TV Links

From the "too good to be true" Department comes TV Links, a site that aggregates TV shows available for viewing online. After clicking on a few links to shows an finding paydirt, I was feeling encouraged. I decided to click on a few more before declaring it "worth checking out." The final tally was 6 out of 10 links lead to viewable shows. Actually 5.5 since one show seemed to start partway through.

So I'd say it's probably worth checking out but don't get your expectations up too high. Selection is a bit scattershot, but not bad. Plenty of cartoons and a few popular shows like Battlestar Galactica and 24, but you may have to cross your fingers a lot.

It's a ridiculous shame that sites like this even need to exist.

TV Links

Web Worker Daily:Blog Archive Five ways to be nice to your eyes

Via Web Worker Daily. Protect them peepers.

Web Worker Daily: Blog Archive Five ways to be nice to your eyes

Can Two Sinking Media Ships Combine to Float?

Sirius and XM want to merge and I think it's a good idea. They're both floundering financially despite hype and happy customers the seem to be maxed out. So perhaps a combining of on-air talent will re-energize satellite radio and help it compete with regular radio, CDs, iPods, etc.

I personally haven't invested in either service for a few reasons:

• I have Rhapsody To Go and really get all the music I want
• I couldn't choose between the services since each had something I wanted
• I don't drive all that much and the car really is the only place I'd use it. In fact the only reason I was considering it is because my fiance does drive a bit now, however she's only been lukewarm on the idea
• I don't want yet another monthly fee

Perhaps combined the service can offer a compelling set of programming that would be hard to resist.

Free Time+math=A Helpful Photo Tip

I take a lot of group photos at work for our Intranet, which means I take a lot of photos of people with their eyes closed. I know they're not doing it on purpose, but it's really irritating when the best shot in the bunch is ruined by a blinker. The "Velocity" blog may be able to help, thanks to some math and some free time to test.

Velocity Web Site - Blink-free photos, guaranteed

Liquor Snob: Great Information if You Can Find It

A crapload of ads clutter up this otherwise unique and knowledge-packed site about all things liquor. The search wasn't working so I guess I'll have to plow through the posts to find some Gin advice.

Liquor Snob - News and tips on all things alcoholic, including beer and wine, breathalyzers, cocktails and spirits; plus drink recipes, booze reviews and more. All the news that's fit to drink.

iDig iStockphoto.com

I use a fair amount of stock photography in my work and while I've always liked and used the heck out of photos.com which is subscription based (about $500 per year) my fiancee has turned me on to a new stock photo site, that I think is even better. It's called iStockphoto.com and it's much more than a stock photography site, it's a community. Community sites are a dime a dozen, but what sets istockphoto.com apart is that this is a community that produces some amazing original stock photography, illustrations, Flash animations, and video that is not only high-quality but inexpensive. iStockphoto.com runs on a credit system. All the artwork is provided by an extremely active community of artists who get paid for their work directly. Anyone can contribute once they fill out an application and get accepted (your first samples are reviewed by a panel). This is a welcome quality control system, and is working well.

To use the service you buy however many credits you want and then you use them pay for whatever you download. Photos are 1 to 6 credits depending on the size you want. Illustrations (vectors thank you!) are mostly 5 credits. Video is 5 to 20 credits. Flash animations seem to vary a bit, but the ones I've seen are usually 1 credit.

The site itself is very Web 2.0 and to delve into all the cool features would take an awfully long post, but the short list would include:

• User ratings
• Tagging
• A great Lightbox utility
• Forums
• A creative network
• A blogging tool

Not only do I get a lot of use out of the site, but I have often started simply surfing around to check out all the cool stuff available. I can't say I've done that with many other commerce sites.

Pipe Down: Fun with Yahoo! Pipes

Well, I've finished my first Yahoo! Pipe. I decided to create a feed that pulls from several "life hacking" blogs and limits results to posts containing lists of tips (which I often find myself drawn to). I rounded up feeds from a list of popular life hacking blogs like Lifehacker, 37 Signals, and WebWorker Daily and told Yahoo! Pipes to Fetch them. Then I connected that to the Content Analysis operator, and then connected that to a filter. I had to set the filter up to permit only blog post titles that contain keywords common in "Tips" type posts. I chose: "tips, top, some, favorite, best, steps, and ways." This was based on reading through several of the blogs and noting what words commonly appeared in the titles of "tips" type posts.

Lastly, I told it to sort by Publication Date and filter out duplicates. Here's the result:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/xMKQRnW92xGrLKYelvXiAA/run?_render=rss

It worked pretty well. A few non-tip posts made it in, but for the most part it did what I'd hoped. I remain very excited about Yahoo! Pipes and will mess with it as much as time allows. It's still beyond non-techies, but I can see this becoming a powerful tool for Webmasters who want to display targeted content and power news junkies who want to create truly unique "newspapers." Yahoo! Pipes plus a newsfeed aggregator like Netvibes or Protopage equals the world's greatest online newspaper.

Autumn: For Anyone Who Has Been Obsessed with Finding an Answer

I think this is one of the best blog posts I've read. Partly because it's exceedingly well-written and partly because I identified strongly with the writer, Nick Tosches' unyielding passion for fulfilling what, on the surface, seems like a relatively simple quest. I've lost so much time over the years to finding answers to things like using Outlook to send formatted HTML e-mails, finding a freeware app to convert video, etc. sometimes only because I know it's out there and I refuse to give in to failing. Nick takes it to an extreme understandable only by those possessed with "The Quest."

Xbox Meets Toll Basket

The other day I was pulling up to a tollbooth on I-294 in Chicago and the car in front of me ceremoniously dumped an Xbox into the toll basket. I wish I had taken a picture. In any event, I have no idea if this was supposed to be some kind of statement against Xboxes or Tollways but it was one of the stranger things I've seen in a while. In case you're wondering, I just threw my change into the basket with the game console. Who knows, maybe they were hiding evidence in plain site.

Web Ad Attack

This morning I clicked on a digg.com link to a story in Forbes about the best and worst selling cars of 2007. I was first met with a splash ad for Symantec which could not be skipped. I waited for it to finish and went on to the story where I was immediately met with a loud video for an investment advice book from Fischer Investments along with the requisite banner ads. In addition there was one of those annoying pop-ups for a Forbes survey that moved with me as I scrolled down the page.

This is a lousy user experience. I understand that Forbes.com needs to make money, but this is overboard. I didn't even read the story because I was so annoyed and I'll likely think twice about the next link I see to Forbes. Here's what I think:

1. If you force people through a splash ad, let them skip it. Most of the time they won't find the "Skip Ad" link until they've seen most of the ad, so you don't lose much eye time. But at least give the option.
2. No self-starting video ads. Present the ad, with the embedded video and let me click on it if I'm interested.
3. Pop-up ads are bad enough, but one that follows you around like a hungry little yelping puppy is just amateurish. Just don't do pop-up ads.
   
   

Butts in Seats

As I trudged through several inches of snow and the bitter cold of a Chicago Winter this morning I started to think how ridiculous some companies are when it comes to working at home. I've worked for a lot of bosses who demanded "butts in seats" and a few who couldn't care less where the team was as long as they got the work done. Currently my job requires my butt in my seat in my cube at our headquarters.

The nature of my job is such that I can pretty much work from anywhere, whether it's my home, a Panera, an airport, wherever. If I can get an Internet connection I can be at work. So why am I taking two trains and walking two miles every day to get to work? Because someone above me is old school and doesn't trust people he can't see.

The good news is that these types will eventually retire.

Creating a Brandtastrophe

One of the divisions of the organization I work for decided to build their own prototype for their section of the Web site. They sent it to us (the Web team) and said this was what they wanted us to build them. We had already prototyped their section for them, staying of course, within our own Web site and branding standards. However they apparently felt that their level of "specialness" extended beyond our brand and therefore required a new, bastardization of our brand. What they sent us I can only refer to as, a "brandtastrophe."

Brandtastrophe: The bastardization of an organization's existing, established brand to suit the needs and preferences of a subgroup of an organization.

We've all seen this a thousand times, from the department that creates its own letterhead by smashing the organization's logo into a piece of Microsoft Word Wordart to the division that works with an outside contractor to develop a piece of collateral that has the organization's logo, but bears little resemblance to anything else from the organization. Perhaps it also has some myopic messages that were put together by the division's director during a brainstorming meeting but that no one else outside the division has ever even seen.

Brandtasrophes suck the life out of a brand and muddle the public's perceptions of it. At their worst, they effectively vandalize the organization.

Digg Zealots Suck

I saw on Threadwatch how Digg zealots are attacking various Yahoo! properties who use a voting system similar to Digg. These people are true idiots. What I find amazing is that many of these Diggers also espouse how the Internet should be free and they should, for instance be allowed to post copyrighted content on YouTube or share MP3s and other intellectual property freely. But if anyone "shares" the idea of a voting-based content system they attack like a bunch of old biddies with their bloomers in a bunch. "You stole Digg's idea!" "You aren't cool enough to be like Digg!" Then they swarm the Comments sections of these "thieving sites" and prevent anyone else from enjoying them.

I've got news, Digg zealots: The Internet is about sharing—sharing ideas, sharing what works, sharing conversations. Who came up with the idea of a search engine? Should they have started attacking everyone else who put a little field on a page with a "Search" button? I know Digg wasn't the first site to come up with a "vote for this" model.

In the larger scheme, zealots of anything suck. Whether it's Digg zealots, Mac zealots, religious zealots, sports team zealots, or whatever, please, just stop. Can't you be a fan or follower without being a blinder-wearing, crazed lunatic? You like the Green Bay Packers. I get it. Do you have to start fistfights in bars because someone else in the bar isn't? You like the iPod. I get it. Do you have to openly mock anyone who has something else, repeatedly boast about how wonderful your iPod is, and canonize Steve Jobs? You're a Jehova's Witness. I get it. Can you worship with your congregation in peace and stay away from my front door?

Digg.com is a nice site, I'm a member. I think it's still got some serious issues, most of which are human/idiot-based. People successfully game the system for profit or glory instead of using Digg as it was intended. The technology itself is fantastic. So instead of attacking everyone else who uses a voting system for content, why don't you focus on making Digg.com better?

No Linking Allowed in Belgium

So apparently linking is now wrong. I can understand there being a concern about Google's cache containing archived stories that are normally charged for by the copyright holder, but what is all this other piffle about Google News using material without consent? So no one is allowed to link to free content without the linkee's consent? Is Belgium on the planet earth?

Court rules that Google breaches copyright with news service-News-Tech & Web-TimesOnline

Widgets Deliver New One-to-One Opportunities

An informative post from Chad Stoller at ClickZ about getting into the branded widget game. He makes some good points about how to ensure your widget is sticky (sticky widgets?) Namely, make them simple and uber-functional. I haven't seen a lot of articles like this and it's nice to see widgets being taken seriously and not just as toys.

As mentioned previously, I do use a few branded widgets, notably from Acura and Allrecipes.com. Not to mention the Yahoo! branded widgets. With Windows Vista, I think Widgets will explode in the next year. That's, of course, contingent on Microsoft getting people to buy it.

Widgets Deliver New One-to-One Opportunities

WIRED Blogs: Listening Post

Great discussion of DRM and the effect of switching to a no-DRM system on Wired.com. It's nice to hear all the arguments for and against. No one can really predict exacly what will happen, but with enough discussion like this I think we can come up with a close approximation. Will the artist lose money? Will the customers ever get what they really want? Will the record companies diminish? Hopefully those are all "Yes."

WIRED Blogs: Listening Post

Will Widgets Kill the Webpage? (Exclusive Netvibes video). (Erick Schonfeld/The Next Net)

I was discussing widgets with a friend recently and they thought widgets were to complicated for most casual computer users. I think if anything, they're easier. They focus on one thing and leave out all the other impediments to finding and using information.

Check out what NetVibe's founder thinks:

Will Widgets Kill the Webpage? (Exclusive Netvibes video). (Erick Schonfeld/The Next Net)
http://www.techmeme.com/070212/p107#a070212p107

Famous Princeton ESP Lab Closes

Amazing ths place was still around. Interesting history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/science/10princeton.html?ex=1328763600&en=2f8f7bdba3ac59f1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Web 2.0 Explained Through Video

This is a cool Web 2.0 video that's popping up everywhere from Lawrence Lessig's blog to Boing Boing. It's very cool and shows the evolution text and the Web. Very slick.

That Would Be a Great Band Name

If you're like me, and pray God you're not, you occasionally realize something that just came out of your mouth would make a great name for a band. I think this happens to me at least once a day. You'll be talking to a coworker about stepping on a rancid peach outside the produce stand by your house and suddenly you stop and say "Rancid Peach would be a great name for a band!"

Well you can now save time in this ridiculous pursuit by using the Band name generator.

Either enter a few words of your own to mix into the generator or just create utterly random band names like "Pungent Lager Wormlings" or "Crafty Hamburgers." I'm pretty sure I don't want to hear the next download from "Sphincter Bulbous Holidays," but who knows, maybe they're the next "Speedcake Protocol Cherries."

Jobs Votes to Give DRM the Heave-Ho

As sick I am of Steve Jobs and despite the fact that I consider him an arrogant, overrated shill, I am really heartened by his essay favoring the drop-kick of DRM. He makes some great points and I'm sure this essay will become the next big thing (probably it already is).

Especially well-written are the last few paragraphs where he points out that record companies have always sold DRM-free music in the form of easily-rippable CDs:

"In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves."

Great point, Mr. Jobs. I still won't buy an iPod though.

Apple - Thoughts on Music

The Morning is Your Friend

In Tapping the Power of Your Morning Routine, Yahoo! Finance writer Jim Citrin collected responses from 20 business leaders about their morning routines. The main bullets:

1. Start early.
2. Get a jump on email.
3. Exercise every morning.
4. Be thoughtful about the source, form, and timing of your news.
5. Problem-solve.
6. Be creative with your morning routine.

These all sound fine except the exercise bit. I have a hard time exercising in the morning. Sure, I walk about two miles every morning during my commute, but to lift weights or run before 7am messes me up. Everything else sounds fine.

I've always said that any idiot can get to work early. However I've seen people who consider this the height of work ethic. Never mind they spend 7-10am reading CNN or shopping on Amazon, as long as they're at work before the boss, they're golden. However, if you can plan out your day, catch up on e-mail, and get a little research done before 9am, I'd say you've made the most of getting an early start. A tip If your boss is impressed by early risers: few days a week make sure to send your boss an e-mail early. Make sure it's relevant though, or you'll look like a brown nose. You might try holding off on response from the afternoon before and then sending it when you get in the next morning.

One thing the article doesn't mention directly is breakfast. I've started eating breakfast every morning and I can say from experience, it helps. For a good article on the subject check out "How to Feel Like Eating Breakfast First Thing in the Morning" on WikiHow.

The article didin't mention RSS either, which may be because many business leaders may not be geeky enough to use Feed Readers or other RSS tools (granted, some may be using it without realizing it on their My Yahoo pages and such). RSS can be a powerful way to catch up on industry and business news in your morning hours. Build a page of RSS feeds with Protopage, PageFlakes, Netvibes, etc. and make browsing headlines faster and more thorough.

The Bears Have Made Me Sad

The Bears looked awful last night in the Super Bowl and had it not been for copious amounts of Guinness I may have cried when the game ended. So this frigid Monday, which I wisely took off well in advance, will consist of moping, whining, and likely some punching of inanimate objects. Tuesday will be better. After all, it looks like the Bulls will be in the playoffs and Spring training (Go Sox!) is right around the corner.

MetaWeather: A Good Idea with Mixed Results

MetaWeather is a weather aggregation site that describes itself as "An automated weather data aggregator that takes the weather predictions from various forecasters and calculates the most likely outcome." Oddly enough I was just chatting with someone about how a "Metacritic for weather information" would be a good idea and it could be called "MetaWeather." So I checked the URL and sure enough, there are no new ideas under the sun.

Disappointed that I hadn't come up with the idea first, but excited that it existed, I checked it out. It's got a definite "side-project" look to it and has some rendering issues in the three browsers I tried it in (IE7, FF2, and Opera). For instance, it shows temperature ranges on a bar graph and if the range is small (for instance between -12 and -9 the two numbers are smashed on top of each other.)

The sources for Chicago listed are Weather.com Homepage, Weather.com weather for Chicago, BBC Homepage, BBC Weather for Chicago, Weather Underground Homepage, and Weather Underground weather for Chicago. I'm not sure why it lists all those weather site home pages, which don't list anything about specific cities. Also, I'd rather see Accuweather and The National Weather Service incorporated. However this may be an API issue.

Again, this looks like a side project and maybe that's all it is. Or an experiment. But I'd like to see a full-scale version of a meta-weather site at some point tricked out with more features and a little more polish. After a quick check of all the weather sites metaweather.com uses and the ones I mentioned, I'm amazed at the disparity. Averaging all this data in a slick way could be very helpful.

So while I really like the idea and initiative the Metaweather folks have shown, I look forward to its maturity even more.

Top Ten-A-Palooza

This Seth Godin post gives me some good ideas. How about a search for the phrase "Some of my favorites..." or "Some good ideas for getting started..."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/02/the_top_10_ways.html

The Best Yahoo! Widgets

I, like many, have grown to love widgets. I was just starting to use Konfabulator when Yahoo! bought them and I was glad to see Yahoo! did nothing to ruin them. I tend to visit the Yahoo! Widget Gallery a few times a week to see if there's anything new and useful, but I find the interface for finding Widgets a little annoying. Like I wish they had an advanced search that let you filter based on user ratings. That would save me a lot of time sifting through a lot of sub-par widgets. However, I recently found a site called "The Most Downloaded Konfabulator Widgets" by Jon Aquino, which lists all the widgets by popularity and helps hunt down the cream of the crop. Why won't Yahoo! do this?

Anyway, I will likely spend some time hunting down more to add to my cadre. For now, here's what I use now:

• Yahoo! Weather A beautiful looking widget that shows everything you need at a glance.
• NY Times Reader Another attractive interface with a lot of customization.
• MultiRSSFeed A little on the ugly side but crams a lot of feeds into a small space.
• AllRecipes.com Recipe Finder VERY slick design from a terrific recipe site.
• Acura RDK Traffic A very polished interface with great traffic information.
• Yahoo! Notepad Access to quick notes from all your PCs. Very handy.

Most of Yahoo!'s own widgets are very well done and really take advantage of having a Yahoo! Account. It's also nice to see companies like Acura and AllRecipes.com creating more than just ads for themselves, but actual useful tools. That's good branding.

100 Ways to Finds Stuff

Charles Knight breaks down the search engine landscape and you're sure to find some great new search tools. I'm already digging Music Map and The Find and they're just in the introduction. I'll plow through the list and see if I can come up with a Top Ten from his Top 100.

MMMmmmmmm, search.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_100_alternative_search_engines.php

Is Flickr Editing Your Photos?

An interesting discovery by Kara at the Colors...Pretty blog. Apparently, she alleges, Flickr sharpens and improves images when you upload them to their service. Nice for amateurs, but possibly annoying for professionals. What if you intended a photo to look blurry in parts or altogether? Some Photoshop mavens might also prefer to do their own sharpening as well. Does Flickr use an unsharp, a sharpen, a smart blur, contrast enhancement? As Kara points out, this should probably be up to the user.

Colors...Pretty

Seth's Blog: Really Bad Powerpoint

While I can't completely agree with all of Seth Godin's points in his "Really Bad PowerPoint" post, I think he definitely makes some great points. You need to pass out detailed handouts after you present, which means you don't have to cram everything you want to say into every slide. Tell a story and use visuals to back it up. However I don't think bullets are evil and I've seen "minimalist" slides that simply don't work.

I like the concept of giving folks a visual and then letting them wonder what the heck it has to do with what your talking about, but you can't do that on every slide. Bullets help people who may have zoned out momentarily and unless you're the most compelling speaker in the world, zoning will happen.

However, I know a lot of consultants that could learn from Seth's guidelines.

Seth's Blog: Really Bad Powerpoint

A Real Desktop?

Courtesy of the Human Productivity Lab, this is one of the coolest and most breakthrough tools for handling digital files that I can recall. It's called "Bumptop" and uses the analogy of your own physical desktop and how you might lay down paper-based documents and objects and takes it to an amazing new level. Microsoft, or more likely, Apple will grab this technology I'm sure. Check out the video below and be sure to check out their channel on YouTube.

U.S. Flight Pattern Visualizations...Wow!

Saw these on Digg. Very cool. It's a series of visualizations showing airline flight patterns on the U.S. It's a bit mesmerizing to watch. Flight Pattern Visualizations.

Presenting the "iBle"

I was bummed to find out I missed the deadline for entry in the Worth1000.com’s recent contest wherein people are asked to come up with a design for Apple's next big product. Above would have been my submission. I felt given the Mac's cult status they probably needed a "Good Book" of their own.

Lose a Few Hours on Similicio.us

I think there is a "Right-click/Find similar pages" function in one of the browsers, which, as I recall, sorta sucked. However Similicio.us doesn't suck. In fact I just lost a few hours playing with it. Just enter a site you like or use and Similicio.us will find similar ones using Del.icio.us. Brilliant.

http://similicio.us/

Maybe a Change Will Come

All it takes is one big label to go DRM-free and the rest, including Apple, will fall in line and be equal. Then they can start dropping prices to compete and we can play our music anywhere.

Digital Music News reports from Midem:

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/012307drm

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC plans online children's world

Why do I get a horrible feeling this idea will be corrupted by pedophiles no matter what steps they take to prevent it? Sigh.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC plans online children's world

Second Life is an OS

Someone asked if Second Life was some sort of game and I said it was more like an operating system. It's essentially useless until users add applications to it. As a blank slate like a freshly installed copy of Windows.

A Computer for Peg

We're trying to collect some money for a friend of mine who desperately needs a computer. We're using a cool site called ChipIn. Help if you can and follow our progress. Every little bit helps.

How Long Will DRM Last?

Great article at TechCrunch about the "inevitable" death of DRM. I wish a label would get the balls to release its catalog without DRM and see what happens. Will the label go broke? Will the bands go broke? Will more people buy music?

I don't think it's really that hard to imagine the scenario:

1. Napster announces that it's reached a deal with the record labels to provide high-quality downloadable non-DRM MP3s at .89 cents a pop.
2. People flock to Napster and start buying like crazy.
3. Some jerks hold off, figuring the P2P networks will soon be flooded with free music to steal.
4. Meanwhile, people continue flocking to Napster. iPod users especially appreciate the fact that their tunes will now play anywhere. iTunes, for the first time ever, sees begins to lose its marketshare, bit by bit.
5. In the meantime, seeing how gangbusters things are going at Napster, other formerly DRMed music sites start slowly signing deals and adding DRM-free MP3s. Their sales start to take off. Wal-Mart starts charging .79 cents a song, or maybe even less.
6. Soon everyone is offering MP3 songs for .79-.89 cents a song. Sales continue to chug along as people realize prices are going down. A whole album for $8? Wow! They're $16 in the store!
7. Good ideas start to pop up at the online digital music stores, adding value and getting even more CD buyers into downloading. Download the whole album and get concert tickets or band merchandise at half price. Get a video of the band playing their big hit live. Download album art and lyrics. Download a special "key" to get into a special area of the band's Web site. Get software to re-mix the band's music.
8. P2P networks continue to thrive along with the legitimate sales. Record labels and the FBI work together to continue fighting piracy, pirates continue to find new ways to get around them. Nothing new there.
9. Within five years, downloaded music sales equal CD sales. Within ten years, CDs are no longer sold. Cars come standard with MP3 players and Wi-Fi (or something like Wi-Max) for transferring. Of course why transfer MP3 files when you can simply stream them over a wireless broadband connection? If your city is equipped or you have broadband cellular, you're good to go.
10. Now that I think about it, who's to say that in ten years we won't be streaming everything no matter where we are? Who needs MP3s? Subscribe to the (someday) new RhapsodyEverywhere and listen to whatever you want whenever and wherever you want. Who the hell needs MP3s anyway?

As much as I hate DRM, since I have a RhapsodyToGo subscription, it doesn't really affect me that much. For the price of an in-store CD each month I can download to my Sansa player and stream music on my PC to my heart's content. And if I want to listen to music in the car I can either pay .79 per song to burn a CD, or, better, hook my MP3 player up to my car stereo. I want for nothing when it comes to music. That's the way it should be.

Short Burst of Text

I just read a recent article by the brilliant Gerry McGovern in which he praises the rise of content in the last 15 years. In short, the content creator revolution of blogs and social networking. However, in it he also acknowledges how mobile tools like Blackberries have changed the way our bosses communicate with us. "Short bursts of text is the new management style." he says.

This couldn't be more true. My boss (actually my boss's boss) communicates almost exclusively in short bursts of text from his Blackberry. This has led to a great deal of confusion. For instance, when presented with several possible options he may simply respond, "Yes, go with it." Now I need to respond back with "Go with which one?" To which he may respond, "Send again--short form." Meaning he doesn't want to have to read any extra "stuff", just the options.

E-mail and mobile communication can certainly make it possible for us to be "always on," but are we listening or just trying to keep up with all of it?

Are Googlers Smarter than Yahooers?

As a follow-up to my previous post, I checked to see what the Top Ten Searches were on Google this year. Surprisingly, the number one search wasn't "Britney Spears." In fact the list is downright respectable and a bit techy. In fact, I'm not even sure what #1 actually is. "Bebo?" I had to look it up and apparently it's a social networking site where you can share multimedia stuff. I'm not sure why you wouldn't just type bebo.com into a browser to find it, but I guess if you'd only heard the name you might not know how to spell it.

Anyway does the list below mean that people who use Google are older and/or smarter than the people using Yahoo? There's no Lindsey Lohan or Beyonce, there's mininova and radioblog. It's tools over people. Odd. Wonder what's going on there.

Anyway, here's the list:

Google.com-Top Searches in 2006

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

The Saddest Thing I've Ever Seen

Those of us who work in the Web field like to think we are working on the hippest thing going. The Web is cool, smart, evolutionary. Unfortunately the reality may be a little sadder than we'd prefer to admit. I base this on the 2006 Yahoo! Top Searches List that was recently published. Here's the list:

Yahoo! Top 10 Overall Searches

1 Britney Spears
2 WWE
3 Shakira
4 Jessica Simpson
5 Paris Hilton
6 American Idol
7 Beyonce Knowles
8 Chris Brown
9 Pamela Anderson
10 Lindsay Lohan

This would lead me to believe that the average Web user is under 14, is very horny, and has rotten taste in entertainment. I think I'm going to recommend my company changes the home page to include scantily clad teeny-bopper artists and a way for visitors to vote on which one is they like best. I guarantee 17,000,000 page views in our first week.

Web Workers and Email

Just discovered a new blog and a good article about e-mail. The blog is "Web Worker Daily" and the article is "How to screw up an email negotiation." Very cheeky, but very true.

The Web Team Chasm

I work at a professional association. We're a nonprofit, legally, but we're hardly a charitable organization. Dues are quite expensive and because of it we've little incentive to work hard at finding other sources of income. For instance, we have an online catalog, but it's definitely Worst of Breed. It's in Siebel, pound for pound, the worst enterprise software I've ever seen. I'm not even sure if Siebel still makes a catalog product anymore. They really shouldn't have. We have a team of full-time consultants and in-house staff dedicated completely to it which is amazing given that A) We don't do much business with it, and B) We don't have that many products. Yet the catalog sucks away most of our IT budget and labor. And at this point IT believes it has invested too much in this steaming pile to stop using it, so we're stuck with it.

Anyway, the catalog is difficult to navigate, unintuitive, ugly, and products are horribly categorized. One category is actually called "Catalog Products." Obviously, that one's not Siebel's fault, but my point is this catalog is not built to make money, it's built to meet someone's internal goal of being able to say we have an online catalog. And it's managed completely by IT.

I am not part of the team that chose Siebel for the catalog, or implemented it, or maintains it. I am, in fact, not in IT at all. I am part of the non-IT Web team that manages the rest of our Web site. In our organization the online catalog is not considered part of our Web site. To our association members it certainly is, but not to our internal staff. This means that my team is not allowed input into the online catalog. In fact, the online catalog requires a separate login from the rest of our site (also, sidenote, it doesn't work in Firefox. This didn't seem to bother our IT department so we built a redirect page that checks your browser and offers our 1-800 number if you happen to be one of the millions of people who use Firefox. IT thought we were crazy.)

The problem here is largely the structure of our "Web Team." I say "team," but I really mean, "Web Chasm." We have an IT Division and a Communications Division and I am in Communications. Our team in Communications uses a lot of the same skills as our IT counterparts, but, as they often tell us, we're not IT. We design ASP pages and forms, perform Web Analytics, conduct usability testing, develop functional and business requirements for the site, etc. but IT does not consider those things to be "IT." Also they don't believe in things like "usability" or "analytics." These are silly marketing things that have nothing to do with building Web applications and they simply don't have time because they've got Web applications to build.

Frankly I don't think any of us in Communications want to be in IT. They are largely reviled throughout our organization. People find them rude, arrogant, unhelpful, slow, and they make you fill out a Project Request if you ask them to hold the elevator for you. No, we don't want into that club. However, this puts us at their mercy when we need things like database applications built. We're not skilled at building database applications, but even if we learned how, we wouldn't be allowed to build them. That's an IT thing. Hence, we get in line with every other department that wants something from IT. And it's a long line that rarely moves.

But how, you may ask, do you react quickly to the fast-moving, always-changing Web? The answer "rarely." I estimate we stay at a steady 4-5 years behind the curve when it comes to the Web. My team follows current trends and offers up ideas to make us more competitive in the market and more relevant to our young, growing member base, but IT doesn't want to hear it. They don't have the time, the inclination, or the latest skills to help us move forward. Besides, they've got an online catalog to run.

The Myth of Mac

In a recent article about Mac quality issues, Veteran technology industry analyst Rob Enderle is quoted as saying "I think they (Apple) are feeling invulnerable right now. Because they've been so successful as of late, it looks like they can do no wrong and that customers will take whatever they give them."

I think this is probably true. Apple and its users seem to me a pretty smug lot. I'm a Windows PC user, but God knows I'm not a smug one. Windows PCs have all sorts of issues like crashes, odd behavior, susceptibility to viruses and hacks, etc. We all know this of course. We install firewalls, anti-virus programs, add memory, apply patches and do everything we can to keep our PCs running.

We also do some pretty amazing things with our PCs, just like people do with Macs. The difference seems to be that Mac users tend to look down on PC users and I really can't figure out why. Are Macs really better at most things than PCs these days? Are they really so much simpler to use? Or are they just "cooler?" Besides, there are programs for PCs that do the same things you can do on a Mac. I use most Adobe products on my PC and they're not all that different on Macs as far as I can tell. But is it more cool to say you own a Mac than a PC? Sure it is. The Mac guy on the commercial exudes laidback, trendy coolness, whereas the PC guy exudes uptight, loser dorkiness. But is a PC supposed to be cool? Is that important? If the PC I use is cool does that make me cool by extension?

When I've pressed Mac users for hard reasons why they love their Macs or what's so much better or simpler about them I usually get a response like. I don't know, they're just easier. When I press them further they end up saying PCs are just too complicated and they don't have time to mess with all of that crap. It makes me wonder why my company has a support person for our Mac users. What does he do all day, play Solitaire?

Same thing goes for iPods, which are heralded by owners and most of the press for their amazing simplicity and quality. Here's a simple fact: The majority of comments I hear from iPod users are negative. Maybe you hear differently, but all I ever hear from iPod owners is how they can't get their CDs ripped to them, and the battery runs out too fast, and for some strange reason the alarm goes off at midnight and drains the power before they wake up, and it scratches really easily and on and on. I also hear about how horrible the customer service is and how you end up paying hand over fist to get them repaired or replaced. And I truly do not get what is so stylish about them. When they first came out they looked like kitchen appliances and everyone raved about how cutting edge and trendy they were. Now pretty much all music and media players look stylish and I don't think iPods really look any more stylish than the rest.

I have a SanDisk Sansa and I really like it. It's small, stable, works with Rhapsody, holds plenty of music, and sounds great. The interface is pretty good too. Not great, but pretty good. Anyway, I don't pretend owning a Sansa makes me cool or part of some generation. It's a tool I use to listen to music and it works well. I haven't joined a Sansa discussion group or told all my friends that it's the "only mp3 player to get." And if I owned an iPod I would feel the same way. Like a Mac, it's just a tool to get things done or entertain yourself. It's not a cult, it's a piece of hardware. Get over it.

Oldie But Goodie about Spammers

This is old, but still hilarious. Rob Corddry from the Daily Show skewers spammers. I think the most amazing thing about this is that a spammer (sorry, a "high-volume email deployer") let himself be interviewed on the air.

KISS Your Zune Please

I was talking to a friend at work yesterday who I was surprised to find out was "really getting into podcasts." She isn't a technically savvy person (I've had to help her with PowerPoint) so I was shocked to hear her regale me with a list of her favorites podcasts, including the excellent National Geographic collection. She explained that she found them all on iTunes and then began to tell me how much she loved her iPod. I showed her my new Sandisk Sansa player, which is easily the best Media player I've used to date, which she thought was cool, but she thought for "non-techies" like her, the iPod was the way to go. I asked what she meant and she said "The iPod is just so easy to use." I showed her how I plug my Sansa into the PC, Rhapsody pops up, and I start dragging and dropping music onto it. "How is the iPod easier than that?" She stuck by her story that non-techies should get iPods. "But isn't that exactly what you do with your iPod?" She just shook her head and said "iPods are just easier."

So I thought about it and realized that the truth really doesn't matter in fashion. iPods have the perception of being simple so they're simple. Never mind the fact that these days there are many media players just as simple and with less gotchas and hardware issues than iPods. It doesn't matter. iPods are simple.

As Microsoft prepares to roll out its new Zune Media player I hope they realize this. Brand the Zune as the "simple choice." Downlplay the features, and focus on its simplicity. Keep the Zune music store and the transfer process simple. Simple, simple, simple. Run it through the "Mom" process. Can my Mom use it? Does my Mom get it? If not, start over.

Leaving Outlook's Tasks Behind?

I'm taking the plunge off the Outlook cliff and trying out a standalone task management program featured on LifeHacker. It's called TaskCoach and it's a free, open source program available for download from SourceForge.

So far I'm liking it. It's relatively straightforward, but, unlike Outlook, let's you easily create sub-tasks. It also offers an uncluttered view of your daily tasks with easily configured views via a "Filter Side Bar." This ease-of-view is a revelation compared to Outlook. Basically it's a one-click process to see tasks by category or status. Brilliant!

TaskCoach handily minimizes to the taskbar when closed or minimized for easy access as you work. In addition it has built-in effort timers (which I hope I never feel compelled to use, but it would probably be for the best).

The author actively solicits ideas for improvements, which gives me hope that one day it will become even better. I already have a few suggestions to make including templates, drag and drop functions, and the ability to set a default attachment folder.

Anyway, I'm going to try it out for a week and see if I can handle losing the biggest plus of using Outlook for task management, which is the fact that I can drag and drop an e-mail to create a new task, complete with the body of the e-mail. A handy VB script I found even lets me include attachments. This really has been my only reason for sticking with Outlook. However, I can already tell that if TaskCoach offered the ability to drag and drop e-mails to create tasks I'd be sold already.

A Cloudy Feature

I think tag clouds are pretty cool, but try as I might, I haven't seen much use for them. The problem is that they're usually pretty much the same. The big words are obvious.

Tech tag clouds show "Microsoft," "Google," "Apple," etc.

News tag clouds show "Bush," "Iran," "Iraq," "US," etc.

I've never really felt compelled to click on tags in a tag cloud because the tags are either too general or too boring.

What would be cool, and perhaps someone's done this, is if when you clicked on a tag in a tag cloud, it brought you to a new, more specific tag cloud with related tags. Something LIKE that exists, called Google News Cloud. However, rather than successive mini-clouds, it simply highlights related tags.

I'd like to see something similar to the wonderful Visual Thesaurus tool.

Mmmmmm, Del.icio.us

I've been a fan of Del.icio.us for a few months now. I originally found it very odd and unintuitive, but I've warmed up to it over time. Especially since I installed the Firefox plug-in that makes adding bookmarks a snap.

I still think it might be a bit obscure for the casual Web user though. I think the problem lies with what I assume is an attempt to over simplify the experience. I say this because I've sent people to the site and their first comment tends to be "So what are all these links?" (actually, their first comment is usually more like "Delicious? So is it www.delicious.com? What? del.icio.us? I don't get it." Note to Yahoo, who recently purchased Del.icio.us, consider a name/URL change. It was cute for a while there, but...)

One of the reasons I've become so enamored of it is what you can DO with your bookmarks once you start collecting them. You can put them in an RSS feed for instance. Or you can send someone all the bookmarks you have tagged with, say "recipes" just buy sending them a link to http://del.icio.us/username/recipes.

Another example: I recently did a bunch of research on podcasting directories because we were in the process of launching podcasts for my company. Every time I found a directory we might want to post our podcast in, I clicked my Del.icio.us button, described the site and tagged it with "podcast" and "directories." When it came time to share what I found with my boss, I just sent her a link to http://del.icio.us/napdynmite/podcast+directories (feel free to click on that, it works).

I also like the fact that I can tag bookmarks with the names of people in my network and they'll get my bookmark in their inbox automatically. Great for team research as well as just fun.

Anyway, check it out at http://del.icio.us/ if you haven't already. Make sure to get the browser buttons here: http://del.icio.us/help/. It makes the whole process seamless and almost habitual.

Now That's a Start!

For years I've built my own start pages, which originally start out simply as an HTML page full of my favorite links but eventually becomes festooned with with whatever knick-knacks I find. I used the Accuweather widget, the Symantec Virus Alert widget, the Last.fm song widget, customized Gigablast search forms, FeedDigest RSS widgets, and yes, even a TagCloud.com tagcloud. I put a lot of time and effort into these creations and putter over them incessantly, moving things around, removing things that I don't use, adding new things I've found, changing colors, adding graphics. Truly a labor of love, or, more likely, the result of a horribly short attention span.

The other day I followed up on a note to myself to check out a site called protopage.com. Protopage is, basically, a startpage creator. You register on the site and then are presented with a screen full of components that you can add, remove, edit, move around, and, yes, putter over. For instance, you can add newsfeeds, widgets like weather forecasters, link favorites, or Inbox monitors and you have some control over how much of each component looks and acts. It saves your page layout on the fly and if you leave and come back it looks just like you left it. Thanks to AJAX, this stuff is all pretty slick and responsive. I created my own protopage and was very happy with it. I had about 12 newsfeeds, a bunch of link favorites, a weather widget and an Inbox monitor for one of my POP accounts. And it looked great.

So, in a small ceremony I officially dumped my previous, homemade html page for my slick new protopage (of course Microsoft Antispyware fought me tooth and nail for trying to change IE's startpage, but more on that another time). So everything, it seemed was hunky-dory. Then I noticed a blurb about something called "Pageflakes" in a Digg.com posting. Apparently Pageflakes was similar to Protopage. So I checked it out. Turns out Pageflakes is pretty cool too. I built a startpage with Pageflakes and saw that it actually seems to have even more widgets than Protopage, including tagclouds from del.icio.us, TV Guides, an SMS sender, even something called a U.S. Debt clock. Well now, maybe I should take a hard look at this.

My next entry will be a review of the startpages out there, including Protopage, Pageflakes, Eskobo, Goowy, and NetVibes.

Taskbar Bullies

One thing that hasn't changed on our desktops in a decade is the fact that many programs we install demand to live in our taskbars. Even seemingly innocuous programs with no legitimate reason for remaining "always on." For instance, why does Quicktime feel the need to maintain constant activity in my taskbar without asking. Is there something I desperately need from Apple that requires this constant tether. If it might need to update itself periodically, why can't it wait until I launch it and then tell me there's a newer version? Anyway, here's a list of the biggest "Taskbar Bullies" that I've run into. All of them suddenly appeared in my taskbar and fought to stay there, despite my attempts to turn them off, edit my startup list, or change options in their program. By the way, get StartUp Cop or something similar if you don't already have it.

Aggressive

• QuickTime
• RealPlayer
• MSN Messenger

Just Annoying

• AOL Instant Messenger
• Yahoo! Instant Messenger
• HP Printer Drivers
• Picasa

I know there are more out there. Leave a comment if you know one I've missed.

What I Think of "What the Nation Thinks"

I ran across this site while doing some research and ended up hanging around for way too long. It's called "What the Nation Thinks" and it's a collection of opinion polls. You can submit polls or take them. Fortunately someone reviews them before publishing (at least they claim to) so there's not a lot of childish attempts to get attention (although there is one up there currently about bra-sizes, but it's actually not a bad question I suppose.)

From the homepage you can look at polls by how popular, "hot", or new they are. There are also categories (which you assign when submitting a poll) or you can search. The interface is really nice and straightforward, as well as easy on the eyes.

I don't know if this is a Web 2.0 kind of thing, but if Digg.com is then I don't see why this wouldn't be. Even though it looks like it started a few years ago. In any event it's a nice way of checking out public opinion and killing a whole lot of time.

http://www.whatthenationthinks.com/UK/default.asp

My Firefox Extensions

Since everyone else is doing it, why not me. Here are the Firefox extensions I'm using (thanks to the ListZilla extension, exporting the list was simple):

ColorZilla 0.8.2
Copy Links 0.1.3
CustomizeGoogle 0.41
DictionarySearch 1.5
Forecastfox 0.8.2.5
Greasemonkey 0.6.4
Linkification 1.1.9
ListZilla 0.7
MeasureIt 0.3.5
OpenBook 1.3.4
PDF Download 0.6
Saferfox Xpanded 3.2.2
Tab X 0.9.2
Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.8.8
Web Developer 1.0.1

I've pared down my extensions to the ones I really use regularly. It's always a bit addictive to go finding and adding new ones, but the more you have the slower Firefox will run. At one point I was up to about 25 extensions and FIrefox was crawling and behaving oddly.

I'd recommend using ListZilla to periodically export your list in case you have to do a new Firefox install. It can be a pain trying to remember which Firefox features are standard and which are extensions.

Yahoo News Search has Blogs

I just did a YahooNews search and noticed they are now including blogs in the search results. On the right side you can see the title of the relevant post. You can choose to add the blog to your MyYahoo page (nifty) or you can save it to the Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 dealie. From the main YahooNews page you can choose whether or not to include blogs in your search. This is all very cool and may actually sway me from using Google News all the time.

Give Us a Reason to Go to Movies

Less people are going to see movies in theaters. To anyone who's been to a movie theater in the last decade, this doesn't come as much of a shock. The movie theater experience stinks:

• Commercials. It still boggles my mind that theaters have commercials now. I never minded the static local advertising that played innocuously before the start of the movie, but having to sit through ten minutes of loud, obnoxious Pepsi and Gap ads is ludicrous.
• Concession prices. $3.50 for a watered-down diet Coke? Come on. The unpackaged foods (nachos, hot dogs, baked pretzels, etc.) are not only overpriced, but they're barely fit for consumption.
• Ticket prices. $9 for a movie that I wouldn't even watch for free is criminal. Is there any limit to what theaters are willing to charge? Do they really think people will keep coming when tickets hit $12? Let's hope not.
  
• Sound. As much as theaters may tout their sound as Dolby-enhanced multi-channel blah, blah, blah, theater sound is still bad. Within the same movie you sometimes can't hear the dialogue and other times you have your eardrums blown out.
  
• Cleanliness. I realize that theaters are made messy by inconsiderate patrons, but theaters need to figure out a way to keep floors from getting sticky and bathrooms from getting disgusting.
  
• The movies stink. Obviously this is not the fault of the theater, but perhaps there should be a quality scale for ticket prices. One star movies are $3, two stars are $4, etc. Of course they'd need to get Hollywood on board with the idea, which will never happen.
• Uncomfortable seating. Who can possibly sit still for an entire movie in the crappy seats they provide? There's no back or neck support and nowhere to put your arms.
• No value-added service. Apart from the big screen, what do you get at a movie theater? Give me one reason (except for the big screen) to spend $30-$40 for my movie experience instead of waiting for the DVD or cable.

I visited a "deluxe" theater a few years ago and was impressed with it. There were a limited amount of comfortable seats, the sound quality was good, and they actually had waitstaff bringing popcorn, drinks, and desserts around. It added up to a solid movie going experience. Why can't this just be the standard movie theater experience instead of being the "deluxe" version?

Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary

Merriam-Websters has gone Wiki (sort of). You can now submit your own words to their "open dictionary."

Submission guidelines are what you'd expect and MW reserves the right to delete the work of mean-spirited idiots or spammers (my words, not theirs).

I think this could turn out pretty cool, as long as MW does a good job of weeding out crap and redundancy. It would also be nice to be able to search the text of definitions, as well as the words. It's nice that they let you browse by category (anatomy, business, food, language, etc.)

http://www3.merriam-webster.com/opendictionary/index.php

MashMap: Your Movie and Showtime Map

Cool tool for finding local theaters. You'd think Hollywood.com would steal the idea.

R.I.P For Dot Coms of Old

MSN has a pretty good Top Ten Dot.com flops worth reading. It really brings you back to the days of free money and bad business.


P.S. I do miss Webvan.

Why TV Truly Sucks

So I was sitting around on a Sunday evening with nothing to do and I decided I'd make good on a promise I'd made to myself to prove why TV truly sucks. What would be my proof? I would categorize and all the TV shows on at primetime for the three major US networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and then total them to objectively display the networks' level of originality. I just included shows for the current week, figuring it would make a representative sample.

Below is a chart of what I found (click on it to see a larger version). I did my best to be objective and create logical categories. I may try to refine the process next time I'm bored and see if I can do a better job, but I think this gives a pretty good synopsis of the crap the network monkeys are flinging at our screens every week.


Basically, you've got reality shows and detective dramas. And for the squeamish there are family comedies, most of which feature the same white, middle-class, nuclear families that we've all come to know and snore to. This includes Yes Dear, Still Standing, Everybody Loves Raymond, etc. That's about 75% of it. I was expecting more legal dramas, but it may be a weekly aberration. If I'd had a harder time categorizing the shows, I would have been unexpectedly pleased, but about 90% of them fell into neat categories. There are a few "miscellaneous" shows in there, but it's probably only because I was unfamiliar with the show's premise and couldn't gather it from the TV Guide synopsis.

So there you go. The same crap on a different channel. Just get cable or satellite TV, a Tivo, and stay away from the "Big, Dumb Three" until they realize no one is watching. Of course by then we'll be watching interactive HDTV streamed over the Internet.

Making RSS Portable

OK, I admit, when I first saw this I was skeptical as to how it could be used, but the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. The site http://rss2pdf.com/ will take any RSS feed or OPML file and instantly turn it into a PDF.

One way I thought this would be helpful is for sending RSS feeds to people who don't "Get RSS." People like my boss. Anyone can open and print a PDF, eh? Plus you can archive feeds on your hard drive easily for offline reading.

It's in beta (what isn't?) but it seems to work well. I'd like to see some formatting options so you could create your own newspaper or magazine from your favorite RSS feeds. Also, It would be great to have a scheduler that would create PDFs and store them on your hard drive automatically for plane trips, train trips, etc.

I'm sure I will find some other cool uses for it, let's hope it stays around and stays free.

http://rss2pdf.com/

Tour the World with a Thousand Friends

Google's willingness to let people play with their maps has brought an avalanche of cool and fun tools. One of the coolest I've seen lately is called "beenmapped.com." Beenmapped.com is basically a wiki for interesting destinations around the world using GoogleMaps.

Anyone who's played with the satellite view using GoogleMaps has likely encountered something they wanted to show someone else. Maybe you found a lake shaped like Alfred Hitchcock's profile or a possible UFO landing site in your local park. beenmapped.com gives you a place to post it, along with comments, and lets everyone else rate your location. Even if you don't use GoogleMaps, you can have a lot of fun looking at what other people have found.

From the site: "Ever since Google Maps went online with satellite pictures, all sorts of oddities are found every day. Secret installations, UFO candidates, and weird picture defects. But those were either soon forgotten or too scattered among website forums. Now those can all be found in one place: right here."

http://www.beenmapped.com

An Encyclopedia of Pests

There are a lot of great resources out there to help you identify and eliminate spyware and adware from your computer. I just discovered Computer Associates' Spyware Information Center, which is very slick and very well-maintained. I especially like that they track emerging pests. Haven't seen that before.

Another great pest encyclopedia is on Kephyr.com, publisher of the Bazooka Adware and Spyware Scanner.

So if you see something running on your PC that you don't remember installing, check it against one of the above lists and find out how to deep-six it.

Earth, Like You've Never Seen It

First of all, go to http://earth.google.com/ and download GoogleEarth immediately. It's free and it's the coolest thing you've seen. I could probably write a novel about how amazing it is, but it's better to see for yourself.

Google Earth is the natural extension of GoogleMaps in that it is one giant map, not just of the US, but of the whole world. In addition, it uses satellite images instead of graphic depictions. GoogleMaps has a satellite view as well, but GoogleEarth takes it further. You can tilt the view to see the land in 3D and in some cities include 3D renderings of buildings, which makes it possible to take a stroll down, say, Michigan Avenue in Chicago and feel like you're really walking between the buildings. And, like I said, it's the WHOLE WORLD. I assume there are "blackout areas" somewhere, but I haven't found any yet.

In addition to the incredible topography, Google includes a variety of "layers" that can be added to the maps like, street names, crime statistics, restaurants, railroads, political borders and much more.

There are hundreds of amazing touches that you really have to see to believe. Go get it http://earth.google.com/.

New Yorker Magazine on DVD In Total

I'm not sure if any other magazines have done this, but I hope it becomes a trend. According to Boing Boing, you will soon be able to buy every issue of the New Yorker ever published on a set of DVDs for $100. Imagine if Time Magazine did this. Or National Geographic. Maybe they are doing it, I think I'll find out.

Anyway, it's especially cool that it's searchable and includes all the covers, cartoons, and everything. Check out the Boing Boing mention here.

How Google Might Have Looked...

Apparently Google had intended to rip off Apple's Mac OS X at some point in their look and feel. They scrapped it, but someone saved it here:

http://hostingproject.info/Zilos/googlex/

Nothing earth-shaking, but pretty cool.

Sending Big Files For Free

Quick note, I used to use WhaleMail.com a lot to send big files. Then they started charging for it. I paid for a while, but now I've discovered yousendit.com, which is free and lets you send up to 1GB. The upload is slow as you'd expect, but that's not yousendit.com's fault.

As per their site:

"If you have ever experienced www.YouSendIt.com or YouSendIt Enterprise Server, you already know the answer to this question: You find yourself effortlessly working with its easy to use interface, having complete confidence that your data will get to its destination without errors, risk, or confusion. Feeling comfortable with the knowledge that your sensitive information is completely safe and secure."

So there you go. Use it in good health.

Acronyms ASAP

Nice new acronym search tool called Acronyma.com. Clean interface, looks a bit like Teoma. Anyway, you get a search box and a button. You can also choose a language and choose Word or Acronym. If you choose Acronym and type in an acronym, you get a list of matches. ADA got me thirty results including Americans with Disabilities Act, American Dental Association, Average Daily Attendance, etc. It also bolds by importance, I assume by popularity somehow, but it doesn't say anywhere.

If you select Word in the search interface and type in a word it will return results that have that word in them. I typed in the word "random" and got 103 results (!) including Random Access Memory, Random Matrix Theory, and Random Amplified Polymorphic Dna (fancy!).

This looks like it will come in handy.

http://www.acronyma.com