This is a great interview. The Planet Money guys are brilliant and Marco gets right in sync with their style.

Marco made and sells one of my all time favorite utilities: Instapaper. In a nutshell, if I start reading an article on my computer and want to finish it or read it on my iPad, I hit a button on my browser “read later” and the article is sent up to Instapaper, a cloud-based service that acts as my breadcrumbs in the clouds. Later, when I’m using my iPad (still connected to wifi) I click the Instapaper app and update its cache of saved stuff. The article appears and I can read it there.

What many don’t realize is that Instapaper caches the articles on the iPad and/or iPhone and so, I can read them there when I’m not connected, like when I’m on a plane. So, before my regular trips to LA I routinely load up my Instapaper account with things I want to read on the plane, then update the iPad’s Instapaper cache memory and I’m set.

Instapaper has many iBook-like reading tools including typographic control and more.

I’m hoping to use Instapaper to help my mother read The New Yorker as its app is totally worthless for anyone who can’t read small type.

Notice that I didn’t reblog the image but instead linked back to the political cartoonist Daryl Cagle’s blog. I’m not making a statement here, I came close to reflagging the image with proper permission and attribution of course, but, I want Cagle to get the traffic, he’s the artist so best to just put in a link. It’s a great cartoon as you’ll see if you follow the link.

I saw this cartoon on the site Political Irony where the site’s author discusses his own reposting of the cartoon and goes on to discuss the difference between copyright infringement and stealing (they’re different).

My question is different and I posted it as a comment on Political Irony:

An interesting question is whether revenue generated by advertising at a site that has permission to reuse material ought to be shared with content providers, many of whom are traditional “analog” artists who may not know a referrer log from a lincoln log.

And, I think those of us who are consumers of reflagged content have an obligation to follow links when interested so that the content provider gets some traffic (and maybe a comment) too. Most of these folks draw these cartoons for their day jobs and while they may make money from newspaper syndication, as we all know, that medium of exchange is in trouble.

Micho Kaku is a theoretical physicist who’s incredibly articulate, funny, and fascinating. His site contains numerous interviews and lectures. Dig around after listening to the one linked to above, he’s quite an amazing person.

LACMA has a great exhibit up: California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way”. Worth seeing if you’re in the area.

Deborah Sussman, whose work is included in the exhibition, talks about her early history with Charles and Ray Eames and her long career as an influential designer.

Marshall Soulful Jones, part of Team Nuyorican 2011, 2nd place finishers at the National Poetry Slam in Boston, perform “Touchscreen”. The Bowery Poetry Club NY.

Brilliant, down to the head movement.

[via wimp.com]

Incredible. What an uplifting video. Go Wimpy.

[via Devour]

Absolutely incredible. I wonder if other animals who live in groups and forage have a Waggle dance to describe directions?

[via The Kid Should See This]

The piece of Guy’s essay that appeals to me most is this:

So if you’re in an Apple based household the odds are good that your new Apple TV will be able to talk to one of your other devices and get the required network info from it. I’d bet heavily that this capability makes its way into AirPort devices and Macs. “Want to let this device on your network?”, is exactly the level of simplicity that Apple tends to aim for.

Setting up and using an AirPort network is much simpler than any of the other wifi routers I’ve played with over the years and my guess is that Apple is going to continue to make it simpler to add new devices to the network, including the AppleTV. It’s easy now and it will be even easier which is part of the puzzle of making a living room appliance that’s easy to use and integrate with other devices you already own.

I’m not entirely convinced that Apple will get into the flat panel TV business but I’m convinced that they’ll expand the capabilities of the current AppleTV, turning a Sony or Samsung flat panel TV set into a dumb HD screen, which is fine by me, I hate the menus on my Sony Bravia.

[via Steve Splonskowski]

This new Netflix terms of use just popped up on my Netflix login page and while I generally skim these things, hold my nose, close my eyes and hit “I agree” I took a closer look at this one given Netflix’ recent history of taking it’s subscriber base for granted.

Here are a few choice quotes from the Netflix Terms of Use which I have yet to agree to:

“Netflix reserves the right, from time to time, with or without notice to you, to change these Terms of Use…”

“We reserve the right to terminate or restrict your use of our service, without notice, for any or no reason whatsoever.”

“We reserve the right in our sole and absolute discretion to make changes from time to time and without notice in how we operate our service. Any description of how our service works should not be considered a representation or obligation with respect to how the service will always work. We are constantly making adjustments to our service and often these adjustments are not completely captured within these Terms of Use.”

“From time to time, we test various aspects of our service, including our website, user interfaces, service levels, plans, promotions, features, availability of movies &TV shows, delivery, and pricing, and we reserve the right to include you in or exclude you from these tests without notice.”

No doubt every terms of service has things in it like this but one would think that Netflix would notify users of its service that things are changing, or that those users are being included in a test of a new user interface, or, god forbid, that their account is being suspended. This says they can cancel my account for any reason they want at any time and not tell me why.

The irony is if you call Netflix with a problem they’re incredibly friendly and helpful, I’ve never had issues with the people who work the phones or with sending back a damaged DVD.

This sounds like it was written by the same person who came up with the Qwikster idea.

I’m not sure Nick D’Aloisio has “hit the jackpot” but he’s come up with an interesting app for iOS devices. He built it to speed up his own use of the web for study and research. The BBC piece is mostly focused on the fact that he’s young and has built a potentially useful app that’s gotten quite popular and gotten him some venture backing to build out the project.

Summly crunches the content of a web page and offers it up in more easily scanned form: it makes shorter executive summaries of web pages.

The app uses an algorithm to recognise what category of information a webpage contains by using “ontological detection” to identify its nature which in turn determines which set of instructions should be used to provide a consolidated summary of its text.

Or to Summlyfy this in Mr D’Aloisio’s own words: “It can detect different genres or topics of webpages and apply a specific set of metrics to them.”

So, for example, an article categorised as business news would trigger a different set of summary guidelines than those applied to a lifestyle feature.

The interesting question is whether using something like this will lead to better and deeper reading and research (one eventually ought to read the articles it summarizes) or even shallower research because of a scanned headline. I really like the fact that he’s experimenting with trying to make a process that’s cumbersome less so, but it may be that real learning requires the inefficiencies (and slowness) of the (old) study process.

I’m going to give it a try (it’s free). Let me know if you do too: Summly in iTunes Store.