Alan Mezquida and smigly do it again.

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David Rees over at Good posted a wonderful piece on our fascination with celebrities and how social networking on the internet interacts with it: How Tall Is Jake Gyllenhaal?. I’m not the sort of person who thinks much about the height of celebrities. (I’ve always assumed most famous people are about seven feet tall.) The [...]

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The Japanese Garden in Van Nuys, California (just over the hill from west LA) is actually part of a sewage treatment plant. The garden that the water runs through is built as a traditional Japanese garden with lanterns, manicured plants, rock gardens, koi in the water, a lili pond, ducks, egrets and more. It’s actually [...]

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I wrote my first post on the Netflix fiasco (Netflix has made a big mistake and it’s not only in pricing) the morning I got Reed Hastings’ poorly written email about their upcoming changes. Since then I’ve calmed down and thought more about it. I’ve also read dozens of posts about it, many of them [...]

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I want to preface this with the fact that I was a late comer to Netflix but thanks to my stepdaughter Jessica I’ve used and loved it for three years now. Given that I watch a lot of movies, both on DVD from Netflix and streaming from them through an AppleTV their recent price increase, [...]

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Verbling: It’s a Chatroulette for Learning Languages Verbling, a Y Combinator company, takes the concept of video chat with randomly selected partners and gives it a wholly worthwhile purpose. Using Verbling, you can connect to native speakers of another language who also want to learn the language you speak natively. For example, I speak English, [...]

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What is Bitcoin? Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum at NPR’s Planet Money have a new piece on Bitcoin a digital virtual currency that’s fascinating. I posted about another piece All Things Considered ran on this and related topics earlier in the summer: Silk Road: Not Your Father’s Amazon.com.

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This video pretty much sums up social networking for me. And, I’m not sure if these are made up or real but they made me laugh pretty hard last night: Do you have a Facebook? More here.

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Americans Elect There was an interesting piece on The PBS NewsHour last night on Americans Elect, a group attempting to use the web to offer Americans a different way of becoming involved in the political process: ‘Americans Elect’ Group Challenges U.S. Presidential Primary Process. While I was interested in the concept neither guest made clear [...]

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The Noun Project A huge collection of symbols, beautifully presented and maintained. They’re all indexed and tagged for easier searching. And, they’re all either in the public domain or carry a Creative Commons license. Many years ago I scanned and collected thousands of these symbols and indexed them in a HyperCard stack called Symbols so [...]

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Great comic by Randall Munroe over at xkcd. A number of my friends (both virtual and analog) sent me invites to Google+, Google’s new social tool and I decided to give it a try, mostly because Andy Hertzfeld was the lead designer of it and I have great respect for him (see Switcher). Just so [...]

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A Woman’s Place Questions about Facebook’s future inevitably raise questions about Sandberg’s. Surely she is on track to one day become a C.E.O., if that’s what she wants. Some people speak of a potential career in politics. Asked what she can imagine doing next, she responds, “I’m actually quite happy with Mark and the company. [...]

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My friend Steve, his wife Cathy and daughter Kristen who live in Oregon recently went on a three week trip to Spain. They wanted snapshots of the trip and wanted to be able to communicate with the outside world as they travelled (email, upload pictures, etc.). These folks like to travel light so no taking [...]

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Google Goggles is useful for lots of things and no doubt more will be coming. Looks like the Getty Center has indexed their collection: The J. Paul Getty Museum collection comes alive with Google Goggles [via Dale Allyn]

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I continue to track (via RSS) the site My Parents Were Awesome and just saw a great one: Dan and Francesca Fantastic shot. Love that car and her shoes. Wow.

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Arty Bollocks Generator Do you hate having to write your artist statement? Generate your own here for free, and if you don’t like it, generate another one. For use with funding applications, exhibitions, curriculum vitae, websites … Brilliant. Must remember to use for next federal grant application. [via Gary Sharp]

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A Tale of Two Inboxes: RSS and Twitter Shawn Blanc discusses and compares two ways broadcast and track information: RSS and Twitter. I’m an RSS man myself, starting many years ago with Brent Simons’ NetNewsWire and moving to Google Reader and now, the Google Reader client Reeder on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I use Twitter [...]

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Interview with Alan Taylor of In Focus Alan Taylor started the trend of collecting and putting large images in a simple, scrolling list as a way of telling a photojournalistic story. First at The Big Picture (The Boston Globe) and now at In Focus (The Atlantic). His photo collecting eye is one of the best [...]

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Silk Road: Not Your Father’s Amazon.com Silk Road (anonymous marketplace), Tor (anonymity network), Bitcoin. If you’ve never heard of this stuff listen to this NPR: All Things Considered piece on Silk Road, an e-commerce site that sells cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana, among other illegal drugs. Rachel Martin interviews Adrian Chen, a Gawker staff writer. [...]

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In-flight Internet: the view from 35,000 feet and three years Glenn Fleishman has put together an excellent overview of the history, what’s available now, and the future of wifi and internet access on planes. I regularly fly a United PS 757 from JFK to LAX and use the Gogo wifi internet service on my iPad. [...]

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