October 2007
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Speaking panties to power
Lanna Action for Burma, a new Thai blog, is running a Panty Power Campaign against the government next door, in Burma. I’m not making this up. Here’s what it says: SPDC is the State Police and Development Council, which rules Burma, brutally. The pointer comes from a friend in Thailand who says this thing is… Continue reading
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Know your bus numbers
I have a paranoid but helpful habit when I travel: When I get out of a taxi, I always memorize the number of the cab, just in case. For example, right now I see two cabs off to my right, lined up at Mt. Auburn Street at JFK in downtown Cambridge, where I’m sitting on… Continue reading
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A .jpg fire map at 1800hrs
The map above is a .jpg I put together from this large .pdf at a link off the San Diego County Emergency page. It’s from 6pm today, Pacific time. I like this one because it gets down nearly to the street level, and answers specific questions in the minds of millions of people who either… Continue reading
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Quote du jour
Paul Watson: Software may let you have 3000 friends but your brain doesn’t. A few years ago, when Orkut was new and hot, Rael Dornfest demonstrated the standare social software friend-confirmation protocol by walking up to people, pushing his face into theirs and saying “YOU ARE MY FRIEND! YES OR NO!” Nailed it, that. Continue reading
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Fly smarter
10 Useful Secrets the Major Airlines Don’t Want You to Know, from TravelHacker, via Britt Blaser, whom I’ve never properly thanked for all those nice things he said on my birthday. (That’s a hint to myself to come back at Britt with the same in a few days.) Continue reading
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Fire news, cont’d
I’m just dumping notes here, as they come in (and I can get out from meetings and stuff). KPBS is, commendably, staying on top of the fire situation, with a number of live streams. For yours, check this page here. Unfortunately, it all seems to be Windows Media. I can’t make it work on Linux… Continue reading
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Too much face(book) time
Here’s the problem. For me, anyway. I believe the Net is an open place. Same with the Web. I also believe private walled gardens on the Web are fine things. Nothing wrong with them. My problem is when the former starts looking and acting like the latter. And that’s why I’m already tired of Facebook.… Continue reading
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More fires
Inciweb, the wildfire Incident Information System is following four California fires: Grass Valley Slide Ranch Cajon Grass Valley is northwest of Lake Arrowhead. Inciweb reports 113 structures lost and 1500 threatened. Slide is west of Green Valley Lake. So far 25 homes are burned and 400 are threatened. Road closures include all highways west… Continue reading
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News is a process, not a product. At least when it’s live.
That headline occurred to me as I was reading Jay Rosen’s Formula for Online News Success at MediaShift Idea Lab (via Ben Tesch), right after following the latest from Nate Ritter on the San Diego fire situation (tag: sandiegofire), including his Twitter feed, which demonstrates Twitter as a kind of live news router. (As do… Continue reading
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Burma save
Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burba (here’s the .pdf) has just been released by the Open Net Initiative, and the most important story it tells is about how the story is told. The summary: Burmese netizens, operating in a constrained and challenging space in a country with especially… Continue reading
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Getting out of Live Search hell
Live.com used to have a great map search that yielded very nice 3-d images of the landscape — much better than what you’d get with Google Maps. Worked on every browser I tried. Alas, this now appears to be a Windows-only thing. Now if I click on 3D, I get “Virtual Earth 3D is not… Continue reading
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Shortest wave
More than 100 times faster than WiFi? suggests that chips transmitting wirelessly in the 60GHz spectrum, where waves are milimeters long, would be a practical replacement for Wi-Fi, or other forms of wireless transmission. I think the advantages here are high, but over very short-ranges — feet or yards — given the relatively low penetrating… Continue reading
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News 0.2, cont’d
I’ve been looking for news about the Malibu Fire. Inciweb has nothing (though it does cover the Ranch Fire in the Ventura County back country, which has grown past 29,000 acres and looks kind of ominous, though hardly as sexy as one that drives celebrities into the sea). Technorati has 408 results as of this… Continue reading
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Stop and listen
Driving through the Maine countryside today, I realized suddenly that it was time for Hal Crowther to weigh in on Something Important again. Hal used to do this weekly back when we were both several decades younger and living in North Carolina. I’m long gone, but Hal’s still there, putting out essays no less interesting… Continue reading
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Rocky finish
Too back you can’t resign a game in baseball the way you can in chess. Because that would be the merciful way to end to Game 7 of the ALCS. (Why don’t they call it the “penant race” any more?). The Sox are up 11-2 at the bottom of the 8th. They’re at home and… Continue reading
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Taking the ournal out of journalism
John Scalzi: …so much of the advice boils down, essentially, to this: “become a starfucker for more popular bloggers.” Lots of great quotable shit. I like this: If you’re spending your time starfucking a blogger, your sense of priorities are unspeakably out of whack. It’s like sleeping with the screenwriter in Hollywood. The screenwriter… Continue reading
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Too much, already
At Chris Pirillo’s blog, John Blue asks, What does “innovation” really mean and what can I do to become “more innovative”? I have an idea but what do I do next? How do I find innovative people? How can my company be more innovative? In the comments I reply, Invention is what matters. … Continue reading
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The leading coast?
John Quimby asks, Why is Newspaper 2.0 still Newspaper 0.2? His bottom lines: Newspaper 2.0 might be coming soon, but we really won’t see what it looks like until 2.0 managers include video and audio as well as web design and graphic animation fully integrated on their pages. Since the entire concept of… Continue reading
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Been there, fun that
Enjoyed last night’s Bloggerdinnerbostonoct07. I brought my camera, but only took one picture, which isn’t even worth posting. That’s because it was too crowded for the lens I was using, at the places where I was standing; and also because the conversation was more important anyway. It was interesting to come to an East Coast… Continue reading