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Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index: "Google's robot army is rumored to include some 4 million cybernetic search-and-destroy units, each capable of capturing and scanning up to 100 humans per day. Said co-founder Sergey Brin: 'The scanning will be relatively painless. Hey, it's Google. It'll be fun to be scanned by a Googlebot. But in the event people resist, the robots are programmed to liquify the brain.'"

Flickr, Yahoo!, and 'The Koolaid Point'

Wired News is running a story that lots of folks are linking to and talking about: Flickr Fans to Yahoo: Flick Off! "A splinter faction of Flickr photo-sharing community members is threatening a symbolic 'mass suicide' to protest closer integration with the website's new owner, Yahoo."

Some people scoff and say the users are just too complainy and they should use a different photo sharing site if they don't like it. Others might try to dream up the *perfect* ID switching system that nobody could ever possibly find fault with. They are both wrong.

These users are what Kathy Sierra calls "passionate detractors" and they are a sign of success. "If you create passionate users, you have to expect passionate detractors. You should welcome their appearance in blogs, forums, and user groups. It means you've arrived. Forget the tipping point--if you want to measure passion, look for the koolaid point."

Steward Butterfield published answers to the burning questions about Flickr and Yahoo! IDs at the official Flickr blog. Anyone planning on attempting an ID switchover similar to that of Flickr and Yahoo! need not jump through additional engineering hoops or insult passionate users. The answer can be found in Stewart's simple observation: "We screwed up in not having better answers and a better explanation up before the changes went live ... if you don't know why it is happening or how it works, it is easy to let your imagination run wild and come up with a pretty bad scenario."

A better explanation in advance. It's not fancy, but it just might do the trick.

Cats In Sinks

Qualities of a Genius and How to Think Productively

iPod Video and the iSight

If Apple does come out with an iPod Video it'd be neat if you could hook your iSight camera up to it. Then you'd have a handy little digital camcorder. That'd be neat.

Human Speakers

You know what would be weird? If you could hook a keyboard, electric guitar, or even your ipod up to your own vocal chords. You'd take a deep breath, start making noise, and the music would play. That would be weird. Especially if you hooked one device up to dozens of people.

Crows Are Mad Tricky

A Curious Development in Japan: "On a university campus in Japan carrion crows and humans line up patiently, waiting for the traffic to halt. When the lights change, the birds hop in front of the cars and place walnuts, which they picked from the adjoining trees, on the road. After the lights turn green again, the birds fly away and vehicles drive over the nuts, cracking them open. Finally, when it’s time to cross again, the crows join the pedestrians and pick up their meal."

Farmer's Market

We're having a bunch of fresh veggies with dinner tonight. Nice.

Podiobooks are serialized audio books in podcast form.

Slate: Nice!

Slate Magazine Podcasts started putting "Slate:" before the title of their podcasts starting three days ago. This is just what I wanted. Now I can pick them out of the list on my iPod.

Esquivalience. Heh. (Via Kottke.)

Note To Self

I may have to get this Griffin Technology iTalk: "Make your iPod so much more than just an MP3 player. Make it a portable, dockable dictation machine with a built-in high-quality speaker. Make your iPod listen to you — with iTalk."

Transfer: The Anti-Sit Archives

I should get me some padded chainmail pants and go sit outside in NYC

Your Age On Other Worlds: "Want to melt those years away? Travel to an outer planet!"

Wikifiction in Print

What about this for a crazy idea: A real book made out of paper and all the rest of it; but it's coated with e-ink and has a wireless receiver in the spine that activates when the book is closed.

The story inside the book is collectively edited online just like Wikipedia. The on-board receiver picks up the signal and the e-ink makes the necessary edits. The result is a kind of living book. The story changes over time. So if you want to find out how the version of the story you are reading *right now* ends then you'd better not put the book down. It's like magic.

Come to think of it, an e-ink version of Wikipedia itself would also be cool. A durable field-guide type of paperback book that's being added to and edited by thousands of people worldwide while it sits comfortably in your back pocket. That'd be neat too.

Video iPod?

Overheard in the Office

Manager #1: Are we meeting sometime, today?
Manager #2: We already met.
Manager #1: Oh. Did I miss anything important?
Manager #2: Well, you missed the meeting.

(Via Case)

D00d!

Wired News: Star Trek Phone Set to Thrill: "Viacom and Sona are still finalizing details of the look and features that the communicator phone, due in stores Sept. 30, will sport. But fans can expect the devices to chirp and beep with ringtones that mimic the familiar sounds of the communicators used in the Star Trek TV series and movies."

Office Space WAV Files

I'm Listening

Maggie loves podcasts because it means she gets nice, long walks. Today I caught up on a week's worth of SDR and I'm loving the Slate Magazine Podcasts. In particular Why We Love Ranch Dressing and Crazy for Target are really good. If it were easier to see which shows were which before I started playing them on my iPod, that would be helpful. All of the Slashdot Review shows say "SDR:" in front of the show title. If Slate would do "SLT:" or "SMP:" that would be great because I can't tell from the title and sometimes it's Future Tense or WGBH Morning Stories which are also good but I get in a mood to listen to a certain thing and I want to keep it going. Know what I mean?

Scratch is a cool short film about a guy with turntable control of a single event in time.

Santa Cruz

Eric and I drove down to the beach in Santa Cruz for the Shellen brothers' birthday. I went swimming and there was a seal in the water. Nice! Eric needed to stop by for some takeout on the way back and that's what the photo is.

RMail

You can subscribe via email to any RSS feed using the following form.

How to make fire with ice. (You make the ice into a lens.)

Mashing Up

"So the philosophy of Web 2.0 is to let go of control, share ideas and code, build on what others have built, free your data. It's actually a difficult philosophy to live by, when you consider how capitalistic Western society is."

Cool houseboat.

On Being A Freak

Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World: "Though most vegans are likely not any 'freakier' than your average person, the simple and compassionate act of denying animal products for ethical reasons can literally make you into the weirdo at the dinner table, or in other social and personal contexts."

This is true. However, I am often the weirdo at the dinner table even before that. Nevertheless, this seems like an interesting spin for a vegan book. Techniques for vegans on how to navigate the obligatory firing squad of questions and imagined situations you're supposed to enjoy sitting through at every meal. "What about plants? They're alive too." Yes they are. You have caught me in my web of lies.

Also, the authors have a great blog and a podcast to go with their book. Nice.

Must remember to go back and make own Magazine Cover.

Captcha for Blogger Comments

Another shovel to the head of a would-be zombie blog (aka spam blog): What is the word verification option? Now you can turn on CAPTCHA for your Blogger comments. So go ahead and allow anonymous commenting but turn this feature on. Not a complete solution to comment spam but a step in the right direction.

Flag As Objectionable

We launched Flag As Objectionable tonight on all blogspot blogs. So if you come across a raunchy or otherwise potentially objectionable blog while nextblogging, flag that shite and we'll see what we can do. I just flagged something that looked like spam. Take that, you zombie undead!

Effing Chinatown Bus

I always knew this thinig was sketchy, that's why I always took Amtrak. Riders flee bus fire on NYC run: "It was the second time in five months that a low-fare Chinatown bus has caught fire. On March 18, flames destroyed a New York-to-Boston bus owned by Travel Pack, a Fung Wah competitor, near the Allston-Brighton tolls on the Massachusetts Turnpike. No one was injured in either fire."

Adobe Blogs: All Adobe Blogs

A New Religion Is Born

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the deity of a religion, known as Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, started on the Internet by Bobby Henderson as a parody of the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to allow intelligent design to be taught in science classes alongside evolution. Henderson submitted an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education demanding that the Flying Spaghetti Monster be given equal time in classrooms along with other religious creation beliefs. The 'religion' has since become an Internet phenomenon garnering many followers (sometimes referring to themselves as 'Pastafarians') preaching the word of their 'noodly master' as the One True Religion."

Blogger for Word

Download Blogger for Word, a free plug-in that turns Microsoft Word into a blogging client.

The Visitor

Robert Scoble at Google.

Two Things

TiVo Officially Introduces TV Downloads.
Scientists develop urine-powered battery.

Neat!

Track visitors to your website using Google Maps.

Scottish Podcasts

If it's not Scottish, it's crap. I guess that holds true for pocasting as well.

Anatomy of A Rumor

Matthew Hurst is tracking the "Technorati About to Be Sold" rumor in the Blogosphere while it's still going strong. This can mean only one thing: The Blogosphere is self-aware! If the beast gets loose we're all doomed. (Via Scoble)

War of the Worlds

I went to an early show of War of the Worlds this morning. Mostly to prevent myself from spending the day in front of my powerbook. It worked for two hours at least. (I also took Maggie on a three mile walk to tire her out.) I thought the movie was pretty good, albeit nerve wracking, but I kept wondering the whole time if I shut the door to our apartment on the way out. (Yes, it was shut—and locked.) So there was that.

Almost Wiki'd

Editing Biz Stone: "Wikipedia does not yet have a page called Biz Stone." I've almost made it into the wonderous world of Wikipedia. In some cases, "almost" is not good. For example, "I almost didn't fall off the bridge." That's bad. But in this non-life-threatening situation almost is perfectly fine. It's an honor just to be a stub.

Who called the cops? (.mov)

Christopher Walken for President

"If you want to learn how to build a house, build a house. Don't ask anybody, just build a house." Christopher Walken for president in 2008. For more information, read: The Walken Platform.

Generate RSS Feeds

This RSS Feed Generator is a tool for manually creating and maintaining RSS feeds. It's open source, browser based, and can run locally on a computer running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. So if you were one of those people who found yourself creating blogs just so you could have a feed, maybe this is for you.

It's a cool 59 degrees in Palo Alto, CA this morning.