I can definitely confirm that people are taking the joke photo seriously. I just saw an angry letter to msnbc.com from a person accusing Obama of sloppily posing for the photo and not realizing its upside-down. Good thing I recognized the IMAO watermark.

Lately my Web surfing has reached the unwieldy state of having too many moving parts. I'm trying to solve this in two ways. First I'm using Google Reader to bundle the links to sites I check regularly. Hopefully that will solve the mind-racing "what else do I need to check?" problem. Second, I'm trying to set myself up on a variety of different tools. I really like how FriendFeed pulls different sources together, so I'm now trying to incorporate Twitter and Delicious along with my Flickr and blogs and Instapaper to help make my sorting more efficient. We'll see if I can actually put this idea into practice. Right now I'm at the stage of trying to set up shortcut links to these services so I don't actually visit the sites. Twitter via IM, Delicious via toolbar button. It's weird how many sites you can use without actually visiting the site itself.

Speaking of gathering links, The Internet Effect on News - This is a nice bit of insight about how people gather their news online. I don't think we can yet say "most," but certainly many people online gather stories one at a time from a variety of sources. The tradition in media is focus on how stories are presented on the cover or front page, so the idea of readers totally bypassing that cover to assemble their own reading list on their own terms is pretty subversive. The next obvious question for the story writer is what that means to how you put your story together. How do you differentiate it from other stories about the same thing and how do you take advantage of the traffic you receive to a story that didn't come through your front page? The story is the new front page.

Bug Labs Founder: Sold Out Of Open-Source Mobile Gadgets - You may recall these guys from my CES coverage. They were good guys with a clever product and an honest presentation so it's nice to see they're doing well.

Fears that the Large Hadron Collider will end the world reminds me of a short story by Arthur Clarke that I read after he passed recently. In The Nine Billion Names of God scientists help some monks with a computer to decipher God's true name. And it works.

I have almost no reason to fear ever being stabbed but somehow I find the idea of a knife-proof shirt really appealing. Maybe it's the old D&D nerd in me always looking to upgrade my armor.

The New York Times has a new music blog called Measure for Measure.

The slow motion slap - It's disturbing to realize how much our face is just a mask on a skull.

If some of the "Find Sarah Connor" items covered here have left you with the feeling that it's just a matter of time before robots are up our asses, it may be time to start shopping for an isolated shack in the mountains.

The Automotive Family Tree - Which corporations own which car companies.

Speaking of cars, "it seems a transatlantic battle is brewing in the high-performance electric sportscar market." Of all things for there to be transatlantic battles about, this is a pretty good one. The UK side of the fight is the Lightning GT. Before you pooh-poohers start in with your battery bashing, this one has something called a "nanosafe battery" which apparently doesn't suffer as many of the risks of the Li-ion batteries. (By the way, the U.S. side of the battle is the Tesla.)

Speaking of power the clean way, "Southern California Edison plans to install 250 megawatts worth of solar panels on commercial rooftops, generating enough electricity to power 162,000 homes." This makes so much sense it kills me. I've heard of similar projects planned for New Jersey that also included essentially putting solar panel roofs over parking lots as well. This article says the utility will lease the roof space, so that would mean extra income for those businesses in addition to the economic boost from the kick in the pants to the solar industry.

Speaking of energy production, I wonder what the chances are that Earth Hour
could create a surge in the grid and wipe out our electricity
infrastructure. (In my disaster novel this would happen, not so sure
about real life. Like the urban myth of millions of toilets flushing at the same time during the Super Bowl commercial breaks and destroying the sewage system.) Earth Hour is March 31st 29th. They're trying to get
people to turn off the lights for an hour as an energy saving
demonstration.

For two days I've been seeing praise for this site and its ability to explain the time travel situation on Lost and every time I click it it's crashed. Last night I saw it on Digg, which you may know automatically backs up sites it might crash with its own crush of traffic driving force, so here's the DiggMirror version. Some of the photos don't load but at least the text is there. I'm only half way through so far and some parts of the theory fit better than others. When the parts don't fit well the explanation is that the fates perform a "course correction" on time to make sure that what's supposed to happen still happens even when someone travels back in time to change it.

Speaking of alternate realities, I ignored this video the first couple of times I saw the link because I thought it was just Hillary bashing. But it's actually a pretty funny use of video effect trickery. (They insert war effects on the news footage of her Bosnia trip.) BarelyPolitical is the same site that puts out the Obama Girl videos.
ADDING: By chance I stumbled upon the blog of the guy who made the video.
RANDOM: Also the guy who made Muxtape.

Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing - I took this to heart as it applies to reviewing Web sites. There are only so many ways of saying "here's a cool site" but that doesn't justify getting sloppy.

20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider - This brought to mind the "are you ready for the lightning bolt of fame" question that came after Ashley Dupre was thrust into the spotlight after being exposed as Eliot Spitzer's prostitute. What exactly does it mean to be ready? What might you need? Someone could probably make a lot of money on that book.

YouTube Reveals Video Analytics Tool for All Users - Now for free you can see where your viewers are coming from and when they're doing the viewing. I don't see it mentioned here but I hope it also lists where a video is embedded. That's something I often think about when I link to page with an embedded YouTube video. Does the guy who published the video know that people are watching through this other person's site?

4 second fury - It's a string of games, one after another that are only 4 seconds long.

Moto Art is furniture made from plane parts.

Everyone's playing Boomstick. It has nice simple controls, no long instructions to read, and yet I can't get past the 400s.

Clothing in the year 2000 - Funny how they expected everything to be modular for quick change-overs from day to evening wear. The last one did a pretty good job anticipating being "fitted" with gadgets.

Also, 2008 envisioned 40 years ago.

Meet the laptop you'll use in 2015.

Search fields
instead of URLs are used to promote sites in Japan. The blogger offers
the explanation of scarcity of good URLs but it made me think of
efforts in the social networking arena to help people gather all of their
various networks and collections into "lifestreams" of everything in one place. If you consider the efforts companies some companies make to get the word out on the Web about their products or to do viral campaigning, it makes sense they'd rather show off a search result than a single site.

Speaking of trends in foreign lands, emos and punks fighting in the streets in Mexico. The news footage I watched reminded me of old clips of clashes between mods and rockers.

Speaking of "whose kids are those?", over the counter DNA paternity testing is not exactly a home genetics kit (you send away for the actual science) but I can't think of another consumer genetics product like it.

Speaking of "who's your daddy," here's that story of the pregnant man. My first reaction was that he's not a pregnant man but a woman on hormones with a double mastectomy. But right away the fellow makes a good point. Legally he's a man and legally he's married to a woman (something he wouldn't be able to do if he was a woman). *(The print version is easier to read, the paginated version has the picture.)

Speaking of little girls with parent issues, the YouTube awards coverage generally focuses on the ridiculous categories and silly clips but the short film winner is really good too. Reminds me of Requiem for a Dream.

Time suck warning: Line Golfer is Line Rider meets mini golf. (Didn't work for me in Firefox.)

Thing I'm watching that I don't really understand: Color Wars 2008. The idea is that when Ze Frank was at camp they divided the campers into teams and made them compete in fun games. So now there's a group trying to orchestrate something similar online, dividing online participants into competing teams.

Another site I spent some time trying to figure out today is Muxtape. After a quickie three-line sign up you are allowed up load 12 mp3s to their site. What you get is a URL built from your user name and a list of the songs you uploaded that (I guess) are supposed to play straight through automatically with no controls. I admire the simplicity of it all but the playing was hit and miss for me. I had to click some songs to get them to load and then click them again to get them to play. Once two songs played in a row but then it died. They just launched so maybe they're working out server load issues.

"You can use Google Trends, a tool to measure search query popularity over time, to measure internet memes." The more famous one is the unmentionable but bewildering none-the-less events of early 2006. NOTE: It's just words, but you don't want to have to explain these words to someone looking over your shoulder.

Have we already seen the Hidden Passageway store? I've definitely been in some McMansions (or just big houses) that have, say, a fancy dining room that no one ever eats in that could easily be walled off and hidden by a secret wall. (I tried to write one more sentence explaining why you'd ever want to do this but really, does anyone need this explained?)

Speaking of self explanatory, Eyeport Vision Training sounds like a game (or maybe just a tool) that exercises your eyes and looks like a Klingon weapon. I'm going to take a wild guess that most Clicked readers are like me and go home bleary eyed, trying to ignore a subconscious concern that all this computer use is actually causing damage you'll one day regret. Eye exercise sounds reassuring.

The Extinct Human Species That Was Smarter Than Us - It's just a book summary but the idea is that there was a branch of humans with brains 30% larger than ours. Actually, the Amazon.com book description says "forebrains roughly 50% larger than ours, and estimated IQs to match--far surpassing our own." Of course, they were taken away by their alien parents 10,000 years ago.

Here's that Miss Bimbo game site everyone's all worked up about.

Can you imagine how America would handle a picture of its first lady naked? NOTE: This is a picture of France's first lady naked.

The world according to newspapers - In each chart the size of the country represents how much it's mentioned in that particular periodical. Frankly I would have expected to see a larger U.S. even for the foreign outlets.

What Does Bush Mean by "Victory in Iraq"? I see Fred Kaplan on the air with Chris Matthews right now talking about this.

The Vogue cover photo of LeBron James that some folks claim is racist is here along with a few alternatives. The criticism is that the photo is racist because his pose is King-Kong-like. I'm wondering if the King Kong thing is on purpose since he's often called King James. I have a feeling the comparison makes even more sense when you're in the presence of the guy and he's towering over you all big and muscley. That said, even with a black man making good progress toward the White House, American culture is not quite ready to compare black men with large gorillas and not have it carry some subtext.

Lots of discussion over on the Today show blog.

"There's really no justice quite like internet justice." The short version of this one is that a thief stole a gamer's Xbox, laptop and TV. The gamer was using a new Xbox when someone sent him a message offering to sell his stolen Xbox back to him. The gamer put the messager's Xbox account and the story on Digg and from there every bit of information about the person who sent the message, short of his DNA sequence, was researched and published on a wiki. His every point of social Web contact was harassed and ridiculed. They even called his mom.

The laptop was eventually returned. Looks like the Xbox also eventually made its way home too. I see a note there asking that the wiki be taken down so that may soon be a dead link. The victim is now trying to get un-famous. The story is made a little confusing because the stolen Xbox was sold and it was the purchaser who contacted the victim. The "internet justice" was not particularly discriminating about that detail. The whole thing is covered well here and here.

Picmatic seems like a great service but I'm not sure how they manage to do it. You upload an unlimited number of photos (under 3Mb each) and they host them, offer you links to embed the ones under 300kb and give you a permanent eternal link to them so you can share the gallery. And there are no ads. My only question is, what's in it for them?

Project Prostitute - Draw what you think a prostitute looks like. These aren't fancy artists or anything. They're mostly pretty feeble drawings. I'm not sure I find as much insight in them as others do. Maybe if we could see some information about the artists it would mean a little more to me.

Quotably is a new service that's potentially useful if you want to make more of Twitter but don't have a sense of the environment there. You'll recall TweetScan lets you search for a term to see what people are Tweeting about it. Quotably lets you search for a person to see all the conversations they're in. Let's take Robert Scoble as an example since I know he's an avid Twitter user. Looking at all of Scoble's conversations gives me that sinking "I'm missing out on the party" feeling.

ADDING: Hey, waddaya know, on his blog Scoble explores "The secret to Twitter."  (His secret is to follow a lot of people. "The more people I follow, the smarter I get, the more connected I get, the better the experiences I have in life." I still struggle to get past the idea that following someone on Twitter is like eavesdropping on their IM conversations but I'm working on building a better "follow" list.

Speaking of following online conversations, "Well, the buzz of the weekend seems to be around a New York Times op-ed by musician Billy Bragg upset about the sale of Bebo to AOL earlier this month. ... Because musicians chose to put their music on Bebo and that helped attract users, don't they deserve some of the $850 million that Bebo got from AOL." My opinion is closer to this blogger's than to Bragg's. It reminds me of the Flickr question we've talked about before. I accept a certain amount of rip-off as part of using the tool because the value Flickr's community and functionality provides is worth it. Same with Bebo or other social networks. The point of Web tools is that you want to make use of every advantage you can. If you can promote your music through a social network, way to go; more power to you.

The idea of tagging everything you own with RFID is a little creepy and probably not worth it just to pull off the cool trick of making your robot purse happy. Then again, for people of a certain age prone to forgetting things, the utility would definitely outweigh the creepiness. Someone's probably already thought of this, but it'd be neat if food packaging was tagged so that items not in the refrigerator would show up on a screen on the fridge or pantry door, essentially writing your grocery shopping list. Tagging the food would make check-out easier too. No scanning, just roll your cart near the sensor.

Note to self: Check out Talk2MyShirt the wearable electronics blog.

Mark Glaser's new Mediashift column is about the mayhem that is the mobile Web. I don't understand how it came to be that Web sites have to jump through hoops to get their content to work on a phone. Why isn't it incumbent on the phone makers to use a browser that can render for the phone's display? I guess now that the iPhone is essentially that we may see some of the responsibility shift. Glaser doesn't really mention a mobile browser war but that seems like the best way to a good solution.

Saturday was World Pillow Fight Day. There's some debate over whether the event is too messy or otherwise ecologically inconvenient but I'm mostly impressed that it was a genuinely world wide event. (There is no better photographic exercise than events like this.)

I wasn't familiar with Muckety before yesterday. They produce relationship charts to illustrate news stories. You need Java for them to render. They're pretty useful (or at least fun) in their initial state but if you click the bubbles to expand the relationships it quickly turns into a huge mess. A neat idea regardless.

Watch every episode of South Park online free. At least some of them are uncensored too which means F bombs are clearly heard. They're also hosting embeddable clips. Even if you don't care about South Park there's a potentially valuable answer that could come from this site. Will pirating of shows and YouTubing of clips diminish now that there's a legitimate, free, high quality source?

Scientists attached a camera to an elephant and sent him to roam around in the wild. I'm having a real hard time believing the elephant got such good shots.

Speaking of taking pictures, The Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips - I almost never take pictures of food because they always look terrible. The color is always off or it's too shiny.
My best effort and still pretty weak:

Remember Qik? It lets you stream live from the camera on your mobile device to a Web site they host for you. Last month I met NBC cameraman/blogger/DIY media person Jim Long who mentioned using Qik and Twitter to shoot a live interview with Bob Geldof while in Africa with the Today show's Ann Curry. Through Twitter he was able to see messages from the audience on the back of his phone while the camera on the front of his phone was shooting interview being shown live around the world. That is both cool and tight, but now Flixwagon may do it better by combining those functionalities into a single service. Broadcast live from your phone, see comments, save your broadcast, upload to YouTube... all in one service. I haven't tried it yet but that's a lot of cool functionality. Handy summary here.

Speaking of streams, apparently MyBlogLog does lifestreaming like FriendFeed does - sharing your online activity in what I can only describe as a Web log. Not only that, but through tags they regroup all of their lifestreams into categories. On the way to the Semantic Web this (topics pages) seems like a popular idea.

Speaking of taking content from a source and putting it in a new page to do new things, some Clicked readers may recall my complaint that link sharing on the Web has migrated from blogs to other formats, making it more difficult to follow Web trends through blog aggregators.  A similar situation is happening with online conversations. A blog item may draw no comments itself but its placement in Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc may draw plenty of discussion(s). And then there's what's said on Twitter and through Facebook notes. Sadly, the list of solutions to the problem of finding out what people are saying about your blog is no less overwhelming.

But while it may be challenging to track every bit of conversations about your particular blog entry, actual inter-site online discourse is doing quite well.  This week saw Mike Arrington speculate about the power that could be wielded by a unified organization of A-list bloggers, followed by a battery of interesting replies.

Other worthwhile reading this week was this somewhat lengthy explanation of the debate over Web standards. It sounds wonky but read as far as you're able and you're bound to come away with some new insight about (and appreciation for) how the Web is structured.

"This is what the world's first Time Machine may look like."

"A German pensioner is taking a hospital to court after she turned up for a leg operation - and got a new anus instead." A headline contest item if ever there was one.

Here's another one of those extended clips of Reverend Wright. As a non-churchgoer I may not be qualified to judge but the characterization of his services as being some kind of indoctrination does seem right. Listening to this guy is more like a mental exercise.

File Dropper has a 5 gig limit and it's free. You upload a file to it, it gives you a link, you pass the link to someone else and they download the file you put in there. This could be the answer to the bowling pictures problem I mentioned earlier.

The Wall Street Journal's Web site is already (secretly) free - This may be a bit longer than you want to read if you're not specifically looking for the answer to WSJ's pay wall but the Firefox trick at the end is interesting. The idea is that while you can't get all of the WSJ for free, you can get at it if you're coming from Google News or Digg and maybe some other sites. So WSJ is reading what site is referring you to them and decides from there whether you should be allowed to read the article. The Firefox trick is to use a "referrer spoofer." You tell it what to tell the WSJ about who sent you.

I got some referral traffic from this cool Flickr tag browser and ended up losing a significant amount of time exploring links on the blog and poking through his portfolio links.

The fruit of that labor includes "Add to friends" gear that displays a bar code (or whatever you call that) that can be photographed and sent to Facebook to add you as a friend. My first thought was that it would be cool to have this as a business card and have it feed something more general-purpose than a Facebook page. Then my mind wandered to the thought that a tattoo would save the trouble of having to carry a card... Boy, that was a slippery slope.

Somehow following that I ended up with Sub-Studio on my screen and enjoyed the list of weird shoe photos down the left side there.

The peace sign turned 50 yesterday. I had heard that its roots were in semaphore but I thought that was just urban legend.

Even though it seems like every card trick calls itself the best card trick, this one really is pretty good. Unfortunately no reveal here. I notice he shuffles off the top, which is usually a sign that the bottom card is a marker but that doesn't answer half the questions this trick leaves.

Listening: Hot French rockers Neimo. I confess I listened to it with the window minimized but I think it's all safe for work. The video is of two people having sex but any exposed flesh is transparent so it's just clothes moving around. Some of it is pretty flagrant but still, no actual boobies.

Rock climbing robots (with video) - I generally think of rock climbing as a challenge rooted in the limitations of human physicality. To the extent that robot designers work from scratch, I'm surprised they'd follow the human climbing model so closely.

I should know better than to see a trend in a single instance but this photo is just too great and this photoshopping too funny for this to be the last we see of it.

In case you doubted the effects of global warming, this is probably the surest sign yet.

In the wake of my tap water rant: Salmonella outbreak linked to tap water - I forgot to mention that my new theory is not that the tap water stories are a bottled water conspiracy but that the shift to bottled water has led to neglect of the quality of tap water. So sort of a passive conspiracy theory.

Coverage of that guy selling everything in his life online is widening. The msnbc.com story went up yesterday but now I'm seeing video of him on the air. For some reason no one mentions the URL with the story. It's here. Looks like the actual selling is going to happen in June.

Seattle bans sale of bottled water - That's just for the city government, they didn't actually stop citizens from purchasing the stuff. The article mentions something that had me up a tree last week. Remember that news about the drugs in the drinking water? The crazy person in me was convinced it was a conspiracy by the bottled water companies. In the above link Treehugger mentions San Francisco and Chicago taking action against bottled water, but the movement is broader than that. New Yorkers are being actively encouraged to stop buying bottled water and switch to tap. Like Seattle, there have been bans on bottled water in legislatures across the UK. Salt Lake City and many other cities have taken action as well.

Bottled water is also being dropped fancy restaurants and food coops. It's being called immoral and is the subject of boycotts, with the bad points and shortcomings highlighted and explained in global major media. It looks like there's a war on bottled water taking place.

So given all of that you can imagine how the sudden appearance of alarming headlines ripping tap water for containing "pharmaceuticals!" would trigger suspicion in a mind prone to conspiracy theories. Especially with the contradictory message that we shouldn't misunderstand or overreact but we should know the story involves mutated fish growing extra genitals (and not in a good way) and a "powerful effect" on "human cells."

Moving on...

"As far as I know, this was the first flight of an insect-size robot."  This is actually the blog that broke that robot dog story. I was poking around to see what else they had and was impressed by this flying robot the size of a penny.

But before you're too impressed with that, I also clicked this item about "bug 'borgs." They put "micro-mechanical systems [MEMS] 'inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis,' the agency explains.  That way, as the bugs get older, tissues grow around -- and fuse together with -- the tiny machines." Deepening the madness, they want to control the bugs remotely through this implanted technology.

Oh, and... "Killer robot shoots man dead on driveway" - But don't worry, it was actually "an elaborate suicide robot" so the killing wasn't a malfunction, it was supposed to do that. (I'm still wondering why [or if] it's easier to sit in front of a shooting machine than simply pull the trigger himself.)

The Billboard top 25 of 2007 mixed into one song. The criticism is that the mix demonstrates the similarity of pop songs. I can't disagree with that but it does sound like the DJ is doing some pitch shifting and other tricks to make them all fit. It's been a while since I've been to this site. Fun mashups.

Have you played with Google Sky yet? The constellation button is useful.

The headline says this guy hit the fire button by accident. I don't believe that's very easy to do but I also don't imagine the guy wanted to blast himself like that. With this video circulating out there, gas station owners might want to make it a little more difficult to "accidentally" push or it could become a new favorite prank.

The Politico has an extended version of the speech by Obama's "former" reverend in which he drops the N bomb and generally bashes Hillary for never having been black-in-America. As you can see in the comments, the clip isn't really mind-changing but for those of us who don't attend this kind (or um... any kind) of church it's interesting viewing.

A rare uncivil moment on local TV that's worth watching because you always knew this kind of animosity was lurking under those smarmy "back to you in the studio" hand-offs. NOTE: Stop at YouTube. Don't follow that "ripe videos" link, unsafe content there.

"Intel has found a way to stretch a Wi-Fi signal from one antenna to another located more than 60 miles away."

Does More Than One Monitor Improve Productivity? This is related to the item we saw earlier about larger monitors increasing productivity. Apparently having two monitors does help you work better but it's also interesting to see that there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to monitor size.

I didn't read the description before clicking this video I was a little shocked at how violent it is. But for what it is, it makes sense. It's "an abridged history of American-centric war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict." There's some sense on the site that it's cheating to look at the sheet that explains what each food is and where it's from but I found that helpful.

Speaking of doing weird things with food, doughnut muffins and beer cupcakes.

A simple animated gif showing how a sewing machine works.

Some Psychiatrists Addicted To Prescribing Internet Addiction - As Gothamist points out, that excuse apparently didn't occur to one city worker fired for surfing. What's more interesting to me about that Gothamist item is the shot of what tracking software looks like. I've heard about employers monitoring what employees look at online but I've never seen an actual user interface that shows how an employee's online activities are logged.

Speaking of keeping track of what you do online, 5 tools to track how much time you waste while online. Of course, "time you waste while online" is an oxymoron. We all know that time online is time well spent, by definition. But in the same way that tracking the food you eat all day can help you adjust your eating habits, software like this could make give you some insights on your surfing.

And as long as we're talking about tracking online activity, now is a good time to mention that FriendFeed is the new hotness. Some folks coming out of SXSW are calling it "this year's Twitter." I haven't registered for an account yet to see how easy it is to use but it sure looks easy. The output is like a combination of the short notes sent on Twitter and the activity reports sent through a Facebook news stream. I don't want to get too ridiculous with the lingo dropping but it's like abbreviated kind of tumblelog. Part of the idea is that you can follow the online activities of your friends or, like with Twitter, of total strangers (particularly influential A-listers). You can also turn feeds into friends and mix those together, so it works like an RSS reader too. I'll have more as I play with it and hopefully find some good new stuff with their "everyone" aggregator.

Morning soundtrack: Baby Baby Babe-uh!

Contrary to the wishes of Heather Mills, the judgment in her divorce from Paul McCartney has been published. It's a 58 page pdf but it tells quite a story if you're into this sort of thing.

It's tangetially interesting to see the way Judiciary of England and Wales judgments are published.

I'm not sure if I'm more impressed with "telepathic" communication or afraid of the idea that our nerves carry signals for actions we aren't actually taking. It makes more sense to me that they've found a code that turns muscle signals into words, but in the video demo the guy actually says "capture what a person wants to say before they actually say it."  What if you confess to a crime on this thing? Here's the official site.

Speaking of disquieting technology, "New video of BigDog Quadruped robot is so stunning it's spooky." Spooky is an understatement. Watching this thing (this is not the same video we saw of it a few months ago) triggers some kind of instinctual reaction that makes me have to concentrate to keep from seeing it as an animal. Watch it slip on the ice around half way through the clip. I also can't watch this without imagining it without that motor noise and with a compact, long lasting power source... and me riding to work on it. It looks more likely that it'll be fitted with cameras and firepower. Run Sarah Connor! Run!

Speaking of technology having a personality, Laptop Sleeves, Skins and Stickers - When you think about it, it's pretty amazing that we're still walking around with gray or black plastic slabs when laptops can be so much more attractive. I'll spare you my rant about natural materials but check these out for a sense of how much more friendly technology can be look.

I guess I haven't been paying very close attention because I hadn't heard about growing tent cities outside L.A. Seeing them on a foreign-produced news clip is pretty shaming. That's America?

The Worth1000 folks have done some fun things with the challenge to put modern products in old-style ads.

40% of all spam comes from just one source

The crackdown on protesting monks in Tibet has many people questioning the wisdom of holding the Olympics in China. Previously we've seen athletes concerned that the air in China is so polluted they're afraid to breathe it - and that's not to mention the food. As I recall, there was some sense that putting the Olympics in China would force China to clean up its act in the glare of global public attention. I wonder if it's working.

Questionaut - Great fun for kids, part of the BBC's Bitesize series of games for kids. It looks familiar because it's from Amanita Design.

I mentioned on that Obama speech post that I happened to be on Andrew Sullivan's blog. I was there looking for something I read last week about Hillary Clinton inspiring irrational hatred in some people. That was brought to mind by this business of the Clinton bloggers going "on strike" because of abuse from Obama supporters and generally angry essay in Sunday's Times about America not being as post-feminist as we thought.

"Rumors are flying that Yahoo intends to integrate video into Flickr very soon, perhaps in the next three weeks."

Speaking of Yahoo encroaching on the territory of successful sites, "Yahoo Buzz is a Digg killer." There's
not much of a case made for Yahoo Buzz actually killing Digg. The real
message is "Social news is going mainstream." Right now the focus is on
how much traffic a link from Yahoo brings to a site. The real test will
be what happens when Yahoo Buzz opens to the whole Web instead of an
exclusive list of content sources. Part of the problem with Digg's rise
in popularity and reputation for delivering valuable traffic is that
the front page content has become more populist and more sites try to
game the system. The result is a lot of wacky photo collections from
linkjack sites. How Yahoo will avoid this remains to be seen.

"Woman files lawsuit against AMR because passenger next to her masturbated while she slept." A gross, horrible story. The question: Does this warrant a civil suit? NOTE: This is safe for work as far as imagery goes, but while I included this link in part because of the liveliness of the discussion in the comments, the subject matter is such that you should make sure you can handle reading some off color remarks before going there.

Why bother having a resume? This employs a somewhat awkward trick of being directed toward remarkable/amazing/spectacular people, but it's a good outside the box exercise. What are the best terms on which to sell yourself and how are you building a presentation of those terms? It reminds me of my question the other day, how ready are you for the lightning bolt of fame?

Speaking of "why bother" and follow-ups thoughts to last week's item, Indie labels bypass iTunes, give digital sales a shot - Why bother going through iTunes? I remember reading early concept idea about the Semantic Web and the possibility that in the future everyone will have a site of their own and if, for example, you have something to sell, you put it on your site and tag it a certain way and the web will find it and feed your listing into aggregators. No Craigslist as it is. Similarly, it's not hard to imagine labels and individual artists maintaining their own online sales and marking them for inclusion in whatever app wants to pull them in. Is that so different from what Seeqpod and mp3gle are doing -at least in terms of results? As the article points out, there's some work in maintaining an online store.

Pundits and talking heads are already gushing over Obama's speech this morning about race and religion. I just happened to be on Andrew Sullivan's blog when it ended:

"This searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply
Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my
adult lifetime. It is a speech we have all been waiting for for a
generation. Its ability to embrace both the legitimate fears and
resentments of whites and the understandable anger and dashed hopes of
many blacks was, in my view, unique in recent American history."

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing. We've got the text transcript up already. I just heard that our video team is in the process of putting up the whole video (it's pretty long), I'll add a link to that shortly.

HERE IT IS: Way better quality than that crappy YouTube version.

Later... Aw man...

I'm seeing stories today about the fame Ashley Alexandra Dupre is facing in the wake of her involvement in the Eliot Spitzer scandal. The question of whether she should embrace and encourage that fame is a no-brainer given what we know about her. She wants to be famous, she should seize the opportunity.

The better question is how she should do it. What model should she follow? Is it just a matter of cashing in on whatever is offered or can she construct a public identity?

I agree with Larry Flynt in the article linked above that right now she probably doesn't have to resort to nudie pictures in magazines, but how much should she embrace the sexpot image? She could probably milk the idea that she's some kind of fatal seductress, destroying men with her irresistible appeal (or something like that). Maybe she can market one of those tattoos she has or whatever phrase that is on her belly. (NOTE: It's the NY Post, but probably shouldn't be on your work screen.) (FIXING: Looks like her lawyer scared the Post into pulling the photos. Both of the shots I link to in this paragraph happen to also be on this page, not yet cowed by a takedown notice.)

But is there a higher road she could take? I'm sensing a nascent respect for her in the public mind. She's a survivor with a troubled past who does what she has to do to achieve her dream. Her friends and family are sticking by her. She doesn't seem to be suffering the stigma of "home wrecker" the way a mistress would.

Does that make her a prime candidate for a reality show?

Should she play the redemption angle and maybe meet with Mrs. Spitzer and make some kind of statement about the importance of girls getting a good education and keeping away from drugs?

Or should she go the "empowerment" route and become a spokesperson for good sex and good times. Maybe pick up some kind of host gig on one of those "Wild On" shows or Mtv's Spring Break. She may not be desperate enough to deal with Penthouse and Hustler but could her eventual agent get her a spread in Maxim or one of those lad mags as a springboard to national pin-up status?

What should she do to ensure that the movie they eventually make about her has a triumphant ending and isn't just another cautionary tale?

One thing she doesn't have yet is a catch phrase. She needs something sassy that can be printed on too-tight baby tees and the backside of sweatpants. "Get paid" or something like that. It's a struggle to keep from looking to Paris Hilton as the example to follow. This Spitzer scandal is Dupre's equivalent of Hilton's sex tape (possibly even less humiliating) and while she obviously doesn't have the same financial backing for pet projects like her own perfume line, surely some of the same tricks of celebrity apply. We can at least expect that if she ends up drunk and making a spectacle of herself at a New York City bar her behavior will be reported in tabloids.

We still have yet to hear her speak. That'll probably determine a lot of her options. Is she wise beyond her years? Does the charm that earned her such a high rate as a call girl translate to the TV screen or the stage?

What actually got me thinking about this whole question was the middle portion of the article above in which her chances of signing with a record label are explored. Signing with a label might actually be the worst thing she could do. Right now she's getting 70% of her song sales on AmieStreet.com. There's no way she'll get that from a record label and she doesn't have to give up the rights to her music to do it. (The Daily News does some speculative math here. I don't see anywhere on Amie Street that shows actual sales numbers.)

Right now a crappy bootleg slide show video of her song is close behind the new Britney video on YouTube in terms of numbers of views. If you were able read any of her MySpace page before it went down you'd have seen some of her musical friends commenting and looking forward to working with her again. The kind of music she makes is easily produced with consumer or "pro-sumer" level equipment. I'm sure she needs an agent of some kind to help her market herself, but signing with a record label in this day and age, given the advantage she already has, would be a step backward.

I think there's also an interesting lesson in all of this in terms of how well basic Web tools prepared her for fame. She had photos available, some personal statements on MySpace with a few findable friends who were quickly booked for TV shows, two songs recorded and uploaded to a revenue-sharing service... If the lightning bolt of fame struck you tomorrow, would you be this prepared?

Speaking of suddenly having a story to tell, "Then Jason P Howe discovered that his girlfriend Marylin was leading a secret double life ? as an assassin for right-wing death squads in Colombia's brutal civil war."

"Plans are being drawn up for a 'Doomsday ark' on the moon containing the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war." I predict the arc will suffer a navigation malfunction and crash into a Genesis planet whereupon the sample genetic material will spill into a lake of incubating primordial soup and a rival, parallel human race will rise. They'll use the cheat sheets provided in the arc to accelerate their technological development and return to Earth years later to seize their birthright in a bloody space battle.

50 people looking for solar image of Mary lose sight - It's like some kind of weird mean joke. Like the ones with punchlines like "put them in a round room and tell them to sit in the corner."

TravelPod isn't new but I looked at it for the first time today. "TravelPod's free travel blogs let you chart your trips on a map, share unlimited photos and videos, and stay in touch while you travel."

Congratulations to Jason for ten years of blogging at Kottke.org.

"Malwarez is a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code."

Incredible Hulk sequel trailer - If it's anything like the first one, watching this trailer means you've seen all the good parts.

Lost Boys sequel trailer- survey says? BZZZZ (I'd sooner re-watch Underworld.)

Speaking of movies, "Affluenza is a fascinating look at one of the greatest social maladies of our time: overconsumption and materialism." This is nearly an hour of video. I didn't watch it all but I am curious what more there is to it since the point is pretty clear from the opening minutes.

50 bucks for a 9-year-old girl -that is, to own one. It's a fascinating conflict between the urge to "save" and not wanting to contribute to that business.

Here's a cool idea: The site lets you mark text on a web page with a highlighter and then gives you a URL so you can send the page with your highlights to someone else.

I sent my name in for beta access to Dropbox. It happens all the time that I have lots of photos to share and no good way of sharing them privately. What do you do with those 30 really big photos you took of the night out bowling with friends if you're not interested in sharing the spectacle with the entire Internet?

This "awareness test" may be familiar because it's based on a pretty famous psychological experiment. It also makes a pretty effective advertisement.

Barack Obama: On My Faith and My Church - Obama makes the strange choice of the Huffington Post to respond to the questions raised by critics of his minister. Surely his campaign doesn't think of the Huffington Post as a mainstream outlet. I wonder if they think the only people paying attention to this kind of scandal are the wonkish types who read the Huffington Post.

London Tube Smartcard Cracked - Often hacking articles go over my head but check out the video he's linking to. Could it really be that easy or are they doing a MacGyver editing job?

"64 percent of kids go online while watching television — and nearly half of them do so "frequently," from three times a week to several times a day." It's rare that I watch TV without a computer in my lap. I used to think Wifi deserved all the credit for this but lately I realize that I actually do a lousy job of juggling both things and generally tune out the TV for what I'm doing on the computer. So what really makes my "multitasking" possible is the DVR that lets me rewind when I look up and see the main character in the movie I'm watching lying on the ground dead and I missed how it happened.

Snow Day: Toss freeze balls into clouds to keep your timer running. I played until I finally broke 1000.

Want something more challenging? Try breaking the curse. The instructions are pretty brief so the first couple of tries go to figuring out what's going on. I managed to solve it in the first go 'round with just one try left. I had to turn the TV off to concentrate though.

I still use SeeqPod for quick, top of the head song cravings but Mp3gle offers something SeeqPod doesn't: a download button. My one criticism is that they should display more search results on the page. I think SeeqPod gives better results too, but hey what do you want for free mp3s? Sheesh.

Speaking of a whole lot of mp3s, Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s

In case you don't have a MySpace login to see them yourself, The Smoking Gun uploaded all the "Kristen" photos from her MySpace and a few others I hadn't seen. At this point the thrill of discovery has pretty much passed though.

Speaking of the thrill of discovery, naturally everyone has been looking for photos of Spitzer's call girl since the story broke (the joke is that she was (and probably still is) easy to find in the real world, not so much in the virtual world). Early yesterday, Page Six release a pretty bogus looking (and probably nsfw even though it's strategically blurred) excerpt from what they claimed was a portfolio description from the Emperors Club site.

That led me to look harder for ways to see the removed pages of the Emperors Club site. Digital Alchemy had good success with The Web Archive. I was able to duplicate those results.

Seeing in the Observer that despite Emperors Club's exclusive image they still ran trashy little sex ads in the back of magazines made me wonder if they marketed the operation under other names as well. At the same time I heard some discussion about whether the Emperors Club spokes models site which was shown in some of the early TV segments on the story is really related to the Emperors Club VIP site at the center of this story. This is where the thrill of the chase gets fun. The common method for researching the background of a web site is to do a whois search through a service like Network Solutions. You'll often find a name and address of a site administrator of some kind. From there you have a whole new set of information to Google and hunt down.

As you search for those things, as well as the phone numbers listed in the advertisements, etc. you'll run into other bloggers reporting their own results as they pursue the same material. Even the Washington Post researched far enough to find out that the registration of the Emperors Club VIP site was using a bogus Wall Street address.

In the end I found a lot of dead ends and even a few virus traps but not much more than what you're already seeing in regular coverage. Even that question of whether Emperors Club VIP and Emperors Club Spokesmodels are related didn't have a clear answer (some details overlapped, others didn't). But it was fun to chase the clues.

Speaking of chasing clues in this case, How an information system helped nail Eliot Spitzer and a prostitution ring - This is a little dry but I Bob Sullivan was visiting the office here in NY yesterday and we were talking about this very thing so it may be of interest to you as well.

Moving on...

Prepare to be amazed: Direct note access - It's a little video demo of new software that can not only modulate music and correct the pitch of individual notes but it can take a chord and break it into its component note and shift them to change the chord.

Pictures of the Google office in Zurich. Not pictured is the animatronic jug band and the 8-year-old birthday parties.

Believe it or not, this sentence is grammatically correct and has meaning: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." I've read the entry twice but I'm still having trouble getting my head around it.

It's quickly becoming standard nomenclature to use the suffix "-vision" to describe real time mapping of a community's output. The latest example: Flickrvision. Watch where photos are coming from as they're uploaded to Flickr. In the 3D view the planet jerks back and forth as people from distant locations submit pictures.

Speaking of cool Flickr tools, this search engine gives better results than the in-house tool.

(While playing with it I found photos of an Enertia electric motorcycle.  Cool!)

Speaking of interesting search tools, Tweet Scan lets you see what people are saying in Twitter.

Hulu officially launched yesterday, which means every time you walk up to a colleague's desk they quickly reshuffle their windows to hide the fact that they're watching TV.

The Times has identified the woman known as Kristen who is at the center of the Eliot Spitzer story. No doubt we'll be seeing a lot of her in the coming days (weeks? months?) but since we know how these pages have a way to crashing or closing down I wanted to point out her known links quickly for Clicked readers. Her MySpace page and her Amie Street account are both open and up right now. Not much public commentary yet but it's just a matter of time.

...and the Google cache, which is different.

I've had one of those chase-the-day days but here are some lighter items I was able to snack on in between chores and meetings.

I thought at first that the Photoshop Disasters
blog was a short term stunt but they seem to be updating pretty often.
It's been a while since I've posted links on the subject but computer
aided alterations to photos of humans is a pet peeve of mine. The best
weapon you can give yourself and especially your children as they
develop a sense of body image is the knowledge of these distorting
tricks (and a healthy dose of the cynicism and skepticism that comes
with it). In that spirit: 33 awesome body enhancement Photoshop tutorials.

Speaking of Photoshop tricks, Face in hole.

Wow cool, streaming 360 degree video. (Drag it while it plays.)

Wellcome Image Awards 2008 (Cool science photos)

"Every pixel in the illustration represents one person alive on Earth. The first one is you. The rest are everyone else." The horizontal scroll is marked at intervals of one million but it'd be cool to see cumulative totals on the scale as well.

I looked everywhere for this yesterday. It's a big flow chart from the Times that shows how contact with D&D (R.I.P. Gary Gygax) at a young age likely altered the course of your life and your likelihood of encountering girls.

The latest Improv Everywhere stunt was a spontaneous musical performance in a mall food court. I'm not as impressed by this one. It seems like something a local theater group might do as a promotion. Well done though.

Gawker has those videos of George Bush singing that the TV folks are showing bits of today. It reminds me of that Christmas video he did one year, looking for WMD under the carpet. If you like him you'll probably find it funny, or at least cute. If you don't like him, it'll probably push you to rage. UPDATE: One broke, here's a different link. And a direct link to the other.

I don't know if you saw the ads for Activating Evolution on MSNBC.com today but it turns out it's a new viral project for Heroes. I'm a big fan of the show but like with Lost, I only have so much capacity for TV stuff. I just don't have it in me to do a lot of online follow-up. Disclosure: NBC and msnbc.com are blah blah blah...

"A bionic device the size of a pencil eraser ... is offering hope that some forms of blindness could be alleviated within a few years." You have to see the picture. It's vaguely steam punk and very Mad-Eye Mooney.

"Welcome to Lollyphile. We're brand-new. Our goal is to make the most interesting and unique lollipops in the world."

You knew it was coming: Stuff Educated Black People Like

If you're like me, the first thing you did once you heard the story was go looking for the Web site.

ADDING: The links below are beginning to fizzle out. Until/unless we find some mirror links The Smoking Gun has the relevant "Client-9" portions of the FBI affidavit and it is more interesting reading anyway.

ANOTHER ADD: The funny thing about this case is that it was already a story before it was a story about Spitzer. So The Smoking Gun and a few other sites have already have material related to the prostitution ring.  Here the Smoking Gun has copies of some of the pages mentioned below as well as other pages of the FBI affidavit.

ONE OTHER: Wonkette found a way onto those removed Emperors Club pages and posts a few screen captures of the women's bio pages. Nothing more revealing than underwear but still not really safe for work. OK, go.

This is the one they're showing on TV, the Emperors Club "Spokes Models" site. There is one picture that switches to a woman in a see-through shirt (second row, third column) but otherwise I don't find anything NSFW here.

The criteria for "casting" is kind of funny:

Preferences given to candidates who are:

• University educated, professional (Finance, Law, Art, Media).
• Master degree or PhD a plus.
• It is essential that candidate is Innovative, creative with first-rate interpersonal skills and high positive energy.
• Healthy life Style / fresh perspective.

The main site is shut down but there are still lingering remnants in Google's cache:

http://www.emperorsclubvip.com/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us&client=firefox-a">The Welcome page
http://www.emperorsclubvip.com/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a">The rates page
http://www.emperorsclubvip.com/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us&client=firefox-a">General description (They had a concierge service, investment services and art sales apparently.)
The rest are "portfolio" pages that are nothing but dead photos, plus this one page for http://www.emperorsclubvip.com/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=us&client=firefox-a">photographer Richard Prince (who we here in the cube farm believe was part of the art sales, not the "model introduction").

"What if every time that you flushed your toilet you could generate just a little bit of power?" Yes, it's a flush turbine. I'm not sure I'd want anything impeding the flow of my flush but in principle I like the idea of tapping water energy that's already happening. I often wonder why there isn't a greater emphasis on micro-generation. Every day I get off the subway and pass through a revolving door/gate. I can't imagine how many thousands of people go through that gate all day, every day, but how much energy could it put out if it had a turbine attached to it? I assume the resulting energy would not be enough to make the effort of installing generators on all of New York City's revolving doors worthwhile.

Speaking of micro energy, the flip side of producing energy in small quantities is using energy in small quantities. LEDs do a good job of making a lot of light with a little power but the color of the light they produce has been the chief obstacle to their commercial and residential use. The new idea is to coat the LED in a nano-substance that absorbs some of the LEDs blue and produces red and green light as a result, mixing it all together into a soft (and therefore marketable) white. You'll have to do your own math to figure out how many times you'll have to flush to keep the lights on in your house with this technology.

Speaking of cutting edge green technology, "Husqvarna launches the world's first automatic electric solar powered hybrid robotic lawn mower." It's like solar Roomba for your lawn.

IE8 is out in Beta. I've not tried it or even read much about it but lately Flash video has been giving me a hard time in Firefox so if IE fixed its flash problem there may be an opportunity to win me back as a user.

Did you see this story about the kid in trouble for running a Facebook study group? I searched for the group and couldn't find it so I can't see if it was really a cheat sheet group or, as it's characterized in this article, a study group. It reminds me of some of the intellectual property arguments we read about where sharing information is OK in the real world but no OK in the virtual world. Part of me thinks the teacher is foolish for thinking the students wouldn't help each other on this homework assignment, but I also wonder if they'd still be in trouble even if the professor found them collaborating around a library table in the real world. In Daytona last week I saw a kid with a shirt that said "It's only illegal if you get caught." (I noticed it because he was walking next to his father and crossing the street in front of police who were doing traffic duty.) This may be one of those cases like speeding where everyone does it and everyone knows everyone does it but everyone still has to put on some pretense that they don't.

WowOWow, the site by celebrity women of a certain age launches tomorrow. I can't escape the feeling that most of the participants were roped into the project with the promise that if enough people signed up they wouldn't have to contribute very much.

The new Watchmen costumes have been revealed.

Speaking of movies, online movie buffs are positively gushing over the alternate "original" ending in the I Am Legend DVD. (Contains spoilers.)

UPDATE NOTE: Folks in the comments are pointing out that this is more dangerous than I realized. Apparently it's entirely possible that you wouldn't know you were prone to these kinds of seizures until some reckless blogger posted a link to a video like this. I can't tell you not to click it because obviously I wanted to see it and I clicked it. But use your judgment; the video itself isn't anything to write home about. End Update.  Speaking of warnings about videos, here's that potentially-seizure-causing, Harding-Test-failing Gnarls Barkley video. I made it through without incident. I have no idea how seriously to take this warning. I imagine you'd already know if something like this will be a problem for you.

The new World's Smallest Lethal Gun.

Christian Siriano, the winner of Bravo's Project Runway has a site (that scrolls horizontally). (It's just photos of his winning collection but seeing the stand alone site makes him seem more like a real person and less like a TV character.) Disclosure: Bravo is an NBC property. Random remark: I got lost on their floor looking for the gym in this building. They have a piece of art in the hallway that consists of quotes and snippets noted by an artist who hung around with the network's producers while they worked and met.

There is no way you'll get me to believe that walking-while-texting injuries are an actual public concern.

3-way chess (safe for work - heh)

Doritos in the UK is holding a contest to make your own video ad. They're going to beam the winning ad into space. I'm sure the Earth puts out a lot of space noise but shouldn't we Earthlings vote or something on whether Doritos should be our interstellar heralding voice?

Remixing the London police's anti-photographer terror posters - Local photographers and photobloggers are a security asset, not the enemy.

Hangboarding is today's best way to lose all your teeth. There's something about an activity that requires a wire hold your butt in the air that makes me hesitate. The video doesn't have any wipe-out clips.

Here's that interview with the "off the record" remark about Hillary Clinton being a monster. The relevant parts are already in the mainstream news but in case you're curious about the justification for ignoring the "this is off the record" backtrack, they explain their position down near the bottom under "publish and be damned." In short, you have to call it when the interview is set up, not in the middle of a sentence.

Slate's got a delegate calculator in case you want to do the Clinton/Obama math yourself.

I remember the red/blue poll projections being big last election. Here are the first sets I've seen so far this season: McCain/Obama and McCain/Clinton.

The Back-of-the-Envelope Design Contest - "We asked readers to sketch their own visions for the George W. Bush Library" - Some more serious than others but they all do appear to be rendered on the backs of envelopes.

OK, by the rule that two makes a trend, Photoshopping Obama into action scenes and movies is officially a trend.

(Name that headline allusion!)

I'm listening to this guy Joe Purdy whose song I heard on a KIA car commercial (the one where the fuel mileage is so good the drivers forget what side the gas hole is on) last night. It's a little more mournful than my mood but it's catchy and since I don't own a car, every time I have to put gas in one I end up doing the "where the hell's the hole" dance, so the commercial struck a personal chord.

I'm gone starting yesterday, back online probably Thursday. You know where.

(Last year folks wrote in who were also down here and like a fool I didn't check my mail to notice. This time I'll pay better attention and maybe we can meet to breathe some exhaust together for a bit. Use the spotter address in the left margin.)