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

Kevin Kelly takes 10 pages to wind up to this original idea: “Copyrights must be counterbalanced by copyduties. In exchange for public protection of a work’s copies (what we call copyright), a creator has an obligation to allow that work to be searched.” Scan This Book! – New York Times

Funny, Web 2.0 looks a lot like Web 1.0 (which looked a lot like the old Main Stream Media): Read/WriteWeb: 53,651 male, youngish, rich, powerful and geeky readers

Seth Godin: “The next time you get all formal or obfuscatory or snarky, ask a simple question, ‘If I knew this person and we were eating together in a restaurant, would I speak to them the same way?‘

I’m spending way too much time listening to MP3s from New York radio station WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Where else could you find enough versions of Stairway to Heaven and Tico Tico to fill up a Shuffle? Where else could you hear Stephin Merritt playing version after version of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, in