Rough Drafts

For the past year I’ve been toting around a USB drive that has a folder full of portable applications, such as Thunderbird and Firefox. That way I can run these applications (with all of my data) on any machine I plug the key into. (I set this up following PC Magazine’s instructions on creating the

Ever notice those “Free Speech Zones” that the authorities put up outside political conventions, trade summits, embassies, and basically anywhere else someone might feel like expressing an opinion? What’s up with that? Last I checked, the whole country was supposed to be a “free speech zone.” They t

Google’s newish Blog Search is a handy way to keep track of the “buzz” about a particular blog, in addition to posts from that blog itself. Just go to blogsearch.google.com and type the URL of your blog into the box. The resulting search results include posts from your blog, as well as other blogger

2006-10-31 banana.jpg, uploaded by dtweney. This month I will not be writing a novel. I will, however, be drawing every day, as part of a new group blog/drawing effort called DrawMo. I’ll be posting my drawings (some of the less hideous ones, at least) on Flickr throughout the month, as time allows.

From Mark Cuban’s blog, some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal. This analysis is interesting because, according to Cuban’s informant, as much as $500 million of the $1.62 billion deal may have been set aside to pay off copyright infringement claims. But here’s the really interesting part:

The problem with Marie Antoinette is that it ends before the title character is executed. After watching that much profligate waste for two hours, I could understand the peasants’ rage perfectly. And by waste, I don’t just mean the French court’s–I mean Sofia Coppola’s. What a way to blow a bunch of

“I will stave off any more comments and just direct you to scoop up the book. It is like buying tiny contact lenses for the entirety of your perception, lenses made of sugar glass and strands of silk.” How could you resist buying a $7 book when the reviewer concludes this way? Dragonfly on a […]

I found out just last week that the poet Carl Thayler died last year. Thayler is a thorny, difficult poet, committed to the precision and beauty of carefully-chosen words. His poetry is dense, often allusive, and steeped in historical events and figures that many people now are not intimately famili

The SDForum event I spoke at on Wednesday was fairly interesting. I got to discuss the future of new media with Anil Dash of Six Apart, Theresa Carey of Barron’s, and Ramneek Bhasin of Mobio Networks. The moderator was Steve Bengston of PriceWaterhouseCooper. It was a lively discussion that focused

The Washington Post’s largest driver of website traffic is Drudge, according to the paper’s editor. That’s impressive clout for Matt Drudge, given that many bloggers regard him as a has-been. I suppose he’s not technically a blogger, either. He doesn’t post stories in reverse chronological order, th

One of the minor irritations of being an adoptive parent is the probing, too-personal questions that strangers feel like they’re entitled to ask you. I usually find these questions easy to deflect, but some parents get really upset by them. So, if you’re an adoptive parent and you get angered by the

The similarities between YouTube and Napster are uncanny. Copyright-infringing content, sudden popularity, a seeming direct connection to the pulse of popular youth culture, scandals, a San Mateo address. (I’m not the first one to notice this.) But the similarities run deeper. YouTube is architectur