Dylan Tweney

The essence of good conversation is give and take. The problem blog-based “conversations” is that the essential give and take is almost always missing. I might say something provocative on my blog, and you might be moved to comment, but that’s usually where the back and forth ends. If I’m an especia

Technologists think their business is the creation of cool technologies, because they are engineers who thrill to the idea of change. By contrast, Coburn says, “technology is widely hated by its users,” because ordinary folk loathe change: Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact

D’oh! AT&T lawyers accidentally leak sensitive info in NSA suit

I think it’s time we all agreed that the “nofollow” tag has been a complete failure. For those of you new to the concept, nofollow is a tag that blogs can add to hyperlinks in blog comments. The tag tells Google not to use that link in calculating the PageRank for the linked site. In […]

The premise of Kindred is that Dana, an African-American woman living in the late 1970s, is suddenly transported back in time to a Maryland slave plantation in 1819. It turns out that she’s been called back in time to save the son of the white plantation owner–a boy who, she soon learns, is one of [

Best application for MTurk I’ve seen yet: Someone asked people to “draw a sheep facing left.” Compensation per sheep: $0.02. Total number of sheep drawn: 10,000. Their web site shows every single one, and yes, you can buy the sheep: The Sheep Market Background: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a sort of

Don’t even get me started on Technorati. The endless waiting while their servers churn along. The unpredictable outages. The bizarre way in which they organize the wealth of bloggy information they supposedly index. But maybe I’m just taking this a little personally. After all, my haiku site, tinywo

Priceless: “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.” Competitive Enterprise Institute

This is just too sad for words: Former Berkeley student known as “Naked Guy” dies in jail (via hudin.com)

You’d think the iPod Shuffle would work just like any other iPod. But there are some inexplicable differences. For instance, most iPods you can plug into any computer and play the music that’s on them through ITunes. Not so with the Shuffle–when you plug it in, your only option is to reload the thin

Ballsiest move I’ve ever seen by an online news organization — Go, Evan! Wired News: Why We Published the AT&T Docs

A friend asked if I could name a few San Francisco-based bloggers. It was harder than I expected, though there are certainly a few. Here’s an off-the-top-of-my-head list of bloggers I know of, in and around San Francisco: Craig Newmark Valleywag (a flagrantly commercial effort to capitalize on a par