Herding ducks
Posted: Friday, March 28, 2008 1:29 PM by Will Femia
Filed Under:
Games
Lately my Web surfing has reached the unwieldy state of having too many moving parts. I'm trying to solve this in two ways. First I'm using
Google Reader to bundle the links to sites I check regularly. Hopefully that will solve the mind-racing "what else do I need to check?" problem. Second, I'm trying to set myself up on a variety of different tools. I really like how
FriendFeed pulls different sources together, so I'm now trying to incorporate
Twitter and
Delicious along with my
Flickr and blogs and
Instapaper to help make my sorting more efficient. We'll see if I can actually put this idea
into practice. Right now I'm at the stage of trying to set up shortcut links to these services so I don't actually visit the sites. Twitter via IM, Delicious via toolbar button. It's weird how many sites you can use without actually visiting the site itself.
Speaking of gathering links,
The Internet Effect on News - This is a nice bit of insight about how people gather their news online. I don't think we can yet say "most," but certainly many people online gather stories one at a time from a variety of sources. The tradition in media is focus on how stories are presented on the cover or front page, so the idea of readers totally bypassing that cover to assemble their own reading list on their own terms is pretty subversive. The next obvious question for the story writer is what that means to how you put your story together. How do you differentiate it from other stories about the same thing and how do you take advantage of the traffic you receive to a story that didn't come through your front page? The story is the new front page.
Bug Labs Founder:
Sold Out Of Open-Source Mobile Gadgets - You may recall these guys from
my CES coverage. They were good guys with a clever product and an honest presentation so it's nice to see they're doing well.
Fears that the Large Hadron Collider
will end the world reminds me of a short story by Arthur Clarke that I read after he passed recently. In
The Nine Billion Names of God scientists help some monks with a computer to decipher God's true name. And it works.
I have almost no reason to fear ever being stabbed but somehow I find the idea of a
knife-proof shirt really appealing. Maybe it's the old D&D nerd in me always looking to upgrade my armor.
The New York Times has a new music blog called
Measure for Measure.
The slow motion slap - It's disturbing to realize how much our face is just a mask on a skull.
If some of the "Find Sarah Connor" items covered here have left you with the feeling that it's just a matter of time before robots are up our asses,
it may be time to start shopping for an isolated shack in the mountains.
The Automotive Family Tree - Which corporations own which car companies.
Speaking of cars, "it seems a transatlantic battle is brewing in the high-performance electric sportscar market." Of all things for there to be transatlantic battles about, this is a pretty good one. The UK side of the fight is the
Lightning GT. Before you pooh-poohers start in with your battery bashing, this one has something called a "nanosafe battery" which apparently doesn't suffer as many of the risks of the Li-ion batteries. (By the way, the U.S. side of the battle is the
Tesla.)
Speaking of power the clean way, "Southern California Edison plans to install 250 megawatts worth of
solar panels on commercial rooftops, generating enough electricity to power 162,000 homes." This makes so much sense it kills me. I've heard of similar projects planned for New Jersey that also included essentially putting solar panel roofs over parking lots as well. This article says the utility will lease the roof space, so that would mean extra income for those businesses in addition to the economic boost from the kick in the pants to the solar industry.
Speaking of energy production, I wonder what the chances are that
Earth Hour
could create a surge in the grid and wipe out our electricity
infrastructure. (In my disaster novel this would happen, not so sure
about real life. Like the
urban myth of millions of toilets flushing at the same time during the Super Bowl commercial breaks and destroying the sewage system.) Earth Hour is March
31st 29th. They're trying to get
people to turn off the lights for an hour as an energy saving
demonstration.
For two days I've been seeing praise for
this site and its ability to explain the time travel situation on Lost and every time I click it it's crashed. Last night I saw it on Digg, which you may know automatically backs up sites it might crash with its own crush of traffic driving force, so
here's the DiggMirror version. Some of the photos don't load but at least the text is there. I'm only half way through so far and some parts of the theory fit better than others. When the parts don't fit well the explanation is that the fates perform a "course correction" on time to make sure that what's supposed to happen still happens even when someone travels back in time to change it.
Speaking of alternate realities, I ignored this video the first couple of times I saw the link because I thought it was just Hillary bashing. But it's actually a pretty
funny use of video effect trickery. (They insert war effects on the news footage of her Bosnia trip.) BarelyPolitical is the same site that puts out the Obama Girl videos.
ADDING: By chance I stumbled upon the blog of
the guy who made the video.
RANDOM: Also
the guy who made Muxtape.
Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing - I took this to heart as it applies to reviewing Web sites. There are only so many ways of saying "here's a cool site" but that doesn't justify getting sloppy.
20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider - This brought to mind the "are you ready for the lightning bolt of fame" question that came after Ashley Dupre was thrust into the spotlight after being exposed as Eliot Spitzer's prostitute. What exactly does it mean to be ready? What might you need? Someone could probably make a lot of money on that book.
YouTube Reveals Video Analytics Tool for All Users - Now for free you can see where your viewers are coming from and when they're doing the viewing. I don't see it mentioned here but I hope it also lists where a video is embedded. That's something I often think about when I link to page with an embedded YouTube video. Does the guy who published the video know that people are watching through this other person's site?
4 second fury - It's a string of games, one after another that are only 4 seconds long.
Moto Art is furniture made from plane parts.
