transaction costs, for better or worse.)

The nice thing about this blog, though, is its blogroll, which is a whole collection of blogs that Obsessively Track Mildly Objectionable Things: the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks; the Literally, a Web Log blog (covering misuse of the word literally; Apostrophe Abuse; the Ban Comic Sans blog; my new favorite, the Lowercase l blog (which calls out signage that uses a lowercase L where it should use upper case); and the old reliable, the Silent Penultimate Panel Watch, tracking wasted silent panels in newspaper comic strips.

Other blogs in this category that I don’t think exist, but should:

• The Who Let Their Dog Crap on My Lawn and Didn’t Pick It Up blog
• The People Unfamiliar with the Ban on Liquids on Airlines Who Slow Up the Security Line blog
• The People Who Forward Ill Thought Out Jingoistic Emails blog
• The Blog About the Guy Who Leaves “Citation Needed” on Obvious Statements in Wikipedia Articles.

The passive-aggressive notes blog reminds me of a coworker of mine at Microsoft who used to fly off the handle about water cooler hygiene. At one point, he got so outraged about how people were using the water cooler that he posted a note that said “Don’t dock the bottle! If you must refill a plastic water bottle, don’t place the bottle over the water cooler spigot and share your germs with everyone!”

I don’t think he made too many friends that way.

But there’s something about office kitchens that brings this tendency out in people. Each individual likely is in the kitchen by himself and thinks of it as his or her own domain; when a reminder (in varying degrees of rudeness) comes that it is in fact a shared space, the individual can lash out in some surprisingly ugly ways.

The office kitchen, in short, is a lot like an Internet forum.

In the category of ideas that sound horrid unless you consider the alternative: the Nosefrida, a nasal aspirator for kids that works on the same principle as the late-70s gas tank siphon. I don’t care how many filters are on that puppy, the thought of putting my mouth on a tube that is filled with preschooler snot is pretty revolting.

But it’s a great product name. (Via BoingBoing.)

Lore Sjöberg posits a future of hybrid websites in Wired’s Alt Text column: Let’s Make Website Mashups, Like Netflickr, Figg and BoingPress. BoingPress is pretty funny (“This blogging service provides all the functionality of WordPress, and in addition automatically links to stories about DRM, the Creative Commons, Disneyland and anything John Hodgman does ever”).

I clicked through thinking I was going to see something about SalonHerringWiredFool, probably the earliest automated content mashup (it combined RSS feeds from four sites, back in 1999). You can even see what it looked like back in 2000, apparently the last time it ran.

I realized this morning driving into work that there is a structural reason for my blogging less (though much of the blame is because I have a very busy plate). The specific reason is that my best blogful time is the morning, over coffee, when my synapses are just waking up and my cross-connections are most fruitful. My morning routine has gotten much busier, because (among other reasons) I am doing a lot more work with our office in Munich these days. Because they are six hours behind, that means I basically have to be on the phone first thing to catch them.

Ah well.

In lieu of actual content, I present a phone that one of the carriers really should sell, which I’ve nicknamed the LOLPhone (courtesy Worth1000, linked from BoingBoing):

The new news cycle: water main breaks, employee in the building above takes camphone pictures… which are solicited for the evening news. As we’ve always said, the relationship between blogs and “official” news organizations is not one way.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think it’s too bad the Tanglewood Festival Chorus doesn’t get involved in the Pops season opening concerts. Then I could have been there for the big fight.

Most novel use of the DMCA: suing companies for not purchasing your supposedly superior DRM technology, claiming that failure to use the most effective DRM technology constitutes avoidance of a technological encryption measure. I suppose if you can’t sell it, you can always sue…

Via Smilin’ Tyler, Murdering Masonic Reptilian Shape-Shifters. Looks like fell asleep between the 6 o’clock news and reruns of V: The Final Battle and decided that they were being threatened by human-reptilian hybrids. Favorite line: “In the duration my brother Ken kept getting struck from behind in the skull by assailants using what appeared to be heavy boards or bats on the top of his skull, the attacks occurred when he went to get mail, go to his garage, walk to get a newspaper.” Reminiscent of Woody Allen’s line, “The creatures motioned to me to come forward, which I did, and they injected me with a fluid that caused me to smile and act like Bopeep.”

Right up there with my old friend VPAC, my friends the Vampire Piranha Arsonist Clown… Deer. No, I don’t know where the D went in that acronym, either. And the whole story behind VPAC will have to wait for another time.

NY Times: No, Really, It Was Tough: 4 People, 80 Martinis. Having tried and failed to articulate the differences among six or seven types of wine, I can only imagine the challenge that this team of tasters faced in their martini-gin review. Palate fatigue, for one.

Local blogger Evan points out that only in Boston would one see the alfresco bookstore strategy that the Brattle Book Shop uses to display its merchandise. I’d go one farther: only in Boston in the spring, where the whole city temporarily goes giddy as the weather warms up and the sun comes out again.

Slashdot points to an embarrassing story for Business 2.0, a tech centered business magazine that forgot to check the integrity of its backups… and lost its entire June issue. Irony: they had mailed the text for the entire issue to their lawyers for review, so the “only” work that had to be redone was the art and layout. I guess they’d better call in Bono so he can make up the entire issue on the spot; after all, he did it for an album once.

Boing Boing: One week to stop REAL ID. Pointer to an interesting list of arguments about why Homeland Security’s push for a national ID is not only ill-thought-out but also potentially illegal.

Boston Singers Resource: John Oliver. An interview with the sui generis director of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

Probably the same people who think Flash intro pages are a good idea.

That appears to be who runs the show, anyway. The Webbys are the only web award that I’m aware of where the agency, as in ad agency, is given prominent mention.

What has me spun up about this? Best Navigation/Structure: Ikea Dream Kitchen, which appears to have won based solely on a Flash-based VR click-and-hold interface which, needless to say, is badly broken on text-based browsers. Please tell me how this qualifies as best structure, guys.

All is not awful in the Webby world; I don’t think I would have found PoetryFoundation.org without the awards. But seriously guys. I think the whole Web 2.0 thing is overwrought, but I can’t help but think Web 1.0 when I look at that list of awardees. (And yes, I know Flickr is there too; I believe the exception proves the rule.)

House in Progress: National Rebuilding Day. Very cool concept, a bit like the home renovation version of Habitat for Humanity. See the national site of Rebuilding Together for more details.

Matthew Kirschenbaum has updates on the status of his forthcoming book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, which is listed as publishing next January.

On Martin Fowler’s Refactoring website, an online catalog of refactorings. Useful for those, like me, whose programming muscles are idle from long disuse.

ITSMWatch: ITIL’s Top 10 Quick Wins. Useful summary of actions that can help illustrate the business benefit of IT Service Management adoption.

Via BoingBoing, an amazingly obsessive recreation and imagination of Bag End, Bilbo Baggins’s home, in miniature. Eight rooms and countless tiny knick-knacks, all to scale for tiny hobbit action figures.

Boston Globe: The bell at Old South Church to toll 33 times. A somber reminder that as Christians we are supposed to care about the soul of the murderer as well as the souls of the murdered. How difficult that is has never been made clearer than today.

The Globe, again: Mom says body found on Cape is her son, a missing MIT student. Daniel Barclay had been missing since April 8. Obligatory eerie note: the last contact he had with anyone was via his AIM away message, which read:
“I have to meet with some sketchy people I thought I’d never have to deal with ever again in east Cambridge.”