There was a funny story in tech circles this week, summarized well in this headline: Microsoft Sends Secret Dossier on Reporter, to Reporter. Microsoft's PR company did research on the reporter who was writing this story about Microsoft's transparency/blogging policy and then sent the research to him. The PR guy seems to agree it wasn't on purpose but explains why it's not a scandal. Some don't believe it was a mistake at all that in connection with an article about Microsoft transparency the Microsoft PR company becomes "radically transparent" and generates an extra wave of publicity.

The deeper question seems to be whether the transparency revealed a certain scriptedness and preparation which are antithetical to being transparent.  That is to say, in oversimplified terms, if you show people how you planned to be fake, that doesn't make you not fake.  (Transparency:  MSNBC.com is partly owned by Microsoft, but I learned about this story on Techmeme like everyone else.)

"The company is hoping the new desk camera will replace the need for passwords, tokens, or cards.  The software with the camera automatically initiates network logon and/or single sign-on to pre-registered web-based or Microsoft Windows applications."  It's face recognition software.  I like idea of my computer simply recognizing me when I sit down.  What gives me pause is what happens when it doesn't work (and you know at some point it's not going to work).  I can picture glowering into the little Web cam screaming, "It's me!  You knew me yesterday, what's the problem? Is it this zit? It's just a zit!"

Cuff lights area a great idea.  The uses are limitless.  Basically anyone with hands who ever finds themselves in the dark.

Speaking of many uses, the list of possible applications of T-rays mentioned at the end of this article makes me think it's worth making a mental note of it so it's familiar when it comes up again.

Gael usually does a round-up of peep posts at this time of year but I have to share this great video on how to make your own peeps from scratch.  Not hard at all and as a bonus, because egg whites are a key ingredient, you finally have an excuse to pick up one of these egg separators.  Hi honey, look what I bought!

Also, the idea of peeps coated in dark chocolate is inspired.

Mothership Microsoft has a new mobile browser.  The idea is that instead of rendering a special mobile version of a Web page it shows you the page just like it looks on your regular computer.  But since that means all the elements are too small, it uses a magnifying rectangle to zoom in on the parts you're interested in.  It sounds pretty preliminary still but I appreciate keeping the web experience consistent across platforms so I don't have to learn a whole new system.

YouTube has added TestTube, a page for featuring new ideas still in testing.  On there now is a tool for swapping the audio on your video with a musical soundtrack.  Also there's something called streaming which is a chat room with a playlist.  As a chatter you can submit videos to the playlist and while you're chatting the room shows which video you're watching so others can know what you're talking about.  I found it a little bit awkward, but in the right circumstances I could see this being really useful.

Speaking of chatting while you watch, Justin.TV is a guy living his life with a camera strapped to his head streaming live to the Web and  you can watch and chat about it in a chat room.  Kind of a 90s idea, but if he can make something of it, more power to him.

Social Media Marketing for Small Business - Outside of the business context, the advice here is good for growing your blog or expanding your online social contacts.

Today is Stop Cyberbullying Day for what that's worth.

Not long ago I read about Google driving a large amount of data in a truck because it was too much to transfer digitally.  (For the life of me I can't find the article.  Too many common terms for search.) This article about using buses to transport offline versions of the Web to unconnected locations is in a similar vein.  It actually reminds me of when I was a kid and the bookmobile would come to our street (is that a thing everyone did or did we have a special program?).

And speaking of online and offline, Which is better, an offline Web App or an online Desktop App?  I spent a fair amount of time yesterday trying to get this straight in my head even though this piece is pretty short.  The debate has a real "heads I win, tails you lose" quality, but the topic of online desktop apps seems to be increasing in importance so it's worth at least knowing what it's about.  Like the people using the Web bus show, there's a lot you can still do without an active Internet connection.  And sometimes running something off your machine instead of over the Web can be faster.  The best solution would be some kind of overlap of the two, and that's where the debate starts to happen.  If you write your blog entry in Word (offline, from your desktop) and then log on to submit it to your blogware, does that have advantages over having to be logged online the entire time you're composing your blog entry?  Does logging into your e-mail on the Web have advantages over using Outlook on your desktop?  From what I read, the ideal is a balance such that you can log into your own files from anywhere, online, but also have high performance apps on your own machine that are informed by the online data.

"Windows only: WiPeer sets up wireless peer-to-peer networks between PCs, no router, access point or internet required."

US 'no longer technology king' - The headline is pretty dramatic, but as many comments on this story pointed out, the U.S. has a vital tech industry and the U.S. tech community is full of global leaders, so how does the study come up with Denmark and Sweden topping the list?  Here's the rub:  "Countries were judged on the integration of technology in business, the infrastructure available, government policy favourable for fostering a culture of innovation and progress and leadership in promoting the usage of the latest information technology tools."  It's not much of a stretch to accept that there are other countries in the world whose governments are more supportive of the spread of technology.  Some Americans could argue that our government is actually resistant to technology's progress.

Upon reading about the rumors that the San Francisco Chronicle is in trouble I read Dave Winer's advice on what to do about it.  The crux of his advice is to "decentralize" the reporting process to get rid of the idea of the reporter as middle man.  At the same time, what he's describing, that the paper host blogs for people who would be sources, is a new kind of "centralizing" as local papers would be building blog hubs that don't already exist.

Flying Imams Shield Law Passed in Congress - The Flying Imams story has been followed by warbloggers for months and I don't think I've heard a single peep about it in the mainstream press.  I've looked for a concise summary and/or timeline several times, but as is the nature of blog reporting I have only found updates and pieces and nothing that would work well as a link here.  This blog entry, though messy, captures all the basic elements.  Here's how I understand the story and if I miss something important, let me know:  A group of Imams, Americans I think, boarded a plane in Minneapolis while apparently deliberately drawing attention to themselves with weird behavior.  When passengers raised concern the Imams got the boot from the plane.  The Imams promptly protested and sued, giving many the impression that the whole thing was a stunt so they could make a big deal about discrimination against Muslims.  The new law makes it impossible to sue someone who reports suspicious activity.  UPDATE:  Reader JE in the comments points to this link in the travel section today (yeah, kind of an odd travel story).

Game: You have five minutes to kill yourself

Super slow motion of samurai swords cutting stuff

"See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses — and build a few new ones." This reminds me a little of the guy who gave himself a sense of magnetism by implanting magnets in his fingers, but this article goes beyond that to giving people new ways to experience the standard senses.  The two mindblowers for me are that it all falls under the category of "we don't know why, no one's ever done this before" and the description at the end of people feeling completely lost without their buzzy gadgets, due in part to the fact that their brains remapped.  There's some exciting stuff to be explored in this field.

Make a wallet from the circuit sheet in your keyboard - I wonder what airport security would think of this.  I have tons of dead keyboards.  I could almost start a wallet business.

I don't understand the deep-frier-as-fish-tank idea. Why does the water not get too hot for the fish to bear?  There's more explanation at this site. Also, eventually you're going to need to aerate that water, particularly since its surface is covered in oil.  I'd like to see that addressed.

Dual photography - I don't remember where I clicked this and it's a little on the nerdy side, but what they're doing is reassembling light according to its path to figure out what a scene looks like from the light's source.  The video isn't too long, but if you're not totally interested, bump ahead to 4:20 to see a very cool CSI-style trick and let your mind wander from there.

Today's entry took a little longer because it's a lot of video, which is harder to skim.

The YouTube award winners - I think we've seen them all at one point or other on this blog.  I'm wondering if this Terra Naomi could be the first big celeb that was a Web celeb first.  (Remember she's the one who shared the chords to her songs and people played their own versions of them as video replies to her on YouTube.  Brilliant.  NOTE: If you let that first song play you will have it in your head until you die.  And if you're like me and never learn the words to songs properly, that death may come by your own hand.

Meanwhile, Ask a Ninja was on the Blades of Glory press tour.  I never really got into this guy but it won't be long before he's the ultimate divider of young and old.  Some entertainment show or award ceremony will have him on for a brief skit and if you're young you'll know it and love it and it will represent the validation of cyberculture and if you're old you won't get it and who the hell was that guy.  Having just turned old a few weeks ago this may have already happened and I'm too out of touch to know it.

Speaking of songs in your head, I wanna rock - Because it is in a rental car commercial that played over and over on MSNBC today.  It has three words so everyone can sing along, even people who never learn the words to songs.

Chevy to show 3 microcar concepts in New York and Do-it-yourself cars (also pretty micro with a 50cc motor).  It's enough to make me think there's a micro car movement afoot, but I don't see how they could ever cope with SUVs on the road.  Maybe if they were given special status.

Top 40 Feedburner sites - What's good about the feedburner list is that it shows sites that people subscribe to.  Most lists show what people are linking to, but that doesn't show readership and it's very prone to cheating.  It's also different than a raw page view ranking because reads in an RSS aggregator don't necessarily show up as page views.

28 weeks later - This is the 28 Days Later sequel and it looks pretty good.  I was a little disturbed to see that the military character is American and says, "We've lost control, kill everyone." Come to think of it, that would make a great t-shirt.

Kermit doing Johnny Cash doing Nine Inch Nails - NOTE: Sometimes it's funny when a familiar childhood character does something outrageous but this is so dark you'll probably find yourself horrified by the end.  That said, being horrified by Kermit the Frog is a pretty amazing achievement in itself.  Contains one S-bomb and very adult themes.

Speaking of bad cover songs, 20 Worst cover songs in pop music history - I don't know about that Guns and Roses item (the live version, not the Tom Cruise version), and for that matter I don't mind Sheryl Crow's Sweet Child o' Mine.

Google's directions from Stanford, California to Stockholm, Sweden.  It's step 33 that's the doozy.

I've often wanted to slide down the shiny metal space between really steep escalators.  Sometimes they have little knobs placed along the length of the escalator, I imagine to discourage that very thing.  Knowing that, you can see why this video of a guy skiing down a really steep, long escalator has some appeal.

dan le sac VS scroobius pip "Thou Shalt always Kill" - More like a list of pet peeves than real commandments, and full of Britishisms and a couple names I didn't know.  The guy would probably be upset to hear me say it, but I kept waiting for him to say, "She drinks a whiskey drink, she drinks a vodka drink."  Next time I'm taking a long drive or maybe if there's a power outage I'll have to give some thought to why I'm always so interested in people's lists of rules.

You thought turning mailboxes into R2-D2s to promote stamps was something?  How about 7-11s into Kwik-E-Marts to promote the Simpsons movie?

The story of my life.

"The reactable, is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface."  What?  You really have to see it.  It's an instrument, but you're not exactly doing Pete Townsend windmill strums on it.  (The part we're supposed to be especially awed by is "multi-touch" technology that allows the screen to recognize being touched by more than one thing at once.)

Life imitates comic book:  Space fireball just misses jetliner - Was it satellite debris or meteor?  Or was it the spawn of Saturn's hexagon cast to Earth to enslave us all only to be defeated by a rag-tag group of farmers led by a high school quarterback and assisted by a goth girl in a biplane?  I mean really, the question answers itself.

One thing you have to appreciate about bloggers is who else is going to find C-Span highlights?  In this one, someone from the General Services Administration is trying to explain that she has no memory of using her office as a partisan tool for election strategizing.  Toward the end is the best when it's revealed that all of her people already ratted her out and she still has to say she doesn't remember any of it.  A good Congressional hearing schadenfreude video.  A fuller set can be found here but I haven't watched them all yet.  (Hey!  That second one is no blog, that's Pelosi's site.  Of course it was just a matter of time before legislators began providing their own highlight reels.)

A look into the future that never was.  This is the ultimate "where's my rocket car?" blog.

"Sewage treatment plant officials in Michigan are trying to figure out what happened to 15 million gallons of partially-treated sewage, which used to be stored in lagoon near the village of Sand Lake – and now isn't."  The real question is where do sinkholes go?  Did you see Pan's Labyrinth?

Viacom blogs still using YouTube - Not only that but the other day Stephen Colbert was especially brilliant for encouraging his audience to remix clips and images from his show.  The only disappointing part was that the guest was a guy from the EFF who didn't present any real response to Stephen's recitation of the corporate line.  (The corporate line is that if people are getting copyrighted material for free, the revenue stream dries up and the content has to go away.  The real answer is that by giving away copyrighted material the audience makes greater use of it, generates buzz deepens their devotion and helps market your show.  There may be a scaling limit somewhere, but The Colbert Report is still small enough that it can benefit more from word of mouth marketing than in can from having a clueless parent company.)

Seven essential stations every home should have.  This sounds ridiculous at first but what I really like about it is that it questions the traditional structure of our living space.  Do we really always have to use the bedroom/living room/kitchen/bathroom structure?  Is there a way to recategorize the routines of our lives so our rooms serve us differently?  I'm not proposing we replace the bedroom with a "gift giving" room, but I appreciated the help in thinking outside of these traditional boxes.

The online tech community is seized by discussions of death threats and incivility in online discourse.  Actually, "incivility" is probably too mild a term when you're talking about hanging someone and other mortal threats.  The spark for this particular iteration of what has become a perennial topic comes from a blogger who has cancelled her public speaking appointments out of fear for her safety.

I don't recognize all of the names in her post, but it's weird that she almost seems to know who made the threats.  Scoble is not blogging for a week out of sympathy and solidarity.  He also calls for discussions on how to fix the culture.

Scoble is talking specifically about how women are treated in tech culture, but even in the broader context of online abusiveness, I don't see how it gets fixed.  Every time one of these stories comes up I wonder if future generations will just have thicker skin.  What will likely happen is that people will start to learn how to have public and private identities online.  When I first started working in online communities no one in their right mind used their real name for anything.  It was like CB radio.  Everyone used a handle.  Yesterday I was reading the reactions to this lady's story of someone stealing online photos of her baby to use on some kind of bogus personal site.  If you don't care to read through the comments I'll just tell you that a lot of people had no sympathy for her because she was fool enough to post such personal photos publicly.

Here's an irony for you: Web anonymity can sink your job search - "If someone searches for you on the Web and comes up empty-handed, do you exist?"

Speaking of women fearing for their safety.  The story of women in the U.S. military being so afraid of being raped by their comrades that they deprive themselves of water rather than make a trip to the latrines is receiving a lot of attention. I naturally made the association with the recent New York Times Magazine piece about women in the military coping with trauma.  The NYT piece (sorry, it's behind the subscription wall at this point but it looks like most of it is here) is ostensibly about sexual assault in the U.S. military but really it's about military women recovering from the trauma of war and how sometimes sexual abuse is part of that trauma.

Anyway, with regard to the first item about women depriving themselves of water, the accusation is that the U.S. government isn't reporting cause of death of female soldiers to avoid providing evidence of the situation.  I clicked military blogger Mudville Gazette who calls the whole thing an urban legend. He focuses on the source of the report (Karpinski of Abu Ghraib infamy) and unlikelihood of someone dying of dehydration by not drinking water for part of the day.

Speaking of respecting women and hiding one's identity online, Beautiful celebrity women with relatively impressive academic credentials (Written by someone calling himself Greedo.)

Speaking of finding intelligence attractive, Why geeks are more attractive. (This is probably linkbait for a dating site, but still, it's good for geeks to read stuff like this periodically.)

OK, one more on respecting women and their state of wellbeing (all of these felt like a cohesive whole when I was plotting them in my head, but I'm not sure I've really established a connection now that I'm putting them on pixel): "Researchers have found that parity between the sexes may be bad for your health."

Dollar bill origami - Contrary to a headline I once read on a similar feature, your waiter/waitress does not appreciate you folding the tip into a bunch of little animals.

Commuter Click: Bob Garfield's Chaos Scenario 2.0 - I got half way through and said, "Holy cow, I'm only half way through?"  It's a fun read though because lately there have been a lot of comments from mainstream media saying that everything is going to be OK.  The media doomsayers were caught up in their own hype.  The media world as we know it is not coming to an end.  I was enjoying those articles because I find media doomsayers to be generally obnoxious and take some pleasure in the idea of them being wrong (even though, as a new media employee, I should probably want them to be right).  But this is a good old fashioned end of the world piece about the collapse of traditional media with the twist being that the Internet is still too young to serve as a safety net.

Speaking of holding a finger to the media breeze, So, how many podcasts did you download today? The UK's Daily Telegraph pursues some trendy new media ideas and doesn't find a whole lot of reader interest.  Now what?

I played a little with Click2Map today.  It's still in beta, but you can tell what it's about as you use it.  Place markers on a map and label them, then save the map.

World's first building-integrated wind turbines - The Freedom Tower at Ground Zero was supposed to have these but I think they were written out of subsequent designs of the building.  "Through its positioning and the unique aerodynamic design of the towers, the prevailing on-shore Gulf breeze is funneled into the path of the turbines, helping to create power generation efficiency."

"Researchers have discovered a pair of twins who are identical through their mother's side, but share only half their genes on their father's side." This is a quick summary of a longer article to which it links.  They're calling these semi-identical twins chimeras.

Speaking of Chimeras, how about a sheep that's 15% human? Craziest sentence: "He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep."  What I like best about these kinds of stories is the way the force us to wonder at what percentage we'll have to grant human rights to these partly human sheep.

Before sharing this "worst logo ever" sign I wanted to double check that it's real and not a photoshop job.  Sure enough, it's real.  FYI, that's an Alabama area code.

"If you're not familiar, Folding@Home is a Stanford University project that analyzes protein folding patterns to work toward cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. All you need to do is download the program and leave it running when you're not using your computer; Your compy's spare processing capacity is put to good use performing incredibly complex protein folding calculations."

"The last, unfinished book by the 'Lord of the Rings' author has been completed by his son."

The old traffic death comparison trick.  Iraq war defenders use it to make the point that the number of people dying in Iraq is small relative to the number of Americans who die in automobile related incidents.  War on Terror skeptics use it to point out the over-reaction to 9/11 because of the small number of people who died relative to the number of Americans who die in automobile related incidents. No one seems to make the point that what these comparisons actually demonstrate is the magnitude of the plague automobiles are on America.  They kill Americans in huge numbers, they pollute, they isolate us from each other, they make America dangerously dependent on oil...  Perhaps it's not that the Iraq War or 9/11 are so small but that our car culture is an exponentially greater problem.

Owner of a lonely heart on violin - See if this doesn't end up in your head for the rest of the day.

**That's "vérité" in the headline but for some reason the characters with the accents aren't rendering.

UFOs flew over Phoenix in '97, Symington says - That's Symington the former Arizona governor who (according to a TV report I just saw) was dismissive of the sighting at the time to prevent public panic even though he was convinced that it was in fact aliens.  A story like this is easy enough to ignore on its face, but didn't we just read about the former Canadian defense minister (second item) calling for UFO secrets to be revealed?  And now I'm also reading about France opening its UFO files.  (The link is slow to load but I did eventually get it open.  But once there I wasn't sure what to do so I'll try again when I've got more time and hopefully by then someone will have highlighted some of the juicy parts.)  And that weird string of UFO headlines from January is still fresh in my mind.

By the way, regarding the Arizona sighting, the article points out: "Tucson astronomer and retired Air Force pilot James McGaha said he investigated two separate sightings over Phoenix that March night and traced them both to A-10 aircraft flying in formation at high altitude."  But Symington doesn't appear to care about that.  Human hegemony is over (if you want it).

"Once a person commits an opinion to writing – even an opinion he does not hold – it soon becomes his actual opinion. Not every time, but MOST of the time."  See how Scott Adams turns that into a strategy to get strange attractive people to want to have sex with you.  (P.S. When you read the line about moist robots, did you automatically think of the "ugly bag of mostly water" line from Star Trek?

• Kurt Vonnegut's Eight rules for writing fiction
• George Orwell's 5 Rules for Effective Writing

They're similar in spirit I think.

Speaking of rules that are as much about assessing others' work as guiding your own, I find myself mentally referring back to this guy's list of rules for taking pictures of strangers while doing street photography.

Obama's pastor speaks out - Apparently he's angry about what the New York Times did with an interview with him.  The letter comes from the church bulletin, which you can see in pdf at the end of this blog entry.

Furniture origami

Disturbing World Trade Center ad from 1984 - Looking for the context I found it illustrating this excerpt of an L.A. Times editorial about the threat of rising water levels being higher than the threat of terror attack.  I also found it in this collection of WTC photos (see that asbestos ad?). 

As long as I'm talking about the context of 9/11, the sight of 9/11 t-shirts displayed next to "beer police" t-shirts at a St. Augustine, Florida tourist shop annoyed me enough to take a picture of it.  I'm not saying everything about 9/11 has to be displayed in low light and ringed with candles, or even that people in Florida shouldn't be able to buy commemorative t-shirts, but on the same rack as beer police shirts?  Ug.

This is a pretty amazing story of Marines accused of murdering an Iraqi.  The amazing part is not so much the murder as the alleged cover up, which involves staging tableaus that were recorded by unmanned surveillance drones to give themselves an alibi for the killing.  Fiction writers, add this one to your idea notebooks.

10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World - Gotta love those Banyan trees.

The peculiar pleasure of ear plugs - "There's the pleasure of calming the world around you to the point where you can hear your own thoughts. And then there is the real treat to wearing earplugs: The moment when you have arrived at your destination—a quiet desk, a park, or maybe home, where a loved one waits—and you take them out, and the whole world comes rushing delightfully in, bright and somehow new."  (P.S. If you get a chance to ride a motorcycle while wearing ear plugs, do it.)

The Freakonomics of Boarding a Bus - Getting on a bus at a crowded stop is a terrible experience, so why doesn't everyone walk down the block to the stop that's less crowded?  Lengthy discussion in the comments, but what made me laugh is the way people who are constantly looking for "better ways" never understand people who couldn't be bothered.  I say this as someone who knows ten thousand ways to get to work by bus, train, cab, company shuttle and motorcycle and I can't understand why anyone would take the least comfortable way.  (A bonus to reading this piece is that you end up listening to the music on Lily Allen's MySpace.)

Retro games in stop motion

Updated pie chart: Who Owns the National Debt, Jan. 2007

A comprehensive list of documentaries to be viewed online for free. Basically it's a navigation of documentaries in Google Video but as such it's more useful than the hodge podge that is Google's documentary category.

Rubber band guns

Five common exercises you should never do.  I don't know about this one.  Those are some pretty time honored exercises.  I mean, I can see why they'd put stress on a joint or tendon, but "never do" seems a bit much.

"Intelligent teenagers often listen to heavy metal music to cope with the pressures associated with being talented, according to research."

Maps of science - It took me a minute to figure out that the way to play with it is through the navigation on the right.

It might be time to see a doctor when...

New site aims to be the YouTube of gaming - You can skip the article, the site is Kongregate.com and the relevant quote is "Not all of them are gems, but the top 100 are."  Some you'll recognize, others not, but I can pretty much guarantee you'll loose a sizeable amount of your day here.

Yet another genius kitchen product.  It's a brownie baking tray that ensures maximum edge pieces.  This is second in necessity only to a top-only muffin tray.

10 Emerging Technologies 2007

Can podiobooks save my eyes and my sleep?  I've been meaning to look into serialized audio books as an evening activity.  I spend so much time staring at a screen and all of the sleep advice articles I've read mentions the importance of lower light as sleep time approaches.  My current nightly habit involves sitting on the couch with a laptop in my lap and the TV on until I just pass out (waking a couple hours later to drag my weary butt to bed).

I don't know how you write a review of the Riches without mentioning the accents.  Everyone is raving about the show, so I feel like I should give it another chance - particularly because I love Eddie Izzard - but British actors doing American southern accents is a real obstacle.  I'm a born-and-raised northerner and even I can hear the accents slipping and sliding.

Exploring the physiological meaning of "having guts" and "gut feelings."

Commuter Click: "The formula for human well-being used to be simple: Make money, get happy. So why is the old axiom suddenly turning on us?" I'm not sure I agree with the premise, but I'll give the essay a shot.

When was the last time you gave any strategic thought to the game of Monopoly?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is the entire Frank Miller 300 graphic novel series.

And about that link, Scribd is a document library.  Some interesting stuff.  I had never heard of it.

Don't copy that floppy - So annoying it makes me want to steal something just out of spite.

How I became a music pirate - Not out of spite.  In this case, the legally downloaded music was so mired in copyright protections that it couldn't even be played the prescribed way.  While this does showcase some of the shortcomings of DRM strategies, there's another layer of technical incompetence that seems new.  Was it ever the case that the music industry put out CDs that didn't play?  I mean, historically is it common for an industry to not understand or properly execute the medium by which its product is delivered?  Maybe I'm suffering from selective memory, but is there a historic equivalent of the struggle newspapers have had with blogs, or as in this case, the music industry has had with portable music files?

Maybe Google Wanted to be Sued: YouTube and Plan B - Probably the smartest thing I've read on the subject.  The idea is that Google recognized that YouTube's success or failure would have a big impact on Google's business, so rather than leave YouTube to fend for itself and likely be destroyed by inevitable copyright lawsuits, Google and its greater resources are defending YouTube's fate.

Emma Watson doesn't want to be Hermione anymore.  I don't see how skipping the last two movies will solve any of the problems she feels have resulted from doing the first five.  Kottke suggests Emmy Rossum as a replacement.  Isn't she American?

Speaking of Kottke, I was originally there reading his thoughts on Twitter.  Yes, coverage of Twitter does sound exactly like early coverage of blogs.  Yes, let's please not make it another popularity contest.  Many good, easy to digest (because they're Twitter-esque) points.

Speaking of Twitter, watch Twitters filed world wide in what could be real time but probably isn't exactly because I have to think they're being published faster that this thing is showing (even though they have labels like "less than one minute ago).  Amazingly compelling viewing (**I predict a good 70% reader disagreement with this statement but still, I watched it longer than I thought I would, which means it surprised me with how compelling it is).

Twittering your home - Ever seen the TV commercial of the guy who gets an e-mail from his car?  The idea behind Twittering your home is that you'd already have certain systems automated or otherwise digitized, so it would send alerts to a Twitter account, which would send them to you on whatever format you want to receive them at any given time.  BUT!  Before we get carried away, the line that really stood out to me was, "I'll lay odds that it gets hacked into a really useful service before long."  Because I'll lay odds that whatever industry ends up being the context for the useful hack will stumble with, at best, confusion, or at worst, business damaging ignorance while it tries to figure out how to incorporate this new useful thing it didn't realize was needed.  It's a great right-before-our-eyes example of how these technologies grow and spread.  And the reason you should care is that one day it'll be your boss who walks in with that Wall Street Journal article folded under his or her arm and says, "We need this."  And you'll be wondering where the heck "this" came from while a consultant is brought in to tell you that "this" is going to change the world and make you obsolete.

Speaking of being made obsolete by technology, Serious journalism won't die as newspaper fades (Don't miss the link to the emerging media ecosystem.)

Speaking of journalism, TPM Needs YOU to Comb Through Thousands of Pages - They're asking readers to choose some pages from the Gonzalez paper dump and comment on whether they find anything.  Folks putting together slide shows on Internet buzzwords will want to screengrab this one for the "crowdsourcing" slide.

And while TPM looks for help from amateurs, Assignment Zero is looking for pros to help their amateurs.

Speaking of adopting the role of journalists, This American Life on toy cameras - It reminds me a little of The Blair Witch Project when the character explains that it's less scary to watch what's happening through the camera. Can you imagine what it would be like to see what all those kids were really "shooting?"

Tomlin Vs. Russell: The 'I Heart Huckabees' Outtakes **- I came upon this first from one of the apparently elusive YouTube versions and had to do a WTF search to find out what it was about.  In short, director David O. Russell works his actors hard and sometimes fights with them.  In this case it's Lilly Tomlin.  That sounds like simple petty rubbernecking but the passion and expression is really compelling to watch.  It's also pretty amazing insight into the creative process of acting, which we usually either don't see or only see in parody ("What's my motivation?").  **NOTE:  It's cursing from start to finish.  Loud angry screaming F bombs and even a C bomb in one of them.

Journalist Scahill Charts the Rise of Blackwater USA

Connect the squares - This is a pretty unique puzzle game with a level of difficulty that lets you clear levels but still requires you to think.

Greek Gods family tree - This is one of those things that sets off "someday you're going to need a reference like this for something" alarm bells so I'm stashing it here.

Brain damage turns man into human chameleon - He adopts a new (entirely made up) identity depending on the social circumstances he's in.

Today is Bum Rush The Charts day.  We've seen efforts like this with organized Amazon purchases to improve sales rank as a marketing trick.  This time it's with iTunes and they want to put an independent band in the number 1 download spot.  Their hope is to make this happen at least temporarily by getting lots of people to buy the song at the same time.  The iTunes equivalent of Googlebombing.

By random chance, just before reading this story about the guy accidentally wiping out both a primary and back-up disc worth billions I had watched this Eddie Izzard clip on computers (NOTE: Contains a few casual F bombs).

This is another one of those empowering love-your-body-the-way-it-is videos but for me it was enlightening because she actually says how much she weighs and what size she is.  Those are both things I don't have a good concept of so the whole "there are no clothes in our size" argument is usually too abstract for me to really grasp.  The whole clip focuses on these kinds of very real complaints, so it's more than just a pep-talk video.

One guy who has to be thankful for the Internet is Dennis Kucinich.  He's running for president again, not that you would be expected to know that because I don't ever see him in the media.  And with all his impeachment talk you probably won't see him in mainstream media any time soon.  But this recent YouTube video is coming up on 23,000 views in less than three days.  That's not quite the audience of a cable news appearance but it's surely more people than he could speak to in two days on the campaign trail.

A new power rises in Iraq - Michael Totten returns to Iraqi Kurdistan to see how hope motivates productivity.

YouTube to present video awards - This is a great idea, not because anyone deserves and award or anyone should even care but because it starts a whole new ball game with a whole new set of celebrities and events.  Remember the ongoing search for the online celebrity who'd successfully turned into a real red carpet celebrity?  We never found a really good one but if YouTube can bring the red carpet to the online world, that could change the very premise of the question.

Speaking of online acknowledgment, Who was the first blogger?

How to turn an indoor pool into a home theater - The only problem with this one is that I'm thinking that anyone who can afford to have an indoor pool in their house probably doesn't need handy DIY tips on making a home theater.  Let me know when they come up with "how to turn one of the bedrooms in your rental apartment into a pool without losing your security deposit."

The wisdom of children - The world from the perspective of young people, but not in a stupid "Look Who's Talking" way.

The 100-year-old photoblog

Eyetracking artists - Cooler than the usual market research, this shows how artists literally look different(ly).  The article makes it clear that they do so as the result of training, though I imagine there's a nature/nurture argument to be had.

Bob wrote about this and others last week but for some reason it's all over TV and newspapers today.  Of course, if you're finding out about it from the TV you don't get to actually watch it for yourself so here's the link.  And here's a whole lot more on tracking the creator of the video.

UPDATE: Arianna Huffington found the guy who made it and got him to write a piece for her site.

Some mail from the past couple weeks in basically chronological order.

Good morning,
I just wanted to let you know that the new Medical Blog Grand Rounds has been posted at Blog, MD.

I'd appreciate it if you could share the news with your readers.

Thanks,
Sam Blackman

Good Morning Will:
Channels.com is launching Tuesday with a revolutionary new Web video guide that provides both consumers and programmers a central and neutral location for the discovery and promotion of the best video on the Web.  For consumers, Channels.com is an all-in-one video guide where they can view videos from the best of TV, cable, and broadband programming.  For video programmers and rights holders, Channels is the most effective tool on the Web to increase the number of viewers of their broadband video.

Best regards,
Amy

Will replies:  Amy's note is an introduction to a press release but still worth sharing since we were just talking about a site like this a couple days ago.  This site pulls copyrighted videos from their legal source.  Their database is pretty thin but they're still in beta so you have to give them a little room for growth.  Ironically some of their channels are TV clips hosted on YouTube as part of a legal agreement, but the Viacom clips are from Viacom properties.  I found a few MSNBC.com clips and they open in new windows.  I had figured a search engine would do the job of finding copyrighted videos on their respective sites, but a site like this that surfaces stuff in channels is probably more inviting.

Speaking of press releases, I also got one for something called Amie Street.  It's a DRM-free music service.  What's interesting is that the price per song is based on how popular that song is.  It could be as high as 98 cents or as low as zero.  I'm finding that also serves as a recommendation system.  It looks like the site also has a kind of tour-management function, presumably networking bands who are participating in the system.  My criticism so far is that even the "radio" channels only play partial samples of songs.  I even signed up for an account but I still don't get to hear a full song (if I'm misunderstanding something let me know).

I'm sure you have heard about the USPS promotion involving Star Wars.  Here's a Frapper map of the R2D2 mailboxes.

-Marjorie Carvalho
Star Wars Action News

Will notes:  The New York City box is a little off the mark but I imagine the map will correct itself as more people access it.

Hey Will,
Hope all is well with you. Just thought I'd pass along the feel good video of the day: a baby hysterically laughing as his dad plays golf on his Nintendo Wii.  I seriously watched this probably about 10 times already. Enjoy!
-Scott

Will replies:  Thanks Scott.  That baby laughing for any reason would be worth watching.

Michael Crook sent over a dozen fake copyright notices to trick webmasters into removing an embarrassing photograph of him.  The EFF sued him for interfering with the free speech of web site 10 Zen Monkeys, and as part of their settlement, they've required Crook to record a video apologizing to the entire internet!

Crook also has to rescind all his fake copyright notices, refrain from sending more, and take a remedial course in copyright law!

Here's a funny first-person account of the entire case.  (With legal commentary from "The Joker"!)

Will adds:  I think the best part of the video is the heavy sigh and look in askance off camera when he's done.

Will,
I  thought you'd enjoy playing the winning game of the recent jayisgames.com "GROW" themed competition:

Sprout

It's a fun little game, with quite lovely graphics.  I like the way it relies on a bit of knowledge to progress, not just finding a random spot to point-n-click.

Cindy W.
Redmond, WA

Will replies:  Thanks Cindy, that's a great game.  I was expecting something like the Eyemaze grow games. (More here.)  I didn't get to complete it because my boss is visiting from Redmond and she was sitting in the next cube.  After a few minutes I got VERY self conscious so I'll go back and play again later.

Speaking of the boss looking over your shoulder, you don't want that to be the case if you follow the links in this next one.

Thought you would get a kick out of this:

It was an eventuality you knew was coming: YouPorn! The latest imitator of You Tube is precisely what it sounds like: a Triple X version of YouTube. They cater to all those people who have been getting busy videotaping themselves, well, getting busy.  (link is safe for work, but after that, you are on your own!)

Barry Ritholtz

Will replies: Thanks Barry.  I'll reiterate Barry's warning: He's talking about a porn site, so if you click the link in his entry, it takes you to a porn site.  A real one with naked people.  The link to Barry's post is clean, however.  That said, I am baffled by the people who contribute to these sites. I know some are hidden cameras or personal videos that were never meant to "get out," but I would be surprised if there are this many of that type.  Since the site Barry points to is free, I'm thinking most of them are either small time porn operators basically advertising themselves online or else maybe just old fashioned exhibitionism.  (?)  I'm open to any other explanations.

Hi Will,
I found a couple of interesting links while you're having fun on vacay.
 
I've always found the concept of time travel to be exciting, yet terrifying at the same time. This new article from LiveScience says it just ain't gonna happen. (I'm paraphrasing of course).

Humorous lists such as this one (40 things that only happen in the movies) have been floating around the net for a long time. But for a more scientific take on Hollywood's improbable (or impossible) take on reality, this list (9 laws of physics that don't apply in Hollywood) is a good read. Thanks for writing such a great blog!

em,
Saginaw, Mi

Dear Will,
Thought you might find this of interest...My local police department is using MySpace to help identify a bank robber who has hit at least four times in the area...

As police continue searching for a suspect in four bank robberies across Arkansas, one local department has taken the unusual step of creating the man a profile on the social networking Web site MySpace, hoping someone will recognize him.

Thanks, Love your blog!
-Jennifer

Will replies:  Thanks Jennifer.  I like this idea but I wonder if it could scale.  Should every criminal on the run have a MySpace page or would that create too much noise?  I'll be interested to see if this works.

Hey Will, I didn't want to perpetuate the conspiracy theme on the message board but couldn't pass up sending this to you-

"Was the Death Star attack an inside job?"

-Sean

Will laughs:  "Bush knew."

This isn't me, self-promoting, so only share this if you get the joke, and think your readers will, but I thought it was curious they chose King Crimson's eponymous late-60's hit for music for that promo.  So my reason for writing, is that about 15 years ago, I realized that the lyrics to the "Gilligan's Island" theme fit pretty neatly into that song.  The idea sat with me, until about a year ago, when I finally had the wherewithal, and time to record a moderately-decent version of it, here. [Will points out: it's an mp3 link.]

For Crimson nerds, yes, I didn't do the calliope solo.  No I don't care.

Keep up the great work,
-Davin

Hey Will,
I thought you'll be interested in this. You'll find the first and last paragraphs quite salient.
- A. Eteraz

Will expands:  It's a discussion of the difference between Islamic Jurisprudence and Islamic Theology.  It's not often we see Islam represented/defended in English speaking blogs, so this is indeed an interesting read.

Here's an affordable click I bumped into today.

Fly it with total abandon,  night would be very cool. Video here.

-1hen2ducks

Will replies:  Leaving aside the question of whether a kite with no string that doesn't need wind is still a kite, just make sure you don't fly it at night in Boston.  I can only imagine the amount of panic that would be caused by flying LED lights.

Alex asked in the comments of my previous entry if I'd found a link to a new controversial Dolce & Gabbana ad.  As a matter of fact, you can see it here.  (Click the thumbnail for the larger view.)  What's ironic is that in the course of looking for it I also saw this one which either evokes date rape or some independently drug induced blitz state which I think (for what my opinion as a non-woman is worth) is much more offensive and damaging to women than the D & G ad.  But then from an industry that applies sex to any product to the point of self parody, it's hard to take anything they do very seriously.  (NOTE: The thumbnail image in that last link is probably small enough to be safe for work but if you click it for the larger image I'm pretty sure that's a nipple, not a coffee bean.)

In case you needed more reasons to be disappointed in the federal government, the RIAA has apparently convinced the federal Copyright Royalty Board to implement an unreasonably high fee on online music, outraging everyone from NPR to cutting edge webcasters.

Speaking of corporations taking their ball and going home, what happens when Google loses?  By the end his short answer is that nothing happens.  It's not like Web video would come to an end or anything.  But what interested me about Scoble's perspective (remember his job now is making original Web-only video) is that he thinks Viacom is shooting itself in the foot because Web video is the future and if Viacom isn't going to share its content online audiences will watch something else online.  I have a hard time being completely convinced of that argument, probably because I watch so much corporate video (mostly on TV) that I'd probably end up watching it on an official site instead of YouTube.  But as a metaphor for the situation with Web radio I completely understand what he's saying.  If the RIAA is going to make it harder to listen to the music they represent their audience is going to end up discovering a lot of non-RIAA music online.  And non-RIAA musicians are going to have an easier time finding an audience eager for music.

Speaking of being better than anything you'd find from Viacom, here's Ze Frank on the nature of creativity (again) - This was his last week, though pretty much everyone expects him back by '08 in a newer, bigger, stronger way.  I never managed to be a regular Ze viewer but I've seen a bunch and more than once he's expressed this anxiety about whether he'll be creative tomorrow or even 5 minutes from now.  It's funny what he says about confidence because seeing him continue to produce in the face of his own anxiety boosts my own confidence that creativity comes when you let it.

Speaking of online radio, since a lot of people wrote in with a favorable reaction to Slacker.com radio (which hopefully won't have to go out of business now) here's a look at the player they're expected to release.  This would be the iPod killer part of their plan.

Speaking of not needing corporate approval to have a good time, the mistake in thinking that blogs will be extinct in ten years is thinking blogging is about the audience and quality expression.  Blogging is about self-expression which is part of the human condition.  The only way blogs will go extinct is if someone comes up with an even easier way to express oneself.  Until then there will continue to be bad blogs, bad music, bad art, etc. (and good too of course).

"A New Jersey civil engineer powers his home with solar panels and hydrogen tanks. Can it work in the mainstream?"  (His energy bill is zero.)

The universal rule for live performance is no kids and no animals.  Ignore this at your peril.

Rachmaninov had big Hands... but for everyone else...

Weird Al may be a dork but you have to admire his ability to fit these palindromes into a song.  Self-indulgent Weird Al anecdote:  Weird Al played at my college and I was dating a girl on the committee that set up the performance.  Among his requirements was an acoustic guitar that he would smash on the stage after singing an Every Rose Has A Thorn parody.  In the course of cleaning up the stage after the show my girl grabbed the guitar strap from the wreckage and gave it to me.  Yes, that means I have in my possession an authentic Weird Al guitar strap.

Delutube offers users a way to view deleted YouTube videos - That sounds like a big deal but I hit the random viewer button a few times and saw pretty much the same stuff I see on undeleted YouTube.  A huge girlfight, miniskirted teens doing wiggle lip syncs, regular old rock videos, homemade rocketry videos with copyrighted music soundtracks...  There's a chance you could see something genuinely tawdry but I wasn't so lucky.

I didn't realize such a big deal was being made over the 30th anniversary of Star Wars.

"The "visits" metric, defined as the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content, thereby illustrating a key component of user engagement."  Can 'Visits' Replace Pageviews?

Smoking 2.0 Gives Lungs a Break - It's battery powered and vaporizes the tobacco instead of burning it.  Doesn't that make it basically an inhaler?

When I heard the news that Democrats were being warned from appearing on The Colbert Report I thought it was an embarrassing admission that they aren't smart enough to defend their own positions against his parody arguments and silly verbal traps.  But reading the Hill story that brought the news I see that not going on Colbert is part of more positive advice: "Pay attention to your district, don't go Washington, go home every weekend."  Now I'm a little embarrassed at myself for caring about members of Congress on comedy shows.  Go do your jobs.

The bracelet phone - I want to be able to talk on it with it around my wrist, like Michael Knight summoning Kit.

I looked for a primary source link for this sport pump but I couldn't find it on the designer's site.

Last WWI Combat Veteran Laid to Rest - Of course this would happen eventually but it has such a Children of Men feeling the headline really stood out to me.

People are accusing Garrison Keillor of being anti-gay in this essay.  I think they're missing his point, which is that adults need to get over themselves and devote more of their lives to their children.  There may be room for discussion of whether there's "life after kids" but I don't think he's arguing that gay people are inherently too self absorbed to raise kids.  UPDATE: Thanks very much to JE in the comments for a counterpoint.  The link to which he refers is here.  Note, as he does that it has a pretty prominent F bomb on the page.  Also, the discussion in the comments section of the Savage entry is a good read.

How to surf anonymously without a trace

Giving Filmy, Flimsy Plastic Bags the Sack - I don't think this would be too great an inconvenience for the most part.  I imagine there'd either be a lot more satchel wearing or dual-purpose hairnets would come into fashion.

Richardson to legalize medical marijuana - The reason that's a big deal is that he's running for president.  The article mentions it being a political risk but who is it that opposes medical marijuana - other than the federal war on drugs folks?  There aren't religious objections that I know of.  Maybe law enforcement types who see it as likely to leak to the street?  The only real political risk in legalizing medical marijuana that I can think of is the exposure to the dishonest spin that's going to try to present it as "pro-drugs" or something.  Would anyone believe that?

My visual DNA - If you like horoscopes or those magazine quizzes you'll enjoy this.  Answer a set of questions based on your preferences and get a little evaluation of yourself.

Missionary encounters extremely bizarre skin condition in Eastern Europe NOTE: Pretty gross.  High potential for freakout.

Surfing the Pororoca

If you've been considering Flickr (disclaimer: I have a pro account there) you might want to first take a look at Zooomr (3 Os, no E).  That's a nice feature list they're putting together.

I can't find the source post for this and I hate to deep link but it's really neat.  Can a hammer really push up when it's hanging?

Genius butter cutter - Why isn't this standard kitchen equipment?

Why men are never published in Dear Abby - Quick and funny.  Don't quit in the middle.

Heat sensitive shower tiles

If computers can look so cool, why are they so ugly?

Beat box on French American Idol

It's a sort of MacGuyver search.  More suggestions from the Reddit community.

"Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?"  Of course, this is the dream of citizen journalism advocates and Assignment Zero is the latest effort to achieve that goal. 

The official site is here with more information on how you can get involved.  It's the kickstart project for NewAssignment.net, which you'll recall was launched back in August.  Maybe it's just my respect for Jay Rosen as a smart guy, but this doesn't feel like it's going to another one of those trendy more-theory-than-substance projects that fizzle out in the cold harsh light of reality.  (Read Rosen's review of FiredogLake's reporting on the Libby trial to rediscover that "OMG! It's a revolution!" feeling that was particularly present a couple years ago during things like Rathergate and the London bombings.)

Speaking of bloggers leading the news, the U.S. Attorney story/scandal is indeed another scoop by Josh Marshall.  We don't really bother to keep track anymore but this is one of those stories that really came from the blogosphere first.  And by the way, Marshall is still at it.

Speaking of roots in blogs, I try to stay away from inter-news-channel bickering (mostly because I don't think any of it is relevant to anything other than more inter-news-channel bickering) but the Las Vegas debate story has an interesting facet and roots in a blog campaign so it's worth mentioning here.  I think this all came to a head while I was away last week, but in short, Fox Newschannel wanted to host a debate for Democratic presidential candidates.  Democratic bloggers objected on the grounds that Fox Newschannel is not a news outlet but advocates a position (and an anti-Democratic one at that).  Mickey Kaus has a good brief encapsulation of the issue here.  I also clicked this item about Air America jokingly offering to host a debate, again as a way of redefining Fox News as not news.  Finally, last night I clicked Matt Stoller's explanation of what they're trying to do.  (He's one of the main progressive netroots activists.)  Maybe I'm being too dramatic but I think it's fascinating that newsmakers could freeze out a news (or "news") outlet - especially in this day an age of media whoredom.

Jason Kottke teaches Editor & Publisher how to write a headline:

• Men look at crotches
• Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design

They're both about a recent eye tracking study of what people look at on a Web page and for how long.

Politics bloggers are buzzing about the No Child Left Behind Act.  I read some of the debate starting with Kevin Drum about whether the NCLB is really a trick to label public schools a failure.  Conservatives are talking about a new proposal.

While I generally think it's better to write about gadgets that are already here than ones that are "coming soon" Slacker has made such a splash at SXSW that people are calling it the (an?) iPod killer.  For now, until the player device is released, it's basically an online radio station.  (I'm listening to the SXSW channel.  Mostly indie rock, but a good way to discover bands you're not familiar with.  I'll be looking up Tokyo Police Club later.)

"Globally, dead skin accounts for about a billion tons of dust in the atmosphere. Your skin sheds 50,000 cells every minute."  I wonder if buying skin lotion can count as an environmental offset.

"Squirrel's weight on feeder activates a motor which gently twirls him off!"

I was perfectly willing to accept that this story about a woman's investigation of harassing letters sent to bisexual students was a work of fiction.  She did study creative writing after all.  It's a pretty good story about hunting a person down using the Web and in part the writer wrestles with whether the investigation is as creepy as the letters the guy is sending.  But then I read the Digg comment thread about the story and saw how that community tried to figure out the real name and other information about the creepy guy in the story and realized what may be scariest of all is the potential for an online mob to form from the provocation of a single magazine article.

Yesterday was Pi Day.

Pedal powered roller coaster in Japan.  Has kind of a Flintstones quality I think.  Really though, shouldn't they only have to pedal that first big hill?

Even the best thinkers can't solve question on premium-rate TV quiz - Apparently in the UK there are game shows that you can play from home by calling a toll number.  In this case there's bit of a scandal because the game show is being accused of requiring an answer that no one's able to figure out -- or at least explanations for the answer that people have been able to give are rejected as incorrect.

9 Confessions From A Former Enterprise Rental Salesman - Living in the city, I don't own a car.  I have a motorcycle but I can't very well bungee the family to it, so we rent sometimes.  Since we recently moved we've been using Enterprise because it's closer to our house to pick up a car.  So far we have no complaints but I did learn one lesson from last week's vacation.  Whatever the car was that we had ordered wasn't available so they upgraded us to a Cadillac with a still-new smelling leather interior.  Reflexively we said yes to the fancier car, but in the end, we definitely didn't need to be gassing up a V8 and toward the end of the week we picked up a scratch on the bumper and I lived in dread for the rest of the trip that we were going to stuck with a fat deductible on an overpriced fancy car scratch repair.  That didn't happen and there really isn't any indication that upgrading us to a luxury car was any kind of scam, but still, next time I'll take the crappier car at a lower rate.

Sphere is one of those maddening hunt-around-the-room games.  I found a bunch of stuff so far but I don't really know what to do with it.

Don't feel like thinking that much?  LineTo experimental is simple trippy fun.

"A ficlet is a short story that enables you to collaborate with the world."

The video of Lindsay Lohan allegedly hitting a paparazzo with her car doesn't show the point of impact so we can't see what really happened.  I don't really care anyway.  But the video did leave me thinking about how weird it is that a group of people could chase after a woman in a car as she literally flees them creating a very dangerous situation on the streets of a major city and yet as a society we don't really have a problem with it.  I know these celebrities make their own drama so they probably don't deserve any sympathy, and maybe I'm old fashioned, but seeing a group of men hounding a woman in the middle of the night is really troubling to me.

Speed painting with ketchup and french fries.

Nine Inch Nails continues to explore new online marketing ideas, this time offering the GarageBand files for their new song.

Superhero Kills the President - There's a longer piece here with images from the graphic novel.  Super hero philosophy isn't something I gave much thought to until I read an essay arguing that if Superman really wanted to help man kind he'd stop wasting his time on petty thugs and instead use his super strength to turn a turbine and generate some free electricity or something.  This is a little more earthbound but still interesting.

There's a big campaign among anti-war bloggers to pressure Democratic members of Congress who aren't supporting the current Iraq bill because it contains a deadline for exit.  There's nothing particularly unique about this campaign so I almost didn't mention it at all, but I thought this was a pretty significant item.  The blogger addresses his representative in a blog entry and gets an answer.

Flying robot dog fights, yes!  (Make sure Sarah Connor is wearing eye protection.)

Commuter Click: South by South-BEST - I saw a lot of people linking to it and so far I've only read that little bulleted part in the middle.  Sounds funny enough to give a full read.

Speaking of SXSW essays to print and read later, folks are fawning over the Will Wright keynote so I'm going to make that a commuter click tomorrow.

Torture isn't Christian.

I had a great vacation but reengaging the work gears has been a hard slog.  I spent most of Monday swinging the e-mail machete and today was devoted to the things I'd foolishly placed on the "I'll deal with it when I get back" pile.  I need one of those how-to bloggers to write a "how to go away for a week and not send yourself into a shock spiral when you get back" entries.  Trying to catch up on my Web reading I remembered seeing headlines about "news rivers" and thinking at the time that they might be useful to someone who needed to catch up.  Some searching reminded me that Memeorandum has one for each of its channels.  I scrolled through the one for news and the one for tech.  I also found one from Megite.

Basically they list the headlines that have passed through their aggregator.  Megite even displays them in different sizes depending on their popularity.  Unfortunately I think the idea backfired because I ended up with a million tabs open, more overwhelmed than enlightened.  That said, this is what I clicked:

What was only a rumor that MySpace was going to launch a news site was confirmed when Wired came into possession of some images of what's in the works.  It sounds like they're planning a mix of mainstream news and user generated news organized with a Digg-like vote up/vote down social system.  The question to wonder:  Is 'Social News' the new trend?  (I don't think so but I do like the idea of community policing of news discussion.)

I've also noticed from the news rivers that everyone is going crazy for Twitter.  Even couched in the familiar context of cat blogging I don't understand what makes Twitter such a hot item.  You build a friends list and when you send a message to Twitter, all your friends receive it automatically or can retrieve it when they're ready.  All the messages you send also end up on your Twitter page.  It's like group instant messaging mixed with mobile devices and blogging.  It's probably most useful to people who are trying to coordinate groups.

In Union Square they sell Homeland Security t-shirts with Native Americans on them so I thought it was funny to read that Native American trackers are being used in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

For reaction to today's news that Viacom is suing the pants off YouTube/Google I clicked over to Mark Cuban's blog because he's a well established critic of YouTube and its associated hype so I thought for sure he'd have a strong reaction.  I wasn't disappointed.  In the past I've argued that if copyright holders would do a better job offering their video online themselves then there wouldn't be a need for uploading it to YouTube.  Eventually we'd only need a good video search engine and we could watch copyrighted material on the site of the copyright holder.  For example, today I happened to click this embedded video of Stephen Colbert talking about the Libby verdict.  It looks like Comedy Central has finally found a way to provide the clip people want to see with the functionality that allows it to be shared easily. 
What I don't understand about today's lawsuit is how they come up with the dollar amount.  How do they show what a YouTube clip is worth and how do they show that the clip isn't worth more as advertising on YouTube than it is locked in their TV vault?

The trick of insulting upward - I'm not familiar with the specific drama Ann Althouse is addressing in this entry but the strategy of picking fights as a means of raising one's blogging profile is well noted.

The 2007 Pig Book has been released, looking at the year in Congressional pork.

Does it suck or rock?  Enter a term and the site searches for positive and negative context online and then gives a rating based on how the term is portrayed online.

Listening to Against Me. MySpace.  I lost track of where I picked up the link to this punk band. 

A wire model of a Subaru - It wasn't until I saw the third photo that I was able to adjust my eyes to see the wire.

"The extinction of the dinosaurs was most probably caused by an asteroid hitting the Earth - but what would have happened if the giant space rock had missed?"  Is that a news article or a creative writing assignment?

WaveBubble is the invention about which "someone ought to invent..." is most often uttered.  It's a self-tuning portable RF jammer, which means you can block the cell phone signals of people around you.  Apparently it's illegal to actually operate, and if you know enough to follow these instructions you probably already knew it was possible, but the rest of us can rest assured that yes, someone actually has invented that. 

With a relatively easy joke, "Starhawk" illustrates why teaching religion in school would snowball into a bad (worse?) idea.

Sloog is a tagging system for Second Life.  It's still brand new, but eventually it could be a good way of actually finding something interesting in Second Life.  I've had a hard time going in there cold and just looking around.

Weird search engines

Getty buys Scoopt - It's been a while since we heard about Scoopt but when there was a lot of buzz around citizen journalism and whether mainstream media would pay regular people for their snapshots of news events, Scoopt's plans to broker the licensing of such photos drew a lot of interest.  The question on everyone's mind is whether all the news outlets are going to have to pay for user submitted media or whether brand loyalty and a desire to share will continue to be enough to draw contributions.

Developers aim to lure women to adult games - This story, and especially this line:
"'Make me think I'm hunting'--every woman I talk to, that's what they say," Brathwaite said. immediately brought to mind a recent article I'd read that users of online dating sites are mostly women.  If most online gamers are men and most online daters are women, the winner is going to find the way to mix the two.  (Not that that necessarily helps the "adult games" industry, which seems like a completely different animal to me.)

A Note To Employers: 8 Things Intelligent People, Geeks and Nerds Need To Work Happily - This could also be flipped to be 8 ways to know if you're a geek, nerd, etc.  See how many match up to your work preferences.

It's that time of year again. I'm out all week.  Let me know if I miss something good while I'm away.

RvD2: Ryan vs. Dorkman 2 - The hotly-anticipated sequel to the original YouTube phenomenon. I know some of you roll your eyes every time I like to one of these light saber fights, but there's no question these kids are talented.  It's an entertaining fight scene regardless of your stance on Star Wars spin=offs.  P.S. It's seven minutes long.  There's a link to a high quality version as well.

UFO science key to halting climate change: former Canadian defense minister - This guy was Canadian Defense Minister in 1963.  Roswell was in 1947.  Would a Canadian Defense Minister have knowledge of other countries' UFO technology?  Would factoring in alien technology be part of how countries assess each other's military capability?  Probably more fun to speculate about than the facts would bear.

Matthew Yglesias devotes considerable thought to the results of a study that shows that married women do more housework than they did when they were single and men do less.  Actually, the amount of thought Yglesias gives it is nothing compared to what his commenters do.

Any casting suggestions for the new Valerie Plame movie?  I'm thinking Sharon Stone for Plame, maybe Diane Lane?  Wilson is harder.  Maybe Dustin Hoffman?

VoteForTheWorst seeks to organize American Idol votes to keep the lousy people on the show.

Project Epoc Lets You Control Video Games with Your Noggin' - I love the idea of mind controlled machines.  Apparently this is going to be demoed next week, so maybe it's not just a pipe dream.

George Bush has become a scapegoat for so many problems, what's going to happen when he leaves office and the problems are still around?  Right wing bloggers have been arguing for years that Bush-bashers are prone to losing sight of an issue's meat in favor of attacking the man.  This essay points out that we shouldn't expect behaviors to change much once a new president is in office.  Instead we'll just hear a new excuse.

The Onion will be adding video.

Spider Man in Abu Dhabi - Not the hero, that French guy who climbs buildings.

I'm making a difference - It's a little funny how much this resembles the old hoax mail about Microsoft conducting a study and they'll pay you for forwarding e-mail to all of your friends.  This isn't a hoax though.  In fact, I got an internal note from Microsoft about it.  The idea is that you tag your name with a charity and when you IM they contribute a share of their ad revenue to that charity.  I don't know what that means in terms of actual dollars.  The upgrade to you IM is no big deal.  So far the only teeny tiny nagging thing I don't like about it is that it puts a big icon next to my name when I'm IMing.

Can you name 50 states in 10 minutes?

Things you can do at home when you're bored

X-Ray kiss - Since I know some folks like to play with URLs, let me tell you right now that if you do you'll stumble upon some weirdly NSFW material.  I also found this one of an X-Ray lick.  Actually the whole image library looks like an interesting grab bag.  Again, I can't guarantee what you'll find.

A round up of HDR tutorials - This is the kind of thing I imagine we'll see more of when free online Photoshop becomes a reality.

Hundreds of educational and cultural podcasts

Ever had one of those days when you feel like a bug on the windshield of life?

Speaking of being wrecked by a car, at least this guy didn't need the jaws of life to get out of this wreck.

After the Boston bomb squad blew up a traffic measuring box last week the parodies have begun to arrive:

• Boston Police Blow Up Suspicious Looking Man
• The this is not a bomb sticker campaign

You might be a nerd if...

Thanks very much to Dwayne in the comments on my previous post for sharing some perspective from Shanghai along with a few links.

Having read this analysis of China's Web censoring it's pretty clear that my impression that you're either blocked or not is a bit of an oversimplification.  Furthermore, I gather that some folks had trouble with the couple links I provided, so let me offer this full set instead:

(This was going to be a cool embedded box but it didn't work, so here's a link to it elsewhere.  It's the same box as on Proxy.org but since some people are blocked from that site, this may work instead.)

Those are all proxy servers.  Enter the site you want to see at the top of that box (replacing the IP tracking site they put in there by default to demonstrate that your IP isn't being tracked), highlight the proxy server you want to try and hit GO.

Some of them will work automatically, some open in a new window with your destination site pre-seeded in yet another box and you'll have to hit another version of that GO button.  If it works, what you usually see is the site you're trying to reach inside some graphic frame from the proxy site.

I got into talking about this as a means of pointing to that GreatFirewallOfChina site, but really Tor is a built for this exact purpose and is widely regarded as the best way to access the Web anonymously.

Incidentally, the recommended proxy server with Tor is Privoxy so that's probably worth a try too.  I see that there is a Tor download that comes bundled with it.  What bears consideration is that when beating the filter means breaking the law you don't only want to disguise your destination but you want to disguise yourself as well.

One last note comes to mind, I've heard that it's possible to run Tor from a flash drive, so you don't even have to put it on your machine.  You slip the drive into your USB and filter your Web surfing through there.  It's slower but anonymous and filter defeating (or so they say).

Is your site banned in China?  Clicked worked.  My Blogger blog worked.  Wikipedia, no.  Vox blogs, no.  Out of curiosity I tried proxy.org (blocked) and then 24hproxy.com (not blocked).  So while I'm not in China to try it, I'm pretty sure someone in China could access the blocked Vox.com by going to this link or one similar instead.  ADDING:  By the way, I know there are some Clicked readers who aren't able to access some sites from work becaue of blocks.  In many cases a proxy server is also how you'd get around those.  Not that you would.  I mean, just if you were curious. UPDATE:  I've posted a bit more on this subject here.

Dueling ridiculous news stories:

• "A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi."
• "When police entered the office of Nitschmann Middle School Principal John Acerra to arrest him for allegedly selling crystal methamphetamine, they found the 50-year-old educator naked and watching gay pornography with sex toys nearby, sources say." 

NOTE:  As with the astronaut story, I realize there are serious issues at play in these stories.  I wish the best for any victims involved while I muse over the collective details in the abstract.

Speaking of pairing links, is there a connection between these two?

• Lack of sleep may impact upon moral judgment
• There is a danger of the 70-hour workweek becoming the new standard

Regarding the story of the supposed discovery of the tomb of Jesus, I finally got around to reading the analysis by blogging Biblical scholar Ben Witherington.  I started here but he's been blogging more so you might do well to start at the top.

Ning is a new site that serves as a platform for you to build your own social network.  Really it's not much different from good old fashioned portal community software like Yahoo Groups but it comes with the features you expect from modern social networks.

I'd read about Conservapedia a little while ago but every time I tried the link it was crashed.  It's a conservative Wikipedia.  I'm not totally sure what that means, but a few entries I looked up had a line or two about how conservatives view the topic.  It's interesting to note that the entry for George W. Bush has more about liberals feeling the election was stolen than it does about the president.  Of course, as a Wiki, that could change at any second.  NOTE:  I'll say again, this is a wiki, which means anyone can add anything.  As you might imagine, this one is prone to attacks so I really can't guarantee what you'll find when you get there, though I can guarantee that order will eventually be restored.

I don't think this girl feels the slightest bit of regret about handcuffing herself to Hugh Grant.  The song reminds me of Nirvana's Polly.

A standup economist.

I'm not sure what to make of this Jihad video.  I think it's meant to be funny, but in the end I felt kind of glum.  I wasn't bothered by the suicide bomber Volkswagen ad but this one didn't score with me.

Solar powered chariot that walks (actually battery powered and it kind of rollerblades).  The hippy shtick wears a bit thin, but the invention is cool.

Sickness and/or craziness aside, am I the only one who thinks it's cool that a global megastar just wanders out alone and makes friends with random people?  Who does that?

The BBC clarifies its position on its role in 9/11 conspiracies - Which is to say, they formally declare that they had no part in any.

Speaking of conspiracies, is Facebook a giant domestic spying conspiracy?

Top 10 modern delusions - You may not agree, but they're good food for thought or discussion.

Who's geekier than you?  Printable pdf in case you are having trouble reading it.

The line game from the other day has been improved.  Try it in mouse mode.

"After trying for 30 minutes to bring two-week-old Woody Lander back to life, doctors decided there was nothing more they could do and called in his parents to say their tearful farewells. ... It was then that the miracle happened."  Corny, but it's important to read a good news story every once in a while dammit.

Heroes character map - I'm not sure this map makes anything clear other than the fact that the character paths are entangled.  It does give me an opportunity to point to this site, which seems to come up periodically among Web geek fans of the show.  Though I count myself as a fan, I'm embarrassed to say I haven't done much exploration of the online offerings beyond a cursory look at the main site.  Hopefully I'll be able to catch up on some of the online depth before the season ends.  (Disclosure:  NBC is a parent of MSNBC.com and I would exploit that relationship in a second to score Heroes swag or info if I knew how.)

"I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it."  Should Digg sue over this (and other Wired attacks)?

Speaking of Digg and TechCrunch links, Is Spotplex a better Digg? - The problem that everyone keeps pointing out about Digg is that a system that relies on the active participation of users is prone to manipulation when the users are dishonest.  The idea behind Spotplex (and the reason it could be a better Digg) is that it uses passive user voting.  It has a database of participating sites that report their traffic, so instead of voting up a link you have to actually visit it.  While that may still be prone to gaming, what makes it different from other meme trackers is that it doesn't rely on links by bloggers.  It's a most-visited list, not a most linked-to list.  I'm not sure what they plan to do when a visit is not an endorsement.  If a headline is good but the destination content is terrible, how to erase the click you just gave it?  Regardless, this is going to be a useful site once the database fattens.

"Wonderpizza vending machines provide you with a 9-inch pizza in 2 minutes without you having to worry about humans touching it at any point in the process."  The FAQ says it holds 102 pizzas, which means it's a giant toaster oven.

The in-movie graphics from Children of Men.  Watching them as a standalone film reel is pretty surreal in itself.

Adobe to take Photoshop online - It'll be free, ad supported.  Most of the focus is on what this means in terms of business and other photo editing software companies but Photoshop has a lot more features that the typical free online photo editing software so if they give the full package away for free, I'm wondering if we'll see a new level of photo processing online.  I mean, everyone knows what a Photoshopped photo is, but not everyone can do it.  Unless you have a pirated copy, that's some expensive software.

Senator Kerry Confronts Swift Boat Funder - I didn't see this on TV but I read that it was going to happen.  Basically a guy who gave 50 grand to the Swift Boat Vets is being appointed to be ambassador to Belgium, but first he has to get past the Senate and guess who's on that committee.  The clip is pretty long but a good listen if you can stand to listen to Congressional business like this.

Speaking of echoes of '04, John Edwards Second Life HQ vandalized - The problem with online campaigns: online drama.  Edwards is certainly learning that the hard way so far in this campaign.  By the way, if you're looking to check that scene out yourself, it's in the Onnuri Sim.  Here's the SLURL.  I was there tonight and didn't find much of value but it could be worthwhile if there was an event to attend.

Here's a funny item to find in the wake of all that Al Gore fuss I stepped in last time.  A lot of people believe that because temperatures are rising on Mars that the warming of the Earth is related and the two are the result of solar activity of some kind.  This National Geographic piece explores the ins and outs of that theory.

Le Moulin - Five minute animation about a man whose lover and her town are spiritually bound to the motion of a windmill.

I initially misunderstood this fold-out balcony as a fold-in balcony and I think I'd fell (Yikes, Freud) feel better about it if that's what it was.  Basically, your wall is on a hinge that swings out from the building face at 90 degrees so you have a terrace.

Though I would never condone vandalism of advertising it's hard not to appreciate printable cold sore stickers to put on ad poster models.

107-year-old woman blogs (with a little help).