November 2007
Decaffeinated Water, Please
It turns out that the presence of caffeine in water systems is now used as an indicator of a leak in waste water treatment systems, since they remove 99% of the caffeine that we cycle through.
Charles Isherwood
[from The New York Times, 30 November 2007]
At the theater, after all, we can feel most powerfully a sense of communion in life’s solitude. It is the place to go to feel alone together.
Internet Evolution's “Wisdom of Clouds”
Stephen Saunders is linkbaiting. He has debuted a pretty ho-hum interface called “Wisdom of Clouds”, riffing on the Surowiecki book, The Wisdom Of Crowds. But then, he just goes stupid:
[from Internet Evolution unveils “Wisdom of the Clouds” interface | 901am]
We’re calling our new interface ‘The Wisdom of Clouds’ as an ironic homage to James Surowiecki’s ‘The Wisdom of Crowds,’...
links for 2007-11-30
The Twitter Toolset: 50+ Guides, Hacks, and Scripts Christina Laun attempts to pull together a mazillion Twitter resources, and still manages to leave out Snitter and Tweetr. (tags: twitter christina+laun)
Anne Truitt Zelenka » On Covering Web 2.0 for GigaOM Anne is a real person, no matter what Fred Wilson says. (tags: anne+zelenka fre)
Competing for the creative class « Jon Udell...
Yelp: Leading The Way In The New Rudeness
I find this new model of having parties reprehensible. I guess it works like this: you invite 200 people expecting 150 to say yes. If 200 say, “Cool,” you send emails out to 50 of them saying sorry: the party was oversubscribed. Maybe better luck next year.
Newest example is the Yelp SF party:
SF Party to undisclosed-recipients, date Nov 29, 2007 7:57 PM subject Update on...
Tom Boyd in Fairfax Hospital
Tom Boyd in Fairfax Hospital Originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd My Dad two days after the surgery cutting out 2/3 of one of his lungs.
Paul Theroux on Stuff
[from Hotel Honolulu]
The things people accumulated — old pictures and pewter, jade and carved ivory and ugly faced masks and books and tapestries and large yellow sperm-whale teeth scored with scrimshaw, silver platters and spoons and sugar tongs, the incidental and ill-assorted objects that were supposed to have value — all of it was merely borrowed from the vast store of ...
Google Experimental Search: Building On Co-op?
Google’s existing dominance of the web rests directly upon the power of search. Most people honestly don’t know that Google’s search algorithm is based on a formula that includes text indexes (yes, the words on the pages matters), but also involves link count: the number of times people have ‘voted’ for the page by linking to it also matters.
In essence, the...
links for 2007-11-29
A VC: I Don’t Want To Consume Media That I Can’t Interact With I’m with Fred, and Scoble, who he references. Which is a major flaw in Kindle. (tags: kindle amazon fred+wilson robert+scoble)
New Moo Card Case From Cubo
New Moo Card Case From Cubo Originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd Just arrived. I got red leather because black was out of stock.
/Message Stats: Over 30K RSS Subscribers
Analyze :: Feed Stats Dashboard, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
And over 75K views in the past 30 days.
Zoho Writer Offline Via Google Gears
Zoho Writer - Online Word Processor - Offline Edition, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Well, I reinstalled an earlier version of Firefox because I couldn’t seem to get much working with the 3.0 Beta.
One side effect is that I could reinstall Google Gears, and then test the offline capability recently announced for Zoho Writer. Seems to work like a champ.
Interesting that Zoho got...
Brian Solis on Social Media Press Releases
I was involved in a kerfuffle early in 2007 regarding the Social Media Press Release, sort of. I say sort of because initially my comments were not directed toward the SMR concept, but some not-very-insightful comments about social media in general that were made by advocates of the SMR (see Enough Already: Getting Social Media All Wrong, Social Media and Press Relations: The Press Release Is...
2 tags
Olof Werngren Breaks Up With Plazes
A sad day, when an old relationship with an inconstant application — in this case Plazes — comes to the break-up point:
[from Plazes Broke My Heart]
[…]
Also I know I’m worth something better and I don’t see a future with kids, dog, volvo and stuff together with Plazes. That’d just be sick.
Thanks for our time together, it’s not all bad memories. I’ll be collecting my stuff...
T.S. Eliot
What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community.
links for 2007-11-28
HOLYCHIC - Visit the Best Of Hip Paris Vesna Gerintes is the editor of this cool site: best reviews on Paris hotels. (tags: paris Vesna+Gerintes holy+chic)
How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook — Facebook — InformationWeek Cory Doctorow say Facebook’s days are numbered because of social scale issues. (tags: cory+doctorow facebook social+networks sociality)
»...
Niche Social Network Nomination: Dopplr
I am an avid user of Dopplr (reviewed at length in Dopplr Case Study From Building Social Applications Workshop), a social networking solution for travelers. While everyone travels sometimes, this one is for the road warriors, like me.
So I will definitely by nominating this one for the OpenWebAwards in the Niche Social Network category.
Coffee Drinks Illustrated By Lokesh Dhakar
Coffee Drinks Illustrated | Lokesh Dhakar, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Great design, good informatics.
OpenWebAwards.com Nominations Are Open
Read all about it!
I am going to approach the nominations for the OpenWebAwards in an open, egalitarian, and lazy way: I am going to invite you — whoever is reading this post, and your cousin, Mike — to submit nominations.
I will also start doing a few, and over the next week, I will filter down to the top nominations, where top is loosely defined at ones with the most...
David Waltz
Words are not in themselves carriers of meaning, but serve merely as pointers to shared experience.
[pointer: Esther Dyson]
Proposal For BlogTalk 2008
Man. The Blogtalk conference has the most convoluted application process that I have experienced in many years. And why do I need to provide an entire ‘paper’? Isn’t that just a bit old fashioned for a social media conference?
I favor the approach that the folks at Reboot took this past summer, where people proposed sessions — of their own or to be presented by others...
My Father Is Doing Well
According to my mother, at the hospital, my dad is resting after his lung surgery, and all looks as well as we had hoped. Two lobes on one lung were removed, but — at this point — it looks like the cancer had not spread. We will know more after more tests are run. But things are looking pretty good.
Will MS Office Or Oracle Be Slaughtered First By...
Firefox, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I was alerted to the release of a new version of Zoho Writer that supports offline capabilities, via Google Gears. They had a version until today that only allowed read-only access to documents offline; today’s release supports offline editing and sync. But I couldn’t install the Google Gears add-on for Firefox, and it is incompatible...
links for 2007-11-26
Why Microsoft’s Zune is Still Failing — RoughlyDrafted Magazine Why the Zune will fail, again, and why Microsoft doesn’t see it. (tags: microsoft zune digital+music)
Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog): Close encounter with Facebook Beacon Charlene is scared of Beacon. And she might be right. (tags: facebook beacon charlene+li)
Paolo Valdemarin Weblog Marco Formento...
Kurt Vonnegut on Writing Fiction
Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. 4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. 5. Start as...
Netflix Mailers
There is apparently no way to get Netflix to send you a mailer. My cleaning woman (or someone) threw my mailers out, and I can’t get any mailed from Netflix. That’s stupid. I even called customer support. Nope.
Apple Censoring Negative Threads?
According to Tony Celeste, Apple’s Leopard problems have led to censoring support threads:
[…]
There are a variety of other reports, including a Mac Pro becoming completely inoperative after a Leopard upgrade. One user asked, Is it me, or is Leopard just a mess?. Apple locked the topic, preventing replies. Another user echoed my sentiments at the start of this article by asking ...
Steve Jobs
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Blogging Is Still Primitive
I had decided some time ago that I wanted to write up the Dopplr case study from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, which I finally completed yesterday (see here). What a pain it turned out to be!
I thought it would be straightforward: convert the 20 or so slides into graphics, upload them, write down more-or-less the words that I said at the workshop.
The conversion was easy. Everything else was...
Hugh MacLeod Goes Back To Basics
Hugh’s story about his recent years is similar to mine. So I hear the echo in my head when he says that he wants to get back to the basic core, and refocus on his blog.
I have been rededicating myself to /Message in recent months. Like Gaping Void, it doesn’t directly pay the bills, but it is the wellspring of everything else.
I will be continuing on with my various projects ...
Restoring Compress PDF In Leopard
Install Compress PDF, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Some helpful soul, called himself Steve Jobs, left the URL to a download that restores Compress PDF functionality in Mac’s Leopard OS release.
Here’s the link: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/compresspdfworkflow.html.
Frank Herbert
Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens.
Shit Comes In Waves
My dad, Thomas Boyd, is going in for lung surgery on Monday. Yikes. We’ve known for some time that he has had lung cancer — several weeks — and the surgery is expected, but it’s very wearing. I am at a low ebb, worrying about him, old Thomas.
And now Pops shares other bad news in the family, too private to disclose, not my news to share. Yet another bone-breaking...
5 tags
Dopplr Case Study From Building Social...
At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin I presented a revamped version of the Building Social Applications workshop that I had previously given at Lift in Geneva and the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I have touched on parts of the workshop in other posts (here and here), but this post focusses specifically on the case study and group exercise.
[I guess I have been flapping my mouth too much in...
Paul Theroux
My career as a writer had not prepared me for anything practical.
Bugs: Flickr, Firefox, Safari
Flickr bug, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Just the newest headache to arise from Flickr’s approach to entering tags.
Flickr allows you to upload batches of pictures, and you can use the (better) approach of comma-separated tags when entering the tags for the pictures. You can also enter tags that will be applied to the entire batch. However, Flickr simply takes the batch tags,...
Thanksgiving: A Surreal Experience
Thanksgiving is one of those weird times when I am surrounded with family — people I have all sorts of blood and marriage relationships with — and none of them has the faintest idea what I do, or reads anything I write. Such a surreal experience. A kind of dislocation from my sense of self. I often retreat into a sort of bemused reverie, in between the times when people want me to...
Buy Nothing Day
Buy Nothing Day Originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd
JP Rangaswami on Why Facebook Is Different
JP has started a several day series on why Facebook is different from other social networks, specifically Linkedin and Xing:
[from Some Friday evening ruminations around Facebook et al | confused of calcutta]
[…]
Why is Facebook different? I don’t quite know, but it is. Stuff like MySpace and Bebo are overtly narcissistic, it’s all about how you express yourself. Facebook, on the...
More Microsoft Bashing (Not Really, But the...
Matt Asay says something profound, buried in a post about a new competitor to Microsoft Office, Live Documents. I agree with his dismissal of that effort, and for the same reasons that he does:
[from Microsoft’s Hotmail founder goes for the (wrong) Office jugular with Live Documents | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs]
[…]
The...
Tim Berners-Lee on Social Graph: Ok, I Give
The term social graph is a catchy meme. The most recent manifestation of the spread of this viral term is Tim Berners-Lee who writes (in an absurdly disorganized and incoherent post) that he believes that the meaning of social graph somehow overlaps with his semantic web:
[from Giant Global Graph]
[…]
Its [sic: it’s] not the Social Network Sites that are interesting — it...
Butchered Turkey
Butchered Turkey Originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd
links for 2007-11-23
Facebook Is Almost 2/3 Women (and other stats) Counter to conventional wisdom. I guess someone will have to duplicate the research, though. (tags: paul+francis facebook web+demographics)
Kindle sells out in 5.5 hours - Engadget Wow. Looks like a hit. (tags: kindle amazon digital+books)
Social Design Best Practices - OpenSocial - Google Code A numbered list might not be the right way to...
Flickr Places
Flickr Places, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Fooling with Flickr’s new Places geoloco service. Extremely cool way to put your pictures on the map.
Google Calendar Hack
I change time zones a lot. It is very easy to mess up calendar entries: I am in New York, thinking about a dinner in London, and my calendar is still set to SF time.
One thing that helps is to actually have the desired time embedded in the appointment title text. Then, even if the screwed time zone stuff puts your dinner down as starting at 4am, you can still salvage the original data.
The ...
Heraclites
Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.
Amazon Kindle: More of the Same (DRM)
The jury is split on the Kindle, Amazon’s big foray into the digital media world.
At face value, Amazon looks to be in the perfect place to create an iPod/iTunes revolution in the digital print media world, where so much failure has come before.
To me, the design looks pretty cool, but I haven’t yet fooled with an actual device to get a sense of the software and display.
The ...
AT&T Backs Away From Telework
In a world headed toward ecological catastrophe largely because of our abuse of fossil fuels, this shift away from telework at AT&T is more than bad news: It’s immoral, and should be illegal.
[from AT&T calls teleworkers back to cubicle life by Ann Bednarz]
AT&T, a company that once was a poster child for telecommuting, is downsizing its long-running telework program and...
The Booze Test Results
97%ALCOHOLIC
Word Of The Moment: Fairchise
I actually don’t know how I stumbled on the BusinessClass.net site, but I did, earlier this week. BCN (as it is also known) started in Berlin, and I could have meet with Manu Kumar, the founder, if I had discovered it a few weeks ago while I was there.
BCN is a network of short-term workspaces. Currently, there are only two: HQ, in Berlin, and another just outside LA. There is a...
