Some links!

• Caterina, on Misbehaving.net: How to Get Out of the Audience and Onto the Stage
• I also am not interested in Multiply - thanks! (As Matt says, "Multiply turned me into Cory Doctorow." Also - did you know your invites are periodically resent?)
• Cal on Searching with PHP and MySql - he writes a lot of great tutorials. Lovely chap.
• The Living Room Candidate has an amazing archive of presidential campaign TV commercials from 1952 on. It is amazing to watch the Dr. Suess-like Eisenhower cartoon and jingle and or the woman singing the sultry ode to Adlai Stevenson (first ads listed for each in the '52 campaign)
• Noticed: some bizarre comments on this post on Om Malik's blog, then the same commenter showed up on an M2M post by Clay and performed what immediately became my new favorite rhetorical move: (A) point. (B) [what seems like a] counterpoint [but is really a reiteration of the point]. (3) Uh, you just agreed with me. (4) Oh, well I was using your term in an obviously incorrect way and "you know what[?] If I'm mistaken about the exact and precise definition of the word ... well, I think that is just TOO BAD."

Bing!

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Kottke posted good musings on 'web as platform' which makes me itch to say a bunch of things, but I kind of have to hold off for a little longer.

I will re-iterate one point from Marc Canter's reply though:

- Data needs to be portable. If Flickr starts to suck, you should be able to easily move all of your photos to a better service.

DUDE - FLICKR AIN'T GONNA EVER SUCK. IT ROCKS.

And if that wasn't enough, I will say two things: (1) syndication is continuous partial export (so, in a sense, it is already there) and (2) part of our promise to paying customers will be that their photos and all metadata are safe and accessible. That means server uptime, backups in multiple locations, ability to order CD/DVDs, and, absolutely, the ability to export everything.

In other words, whether or not it is easy to move all your photos to a better service will be up to the better service. But we'll do our best to ensure that is a moot point.


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Andrew Otwell has a great and meaty review of Malcolm McCullough's Digital Ground. Bottom line: "It's the best current book on interaction design, and should appeal to both designers and theorists."

I'm a fan of Malcolm's and having had the chance to hang out with him in Amsterdam (twice), Maastricht and Paris, also a friend. I will have to pick this up right away!


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I never read much scifi — Caterina, reading over my shoulder advises me that you will all sneer at me for saying 'scifi' rather than 'SF' ... grow up, you pieheads! — growing up, but I've read maybe a dozen scifi books by now. Permutation City was recommended to me by so many smart people that I was excited to pick it up. Almost done now. The first half was really excellent (I'll reserve judgment on the second part till I am done). This stuff should have been required reading in my undergrad philosophy of mind courses.

But, even in good books there are bad lines. And one of the reasons I was never attracted to SF (see?) in my younger days was this way of putting things:

It was bad enough that her true body was a pattern of computation resonating in a tiny portion of a otherwise silent crystalline pyramid which stretched into the distance for the TVC equivalent of thousands of light years.

Indeed.


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Folksonomy : social classification - a great neologism (coined by Thomas). Thanks for posting it Gene.

(Aside: I think the lack of hierarchy, synonym control and semantic precision are precisely why it works. Free typing loose associations is just a lot easier than making a decision about the degree of match to a pre-defined category (especially hierarchical ones). It's like 90% of the value of a "proper" taxonomy but 10 times simpler. (Of course, I don't know if there is a lesson there for the everyday work of IAs - different kind of problem.)

Update: I meant to link to our very own Cal Henderson's 'tags' plugin for Movable Type 3 (which lets you use tags rather than fixed categories in MT3).

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(Mostly boring:) If you're like me, you hate the AIM 'feature' which allows you to be signed in at more than one location at a time.

I don't know when they started this, but now 'AOL System Message' (the friendly helper who tells you that you are signed on in more than one location) has some bot functionality: type '1' to have it log you off at other locations and '2' to get a count of places you are signed on at (I was signed on at three locations just now ... but I only have two computers, and I could have sworn I closed trillian before leaving the office).

Unrelated: One small complaint about the Blogger WYSIWYG editor, which is otherwise a fantastic implementation:

<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span>

Give me a freakin' break! <b> is never going to die, people (and I don't think it should, either. Cf.).


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Soup Baby
Originally uploaded by yi.

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Jon Udell was in town today for the Python Workshop and we stole him away for a little hike into Lynn Caynon** and then a snack at Guu with Garlic (previous plans to snack on Granville Island were stymied by the insane crowds and longest-ever lineup for False Creek Ferries on account of the Pride Parade and related festivities).




** When I was looking around for a Lynn Canyon link, I hit upon the District of North Vancouver website and noticed it had a orange RSS button right at the top. Next to it was a "What is RSS?" link which lead to a Government of Canada webpage explaining the virtues of RSS. It's not my place to say Bing! but, you know.

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Banned In Boston! The Ann Coulter Column Too Hot for USA Today by Ann Coulter

Hole-eee smokes! Ann Coulter's column with remarks from the USA Today editor who rejected it inline. I really, honestly can't see how they can't see that the column was just bad.

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Gmail spam handling update - rather than completely nuking my old stewart@sylloge.com address, I've been forwarding it to an unused Gmail account to help train up their spam filters (still, by the way, delete that address from your address books since I'll never get it, and use a similar address with 'ludicorp' in place of 'sylloge').

When I first tried a similar test of Gmail, it caught about 20% of the spam. Now it's doing a lot better:

• 93,983 in the spam folder
• 5,394 in the inbox (there may be a couple of real emails in there, but I'll never find them - let's say 5,350 of those are spam)
• 99,377 messages total (99.96% spam, approximately)
• 94.6% correctly identified as spam

Also interesting: the oldest message in there is from 8:41am on July 12. That means I'm looking at 16.25 days worth of message. I'm using 365MB of the 1GB limit. That address receives:

• 22.46MB of spam per day
• 6115.5 spam messages per day on average, or;
• 254 per hour,
• 4.25 per minute
• Average message size of 3.5KB
• At this rate, I'll run out of space at around 8pm PST on August 25th. That means:
• My 1GB of space on Gmail will have lasted 44.5 days.
  

Again, don't bother sending mail to that address ;)


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Flickr Jingle - I love my job.

See also: flickr.com/groups/flapface/pool/

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... the new MTBlacklist* lets you block comment spam (ouch!)

* Congrats to Jay for winning the contest**!

** Congrats to 6A for shipping announcing MT3.1 - I think that's what everyone was looking for.


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Via the Marketing Playbook, which continues to be very good, we learn that Laura Ries has a blog. Worth checking for sure. The only thing that remains in my mind from the 23 Immutable Laws of Branding — I deliberately didn't look up the title, so not sure if that is correct — was the one that said that logos should be wider than they are tall (which seems true).

No wait! I remember the other one — and this is good — that people need to be able to say the name of the product (or company). How it sounds, whether the pronunciation is ambiguous from the written version, whether explaining how to spell it was going to be long and laborious - these were concerns as important as logotype or color since people talking about your product was perhaps the most important thing of all. I can definitely see that.

Also, Jim Kunstler has a blog - good! I once walked downtown through Manhattan with Jim and some other Gel '03 people. We passed Licoln Center. He had a lot to say. Highly recommended (walking with Jim past Lincoln Center, I mean. Or pretty much any human settlement).

I can't help but notice that both Jim and Laura were using TypePad. There something interesting there. Feature set may be part of it, but I can't imagine either of them would make a big deal about whether their site supports trackback, for example. Part (or all) of it might be because someone they know told them: use TypePad. And a major factor might be that TypePad is paid while BlogSpot is free - this has come up a lot in conversations lately, and is interesting to note: charging for your service can be an advantage.

Also, I am going to start reading 1,000 Years of Nonlinear History since it's been in the constant recommendation stream for me for 4-5 years. I need to read real books again. (If I can find a copy of Permutation City around, I might read that first.)


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Got back from SF around 6:00pm and it was still about 30° (88°F) here. The lawn across the street was a bit of a paradise. In the unpacking and decompression a vital piece of information went undiscovered: last night was Illuminares, my favorite public event of the year (it is a lantern festival, held annually on Trout Lake in Vancouver's east side). I've been every year since I've lived here (photos from 2000 and 2002) and I'm a little sad to have not known. Aw, nuts.


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The Dooce and the Man
Originally uploaded by Stewart.

Look how nice the Dooce is!

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Picture(1)
Originally uploaded by Stef Noble.

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Heather and Judith
Originally uploaded by Stewart.

Tongues!

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Press release - our post about it - their post. The people at Feedburner are great. I will say this: Web 2.0 is going to be a hell of a lot more interesting than Web 1.0.

Also: I'm too sleepy and I have too much to do before Caterina gets home, but what a day - I set out to SFO from YVR at 7am and was back at YVR picking up my car at 10pm (I'll be back in SF over the weekend and next week: quit bugging me).

I've had one hour of sleep (because who the hell can get up at 5am? stay up all night) in the window seat, woke up and everyone had already deplaned. So much is happening all at once it is exhilarating and scary and fun.

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A good post by Clay at Many2Many. The first two comments are mine. I will repeat the second one here:

And of course, I forgot my original reason for commenting which was specific to the word "content" in the title of this post. One quibble I had with Esther Dyson's otherwise perceptive NYT article a while back was that when you talk about the stuff that people are posting as "user-generated content" it is really easy to miss what's
going on.

When someone uploads daily photos of his son, born at 24 weeks and struggling to survive, it is not like that is an alternative to watching TV or reading a magazine. "Content" is what movie studios and publishing houses create, the kind of stuff that cable companies distribute, etc. And if you confuse that with the stuff that lives are made out of, then you're just not seeing things clearly ("reality TV" to one side).

(Btw, on the blogging a lot thing: this is great! I feel like Dave Winer. Weeeeee!)

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Jason found a great excerpt from a Roger Ebert piece on Columbine. I'd have to quote the whole thing here to get the point across, so just read it there.

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