Monthly Archives: May 2008

I have been a fall of twitter for sometime now, but they are having serious problems due to their architecture .
(See here Twitter Technology Blog: Twittering About Architecture). I hope they get it resolved soon, before it is too late.

I have also been a fan of tumblr for some time too. So I thought it was interesting that twitter is updating their
Twitter Status using tumblr. Perhaps more people will start using tumblr as a result. Tumblr is great and worth considering.

2013 update: note, this may no longer work. I am keeping the post, but you may want to look for a more current blog posting on this topic.

You might not be able to tell from this title, Silicon Valley Users Guide: How to avoid being a Facebook shill like VC David Sze but this article tells you how to modify your facebook settings to turn off annoying ads.

Don’t worry, most people won’t. And even if they did, well don’t worry: coming up with new ways to direct advertisements to you keeps marketing folks in work.

The excellent blog datamining.typepad.com has lots of cool information on data and data visualization, including some of these very cool representations of the blogosphere.

I wish I had more detail on the data, but the images are cool. 🙂

brand tags has a very web 2.0 way of analyzing brands using tag clouds. I checked out Nike, Starbucks and of course, IBM, and I was not surprised by what I found.

Over at Boing Boing is this so wacky it is funny, 1939 marital rating scale for wives
I like how there are demerit points for when she “puts her cold feet on husband at night to warm them”. Actually, I thought that was kinda sweet. 🙂

Great article!

David Byrne has a good review of Errol Morris’s new film, Standard Operating Procedure. (David Byrne Journal: 05.03.2008: Objective Truth)

I initially was disappointed by the film, since I thought it was going to be shattering in what it revealed. I hoped it would be like Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line”. As it was, the story it told through the voices of those involved didn’t appear new or interesting. However, as I thought about it afterwards, and I considered some of the ideas that Morris has been writing about, I began to think that that wasn’t the only point of the documentary. For the documentary is also a study of the question: what does photography signify? It is a question that Morris doesn’t answer so much as explore. It’s the study of this question that makes the film interesting, more so than the (hi)story of American involvement in Abu Ghraib.

It reminded me of the reviews I read about W.G. Sebald’s book, “On the Natural History of Destruction”. Many of the harshest critics of the book appeared to take it to task solely as a work of history. But Sebald is first and foremost an artist, and in this work, as in his fiction, he is exploring ideas and themes almost independent to the (hi)story at hand. To criticize him solely on his historical qualities is to miss much of the point of the writing. Likewise, to watch Morris’s film and criticize him as if he is Seymour Hersh is to also miss much of the point of his filmmaking.

Ok, The wiggles may not fit in with your idea of “artists”, but regardless of your tastes, this is a cool idea. See:

iGoogle Artist Themes

P.S. Of course, some folks may not be too crazy about Jeff Koons either, but hey, there is something for everyone!

Have you sometimes received an email and it seems to come from XXX@donotreply.com? Want to know what happens to the email if you DO reply? Simple. Check out:Do Not Reply

(Thanks Jean-Francois for the tip!)

If you paste a long URL into twitter.com AND you don’t exceed 140
characters, twitter will automatically turn the URL into a tinyurl.

More good stuff from twitter!

The globeandmail.com: has a list of what they think are the Top 10 BlackBerry apps

I think it is a good list, although not all apps will run on all BlackBerries (as I have discovered, having an older one)

Kevin Kelly , in his blog, The Technium talks about how spammers are using artificial intelligence to defeat captcha, the hard-to-read letters you are sometimes asked to fill in when doing an online transaction.

Harder captchas could be devised, but then people may not be able to solve them, either. You could show three pictures of flowers and have someone type in “Flowers”, but eventually computers will recognize this. Even subtler forms of recognition will eventually be defeated.

We may end up with the V-K machines in Blade Runner after all.

Not if I read this article properly. If Bernanke is still urging such big measures, he must believe it is going to get worse. But read it and decide for yourself: Bernanke: Foreclosure woes require action – May. 5, 2008

I could tell you what twistori is, but it is quick and best if you just go check it out. (Especially you twitter fans).

It’s fascinating, and one more example of why twitter rocks!