the tweney review

These are a few things I found interesting on April 30th:

• WordPress Plugins | alexking.org - some good plugins here, including a “most popular posts” one
• Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source - “This, is an unsettling trend”
• blog.pmarca.com: If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo - good analysis of what’s likely to happen, and how
• Cory Doctorow: How to stop your inbox exploding | Technology | guardian.co.uk - good, quick advice from Doctorow
• The Right Mailing List Script For WordPress - WordPress SEO and Blog Marketing - Nice, somewhat dated survey of options for integrating an email list with a WP blog
• all things dylan tweney - Just in case you felt like keeping track of everything I publish on Wired.com, my website, and Flickr, here’s a Yahoo pipe I built last year that does just that

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 27th through April 29th:

• SarahLacy.com: Once Delicious, Now Stale - Is Yahoo screwing up del.icio.us, Flickr and other acquisitions by failing to upgrade them?
• Gallery Of The World’s Power Sockets | Gadget Lab from Wired.com - quite handy photo gallery of international power sockets, so you know what you’ll need to plug into. From Gadget Lab’s Charlie Sorrel
• HotWired: Intelligent Agent - “The Birth of Way New Journalism” by Josh Quittner - Quittner’s “Way New Journalism” predates the phrase “open source journalism” by about 4 years, but is basically the same idea
• PressThink: Okay, Ready? My Coordinates for a Successful News Site - Jay Rosen’s Lessons and links for SABEW workshop, April 27, 2008.
• Bowling 1, Health Care 0 - New York Times - Elizabeth Edwards to the news media: “Do your job, so the voters can do theirs”

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 24th through April 25th:

• The INQUIRER Guide to spelLing - The INQUIRER - “… when a company thinks it’s really big and clever to call a product the ‘cOmpuTer’, we change it to ‘Computer’ out of respect for the language of Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer and Magee.”
• Erin McKean - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - McKean’s Law is one of the alternative names for Skitt’s law: “Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.”
• Clouds (Ftrain.com) -
• The State of the Telecosm - George Gilder was right after all
• Invention of the Day #496: Exosoles - After reading my post about the benefits of going barefoot, this guy came up with an idea: Disposable, stick-on protective soles for your bare feet.

These are a few things I found interesting on April 22nd:

• Google Transit - plan trips using public transportation & Google maps
• What is Mind Mapping? (and How to Get Started Immediately) - I used mind maps to take class notes from 9th grade to about 11th grade. I took a lot of shit for it, too, from teachers and classmates alike
• 511.org - Bicycling - Bay Area Bicycle Maps - more bike maps, for SF Bay Area residents
• Bike Trails, Paths & Routes From Over 40 Countries at Bikely.com - Find a route, look at it onscreen, or download a .gpx file to your handlebar-mounted GPS unit
• Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm - Profile of Piotr Wozniak, creator of the “SuperMemo” software for enhancing memory. Echoes techniques developed by my wife’s grandfather for his Ed.D. in probably the 1940s or 1950s — though he used index cards
• What is the Learning Curve? - Brilliant, funny explanation for those who dimly sling around the term “learning curve” without thinking about it

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 16th through April 21st:

• 10-3-07 // Online Exclusive: City Slickers - urban bikes
• Dirt Rag {Print Rag} - Review of Kona Paddy Wagon - another relatively inexpensive single-speed, lightweight bicycle
• Dirt Rag {Print Rag} - Review of Redline 925 - One inexpensive, lightweight single-speed bike
• Cartman Berates Your Flash-less Ass | Compiler from Wired.com - “Get Flash, you stupid hippie!” More error messages should feature South Park characters, I think
• Love Your Idea (Don’t Want to Finance It) - New York Times -

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 14th through April 15th:

• Raoul Wallenberg and the Rescue of Jews in Budapest - Amazing story about a Swedish businessman who saved 10,000’s of Hungarian Jews — as many as 100,000, I have been told
• Robot Scans Ancient Manuscript in 3-D - Extreme digitization: 39 megapixel images, plus high-res 3D maps of each page
• Inside Seagate’s R&D Labs - A peek at how hard drive storage continues to climb
• Justin.tv Blog: The Justin.tv Story: Year 1 - stats on the first year of Justin.tv’s lifecasting business
• Funes, the Memorious - By Jorge Luis Borges - Athenaeum Library of Philosophy - Borges’ very short story about a man who can’t forget anything

I gave the keynote address yesterday at the annual meeting of the International Oracle Users’ Group (IOUG), part of the big enterprise database tech-fest that is Collaborate ‘08.

The topic of my talk was how the decreasing cost of storage and bandwidth, plus ubiquitous, simple search, are going to change the world. I made good use of Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s feature story Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, plus science fiction author Charlie Stross’s notion that history is just about to begin.

I’ve pasted my notes for the talk below (they’re rough). Also, you can get a list of links to my sources and related stories or download my slides: Rebooting history - IOUG keynote (PPT).

Read the rest of this entry »

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 10th through April 11th:

• Dept. of Technology: Remember This?: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker -
• what-may-happen-in-2000-large.jpg (JPEG Image, 1108×1600 pixels) - What may happen in the next 100 years? Ladies Home Journal predictions from about 100 years ago
• The Magical Minimalism of Microformats - Open - Code - New York Times Blog - nice explanation / summary
• Algorithms Are Terrific. But to Search Smarter, Find a Person - Mahalo, Squidoo, Brijit, ChaCha and others aim to solve search problems by recruiting human help
• Map: Broadband Service Available Worldwide, But Few Can Afford It -
• Eye-Fi: How One Little Chip Will Change the Way You Share Pictures - also search for “eye-fi” on wired.com to see our review of this little 2GB SD card/Wi-fi adapter
• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business - Chris Anderson’s article on the importance of giving it away
• Microsoft Windows Media - Understanding HD Formats - It takes about 44GB to store one hour of compressed HD video using the HD-DVCPRO format

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from April 8th through April 9th:

• BMWSportTouring Forums: Space Shuttle Processing: Rarely seen by the general public - nice slide show of Space Shuttle assembly & launch
• Gmaps Pedometer - Bay to Breakers Route - Rough map of the Bay to Breakers course on May 18, including an elevation profile
• Texans Build World’s Most Powerful Laser | Wired Science from Wired.com - Awesome, “Back to the Future”-like photos of a petawatt laser, with a great explanation of how it works
• Author Probes Sex-Obsessed Scientists in ‘Bonk’ - Q&A with Mary Roach. Fun fact from Kinsey’s research: “when cheese crumbs are spread before a pair of copulating rats, it distracts the female but not the male.”
• Webby Honorees include GadgetLab on Wired.com - And sister blog Epicenter takes a Honoree award in the “Business Blog” category
• Royal Pingdom » The history of computer data storage, in pictures - very nice pictorial history of early data storage tech

These are a few sites I thought were interesting from July 2nd through April 7th:

• The effect of Nuclear War on Climate Change : Weather Underground - Effects of a small nuclear war: Pro: worldwide cooling effect would offset global warming. Con: Crop failures, starvation, and holes in the ozone layer cause a decade or more of famine and suffering.
• Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin — Way Beyond - Amazing fact from this story: The human body contains nine bacterial cells for every cell of our own.
• Building a Wall 1 - Introduction | DoItYourself.com - tips on layout & construction. came in handy today
• IDC - Press Release - 1.6 exabytes (1,645 petabytes) of storage capacity was sold in Q4 2007
• IDC serves up top 10 storage predictions for 2008 - According to IDC, storage capacity is exploding at a rate of almost 60% per year.
• Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » YouTube Statistics - 78.3 million videos representing over 412 years of video time, as of March 2008
• Twitter vs. Blogger redux (kottke.org) - nice J curves
• Fed Shrugged as Subprime Crisis Spread - New York Times - Missed this in December, but it’s still shocking: people in the Fed and Treasury saw subprime problems as early as 2000, and nobody did anything. In fact, regulatory policy actually encouraged *more* mortgage monkey business