Rough Drafts

The Bake Shop Ghost, by Jacqueline K. Ogburn and Marjorie A. Priceman (Illustrator). Best new kid’s book I’ve seen this year–and I can say that despite having read it aloud at least 40 times over the past two months. The pictures are excellent, the story is original, and the hero triumphs by being c

Brain Age for the Nintendo DS ($20) is a videogame masquerading as a brain-training tool. The exercises include rapid-fire math, counting syllables, reading aloud, and even drawing pictures from memory. The friendly bobbing head of Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima explains what each exerc

Adding a computer to your home theater no longer means crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. In the latest issue of WIRED, I review 4 PCs that handle video and audio with aplomb, and even play saved movies while burning DVDs, thanks to the powerful Intel chips inside. But guess what: The to

Last week, my haiku site, tinywords, appeared as the 30th-40th result on a search for haiku on Google. This week, it’s not in the top 500. What happened? I think Google is punishing me for mentioning the word “haiku” too many times in a previous post, which I admit I did in a fit of […]

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

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

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

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

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