Mitsubishi Electric Research Labratories proposes a bar glass that sends a wireless message to your waiter when you're out of beer. They must have tapped Genius Labs. (Thanks Molly)

John's Xanga Site: "If you feel your physical safety is in danger, please go immediately to the police or authorities. Xanga is not Interpol.  However, we have cooperated in plenty of police investigations.  If you are being stalked, the local or national police are there to help you." Running a blogging community is not all fun and games.

The Floating Island is an article about unknown eccentric genius Geoffrey Pyke and his idea to build giant boats out of ice. But not just any ice. Special ice. This would make a fun, weird movie.

TypePad News: Template Builder. This is similar to what we did at Xanga but I must admit, prettier.

Buddy Cianci: the musical: "A group weblog chronicling, in intimate detail, the month before the opening night of an Off-Off-Broadway Show." Innovative marketing technique. Odd though, I was unable to use my BlogThis! on this blog. Seemed like it was blocked. Weird.

I would love to go to Pop!Tech. I've gotta figure out how to swing that fee.

Did I ever tell you about the time that I drove a rented semi the wrong way down a one way tunnel in Manhattan? Traffic followed me in. I managed to perform a 99 point turn and got that sucker turned around. Good times.

I visited the Peabody Essex Museum yesterday in Salem, MA. The place is plush. They have shipped over and rebuilt an entire Chinese house. That thing was great, I want a house like that. But I want a washer dryer in there too. My lifelong dream is to one day have my very own washer dryer. Also a Chinese house.

Chris Lydon is the ultimate audblogger. It'd be neat if he somehow enabled audio commenting and added it to his arsenal. Then his listeners could add their voice to the fray. I enjoyed the Thursday evening meeting tonight. Unfortunately, I had to climb the fire escape to get into my apartment when I got home because I forgot my key. Biz Stone, Genius.

Neat, Shellen's blogging with pictures and sounds from his phone.

Google does not appear to over represent blogs in search results.

Business Week: "Allbritton and others are building on a flourishing Net trend: Web logs, or blogs. These are do-it-yourself sites where writers publish diaristic articles that anyone can read, typically for free. Now, some entrepreneurs see a future in pooling the work of bloggers and charging for it."

Bloggers seem to be employing more descriptive linking these days. I like this because when I scan the citations at Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, etc., I can read an overview of everyone's opinion without reading every individual post. So I see what bloggers find linkworthy and why in mere seconds. This is good news for my employer because it means less time spent surfing the blogosphere and more time spent on work.

Because Google loves blogs, Matt says he keeps running into himself: "Tonight I started to write up a review of a product and found that a search for the product name gives my photos of said product as the #1 result, with the actual product in second place." I have a strong feeling that Google is on top of this. They know things. Update: Actually, Ev has nicely addressed this google/blog relationship.

Doh! I've gotta get to the Thursday evening meeting this week. Maybe Jen Garrett will come. Jen, shall we say you drive? Nice.

Last night we were Wishlist Stalking. Its amazing how much personality you can seemingly extrapolate from someone's wishlist.

Genius Labs AOL Branch: "My thoughts. My Blog."

Wired News: Blogging for Bucks: "Journalist Rafat Ali is an unusual beast: a laid-off dot-com reporter who's making money online writing about, well, making money online."

Payless is usually my go-to store but they didn't have the funky bowling style shoes with ample toespace. Target is my new untapped source for cheap vegan shoes. Got some freshies today. Nice.

(sometimes)blog: "Got the sideblog up and running! More I played with that, the more I liked how it works. Looks like you can easily make 5 'minor' entries without the need to use blogger or mess with the template to add 5 new items." Damn straight! And that's the free version.

AOL Journals - Your Thoughts. Your Blog. This is the first AOL blog I've seen. Looks pretty good, familiar.

Fox Searchlight Pictures: "All the independent and arthouse movie news that's fit to blog."

Henry, what's wrong with my photo? Is it that I am wearing giant reading glasses from Rite-Aid and look mean and/or crazy? That pic is almost two years old, maybe it is time to re-design. I need a new camera.

John rates some funny Xanga posts which starts me thinking about the best of craigslist page I was reading the other day. That craigslist thing is really funny, it would make a great book.

Complete List of Emmy Nominations Featuring 5 by Greg Yaitanes. Children of Dune: Outstanding Hair (nice!), Outstanding Visual Effects, Outstanding Sound, Outstanding Make Up and CSI Miami Simple Man: Outstanding Cinematography. Greg Yaitanes, emmy nominated director. Congratulations!

SoundTrack is new music software from Apple: "Choose from over 4,000 royalty-free instrument loops and sound effects covering a wide variety of instruments and genres."

Macromedia Contribute 2 for Macintosh OS X is coming soon. Nice.

Virtual Book Tour: "The Virtual Book Tour empowers publishers and authors with modest marketing budgets to reach a wider, desirable audience without leaving home. Harnessing the power of personal websites, weblogs and viral marketing, the VBT plans, coordinates and schedules author stops at 10 of the most intriguing and diverse sites on the web, enabling authors, publicists and publishers to promote quality books in an efficient, cost-effective way."

Really cool new service from CaféPress lets you publish books for free. There's no guarantee that you'll be the next Wil Wheaton but hey, you'll have a published book!

I was telling my mom that as an AOL user, she will soon be able to launch Margblog. She asked me what I meant. I told her:

Margblog is the words marg+blog combined. I made it up. MARG is your first name, abbreviated, and BLOG is a web page featuring your writings. Like an email, but it's on a web page instead. So that way, anyone can read: "Kathy took me out to lunch today at Tianfu. It was pretty good." That's what thousands of AOL users will be doing this fall.

Good business for Tianfu.

Google and The New York Times: "At the heart of Google's caching dilemma lies a thorny legal problem involving a core Web technology: When is it acceptable to copy someone else's Web page, even temporarily?"

TiVo users can program with AOL: "TiVo Inc. subscribers will be able to program their digital video recorders remotely by logging on to America Online under a new service TiVo and AOL plan to announce today."

Eastgate Tinderbox: the tool for notes: "Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organize and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs." I'm blogging links from my Google ads now. They're supposed to be ads but they're behaving like recommendations for me.

I got this email the other day: "I am interested in buying text link promoting my internet pharmacy off of your website. The links would not have to be in a very prominent place on the website, as I am not looking for traffic from your site. I am looking to increase my PageRank in google." Paying for Googlebombs, the next wave of grassroots marketing?

Blogger T-shirt practical use #009: Hummus Bib. The impervious 4.5” square, rubbery logo on the front of the Men's Blogger T-shirt acts as an impenetrable shield against downward flying blobs of hummus. This enables care-free snacking while blogging and is highly recommended by Genius Labs. It is helpful, however, to keep in mind that you will still have to check for said blobs before going out to your local store to buy a soda. The logo-shield can only help so much.

Many logos. This could be useful at some point. Even just as research. Good stuff from Jason's sideblog.

Car related fact: It costs $41 to have the engine light turned off in a Toyota. The light came on because at some point the cap to the gas tank was loose but you you don’t know that until they download the error log with their Speak & Spell (special automotive edition).

Dear Abby on blogging: "DEAR BLOGGIN': The written word takes on a life of its own and never dies -- particularly in cyberspace. That is why it's important that a person carefully consider what he or she is posting before making it public." via meg

Joroma: "Oh, if anyone is actually reading this, you might have noticed that I am making an effort to use proper grammar and capitalization. I think it will make the blog more professional." Nice!

Who is Jennifer Garrett? is a damn fine "about" page. Blogging textbooks will have screenshots of that effing page. I need to work on my site.

Wendy on TV news. I agree. Google News and blog bouncing is my preference. The negative nightly newscasters with their strange way of talking freaks me out. Its like a weird version of Christopher Walkin speak: "...and NOW over to HARVEY withtheweather. Harvey? Iiis it hot OUT there toNIGHT?" We need GNN: The Good News Network.

I was just thinking that a BlogThis! for email would be good for publishing a weblog of odd help request email I receive here at Wellesley. But then I realized I have Blogger Pro, so I can just hit reply and send it to a blog. EmailReplyBlogThis! Nice.

International Space Station Blog: "Lately, it seems like every time I look out the window I see Canada."

I Want My BlogTV: "We offer choice of software, choice of names, and personalized customer service. We are designed for the new blogger, yet provide a fresh, new community for every blogger. Anyone with Internet access will be able to start their own channel on the BlogTV network."

Blogs in the Workplace: "It helped everyone to get on the same page more quickly." (NYT)

Sylvester Stallone is: Jay Leno. This summer, only in theaters.

Blogger Knowledge Base.

AOL Blogs Almost Ready: "Now, let me explain something. AOL Journals is different. No one thinks of blogging as a new space to conquer. Most of the people involved in the project realize that AOL's coming into an established meta-community who are wary of any large corporate involvement in their space. I think we did a good job of explaining to the folks there, and explaining to people at AOL, that we're here with a great measure of humility (I know, it's rare for AOL, but it's true). We're trying to play nice with the larger blogging community by supporting open standards like RSS feeds for blogs. We're trying to talk to folks in the community to see where we should work with them. It's unique in my involvement in AOL products, which is a great step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned."

Summer of Glove: "30 Ballparks. 1 summer." Nice!

Since its independence day and I’m in the US, here’s my idea for the day: I am an idea person. If I had a business guy and a programmer by my side, we could make some money showing companies how blogging can make them stronger both inside and out. Who’s up for that? Our office needs to be near the beach. Happy fourth.

Another update: Ev just mentioned a new version of the Google ads featuring related search. I wondered if that bar at the bottom of the ads was a placeholder for more to come. Nice!

Update on my Google ad experiment: Click through rates started out strong at about 8% but weakened a couple days later (down to 1% today). I think its because the links aren't changing much. Visitors already clicked on 'em and checked out the sites. Maybe there's not enough ads that relate to my blog content. For example, this post. Doh!

Whistle Keychain: "You will never lose your keys with this sonic keychain. Just whistle and the keychain will beep and flash a red light." (via SPAM)

I’m afflicted with the first documented medical case involving blogs. I just got back from the eye doctor where I was diagnosed with “blog induced myopia.” Almost four years of blogging and reading blogs every day has taken its toll. My pupils are totally blown-out from the eye drops and I have to go back next week to pick up my glasses. Maybe with glasses I will look wicked smaht and people will give me money. (The glasses in the picture were fake.)

Prius_04: "The all-new 2004 Prius will be arriving this fall." (Cool, my BlogThis! bookmarklet automatically inserts a colon and quotes just as I would!)

I had five ideas today. I’m keeping two private but here’s three:

Desktop Blogger - An application that lets you blog ideas and link to documents on your home or work computer - not the web. (I could use this to manage my ideas.)
BlogZones - A way to manage content in a particular spot on your blog without mucking around in your template every time. (Chris, this is up your alley!)
Blogshopping.com - A storefront featuring Amazon products that bloggers have shown interest in. (Amazon, Google, and Blogger. Nice.)

As usual, contact Genius Labs for more information.

leigh is a pony

Ted's Amazon Blog: "Why am I writing this? Well, someone needs to. How else do you find out about the internals of Amazon? I came here in early February 2003. I tried to find out about Amazon by googling for Amazon. That was tough. I didn't know anyone who worked here, so my best introduction was when I walked in the door! This is typical for companies, I guess, but why should it be? Maybe this little blog will help."

Wired News: Bloggers Gain Libel Protection: "The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers."

Blog-It!: "HostSave accounts come with a preinstalled copy of Blog-It!, a powerful blogging tool built on Greymatter technology."