How Twitter works in theory, by Kevin Marks. “Phatic” gestures are important to understand if you’re building on the web.
Category Archives: Asides
Blog Mothership
Open City Data
Yesterday I was part of a press conference by Mayor Gavin Newsom promoting DataSF.org, which is one of San Francisco’s first steps at opening up. Tim O’Reilly also spoke and made the point to me afterward that as he dives deep into every part of the intersection of technology and government he’s most excited about the prospect for change at the city level. Here are some pictures from the event. I think we’ll see more along these lines, and more WordPress, for San Francisco in the future.
Gravatar
Gravatar gets a light visual refresh, portent of things to come.
TEDMED
I’m going to be attending TEDMED this year. I think we’re at a crucial juncture for health, where in my lifetime we’ll look back at our treatments today with the same wonder as we have when contemplating medicine before the understanding of germs. I have a feeling TEDMED will be the best spot to get a glimpse of this future.
OS X Optimizations
Monolingual is a Open Source utility for Mac OS X that removes all the not-needed languages from your computer, freeing up hundreds of megabytes. My Mac mini is going “laggy” with the mouse jumping around instead of being smooth when I move the cursor around — any more tips for optimizations?
Diminishing Data
The diminishing returns on data, by Nick Carr riffing on an interesting interview with Hal Varian.
Evolution of Blogging
The Evolution of Blogging by Om Malik.
Real-Time, Productive Communication
Real-Time, Productive Communication (using P2).
Clunker Broadband
App Store
Chris Messina on why Steve Jobs hates the App Store.
Launch Years
Bezos Reviews
Amazon.com reviews from Jeffrey P. Bezos. Includes milk, cookies, cheese snacks, binoculars, and a Cory Doctorow novel. Unfortunately, the cookie items reviewed are no longer available so we’re not able to share in “snickerdoodles [that] were the best I’ve ever had.”
GPL FUD
Favorite iPhone Apps
Google Global Warming
This is why Google is trying to solve global warming. So they can run their datacenters without A/C more days. 😉
Dopplr Stats
I just got my Dopplr stats for the first half of the year. “You took 28 trips, which added up to 221,054 km or 60% of the distance to the moon. You spent 72 days at home, 109 days traveling. Your personal velocity so far this year was 48.12 km/hr, which is about the same as an elephant.” These stats are the #1 reason I use Dopplr, it’s just fun to play with it.
Haiku-powered Design
qTranslate
I recommended a translation plugin the other day at WordCamp Montreal but couldn’t remember the name. It was qTranslate.