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.

Pogue lays out the situation calmly and clearly. Its worth a read.

Some people are O.K. with the goals of the bills, acknowledging that software piracy is out of control; they object only to the bills’ approaches. If the entertainment industry’s legal arm gets out of control, they say, they could deem almost anything to be a piracy site. YouTube could be one, because lots of videos include bits of TV shows and copyrighted music. Facebook could be one, because people often link to copyrighted videos and songs. Google and Bing would be responsible for removing every link to a questionable Web site. Just a gigantic headache.

But there’s another group of people with a different agenda: They don’t even agree with the bills’ purpose. They don’t want their free movies taken away. A good number of them believe that free music and movies are their natural-born rights. They don’t want the big evil government taking away their free fun.

The second group of people is the group I don’t want to be associated with. This is what clouds my support for the entire protest.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

There’s no doubt piracy is wrong but having Congress, many of whom still think the internet is a “series of tubes” design laws to protect copyrighted material maybe isn’t the best way to go about stopping it.

fightforthefuture.org/pipa

[via The Kid Should See This]

There’s a new issue of Pictory out and it’s great. Some day I’m going to submit things to this most excellent photo site (I keep saying that and not doing it for some reason).

[via Coudal Partners]

Social media and handheld devices for posting is invading what used to be solitary adventure sports. Many have mixed feelings about this.

As one who posts hike progress on Path and Instagram who am I to say that this is a bad idea. It will be interesting to see how it affects the kinds of things climbers and other adventure sports enthusiasts do: will they push themselves unreasonably to do ever more daring things for their online audience and to gain Page rank? Probably.

While the implementation may not be the best, this is a killer good idea and it allows family members to log into the account and set up reminders.

Of course, someone might write an app like this for iOS and then one could have all the benefits of an iPad plus a custom reminder system.

The problem with any idea like this is it has to be made fully accessible to people who can’t see, hear, or use the tablet’s UI well.

I think this is a job for my friend David Niemeijer at AssistiveWare.

A free social site for organizing old family photographs and building relationships between them. It even has a family tree/genealogy component that allows you to build familial relationships into the stored images.

There’s an iPhone app called ShoeBox for scanning/photographing and organizing content for 1000memories.

This actually looks pretty good and I might give it a try. Here’s their FAQ.

Brent Simmons has written an excellent piece on proposed changes to Google Reader and how they might affect clients like Reeder which piggy back off it.

I use Google Reader to catalog and organize my various RSS feeds and have been since I dropped NetNewsWire (which Brent Simmons above wrote) years ago in favor of Reeder on my Mac and my two iOS devices.

My RSS feeds are the center of my online activity and I can’t imagine doing what I do online without a single application to organize and read them. I track activity at this site, my flickr account including all of my contacts, various sections of numerous newspapers and news feeds, blogs, photoblog, Apple related stuff, funny videos, and lots more. Google Reader and clients like Reeder and the RSS functionality they use is the single most important part of my computing experience and has been for many years now.

I have no doubt that the authors of the various Google Reader clients (like Reeder) are watching closely and will adapt to whatever Google does, but as Bent says, Google is looking a bit less generous and a bit more self-serving by forcing integration of their social network which may or may not be meaningful associated with RSS feeds.

This announcement isn’t just a reminder of the fragility of the system: it removes some features that people use. Google Reader’s social and sharing features are going away in favor of integration with Google+.

Crap.

Ewald Mario Bauer’s Flickr Galleries

Note the page numbering on the bottom, there are 14 pages of them.

Frankly, I never looked on galleries as something of meaning because it seemed like a fancier way for people to collect links to favorite photos. But after looking through many of Ewald’s galleries I think a better explanation of them is a flickr feature that allows a user to curate a collection of things they find of interest and share that collection with others. I guess I was looking at this flickr feature from a bit too paranoid a viewpoint. In fact, being placed in someone’s gallery is useful in that it will lead new viewers to your photo stream.

Sometimes being included in galleries is something you don’t want, like some of my yoga images of my wife and our yoga teacher being included in galleries of “hot women.” As the owner of the image, you’re notified when someone includes it in a gallery and you can check things out and delete it from that gallery if you don’t want to be included as well as block the flickr member who made the gallery if they seem to be less than decent (my wife had mixed feelings, being flattered to be included in such a gallery).

I’ve not made a gallery on flickr and I’m not sure I’ll get around to it but I’m looking at this flickr feature in a new way after poking through Ewald’s curated collections.