A Blog Just for Ex-Googlers

Xooglers.blogspot.com is a "gathering spot for ex-Googlers to reminisce and comment on the latest developments in search." I did two years at the GOOG so that makes me an ex-Googler! Nice.

Exclusive TiVo Beta Photos

Ten High

Evan has posted Ten Rules for Web Startups along with a new blog design. Also? There's a bonus rule!

It's Not A Shed

It's a Modern Cabana.

Note To Self

"Giftbox is an online gift manager. Gain control over all the gifts and holidays in your life." (Via Case).

Personalized Podcasting

A new service called Taldia.

Trulia Good Service

Trulia, Inc. is a privately held real estate search company with solid backing in San Francisco started by two guys named Pete and Sami last summer while they were graduate students at Stanford University.

I've been using it to see what's out there and it's such a joy compared to every other real estate site on the web. I'm hoping to see them spread their search across the world.

Search Drawer

Shaun Inman's site does a neat trick that I want the blog*spot navbar to do.

When you hover over the tab on Shaun's site, a large "drawer" zooms down filled with stuff you can do. I thought that might be a neat way to tuck away lots of compelling things for Blogger users to do.

They Saw It Before Me?

They're watching Harry Potter on the space station: "U.S. crew of the International Space Station has watched the latest Harry Potter movie, 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'." Evidently, Mission Control in Houston screened the movie to the crew on the request of the station commander, William McArthur.

Futuristic Photovoltaic Freeways

What if we could somehow figure out a way to mix crystalline silicon into the pavement of the freeways, parkways, highways, and turnpikes of America so that they all became photovoltaic? Then, we make tires in such a way that they can channel the power right from the road. We'd have a nation of electric cars powered by the very roads on which they drive. Kinda like that toy racecar track I had when I was a kid. That'd be cool.

A Bridge of Water

Check out this more than half-mile long water bridge over the Elbe River in Germany. It joins the Elbe-Havel canal to the Mittelland canal near the eastern town of Magdeburg. It's a giant concrete bathtub. Crazy.

Sketchplanet looks neat.

Massless

Cool 8-bit video for Dealership's 'Forest'

Tivo to Support iPod Video

Podcasting News: "TiVo plans to begin testing software to enable video downloads to iPods from its digital video recorders within the next couple of weeks. It said the company intends to make the software available to all TiVo users in the first quarter of 2006 for a one-time fee, most likely between $15 and $30."

Pretty Pretty Pretty Pretty

Nice. Mint: A Fresh Look at Your Site.

Boston by Storm

I was invited to speak at Harvard tomorrow in Boston so a very quick visit is on tap. It's just a weekend thing, unfortunately. Nevertheless, a quick visit is still something.

Three Ideas

1. A verison of Ebay just for charity auctions
2. FedEx should offer kickass file transfer
3. Million Dollar Homepage—AdSense Style

Page Goes Freestyle

I saw Larry Page riding a wacky little bike around Palo Alto near Stanford yesterday. He was riding across the street with no helmet? No helmet? Page, you're a loose cannon!

Urchin Is Now Free

"Google Inc. today announced that its hosted web analytics service, Google Analytics, is now free. Formerly known as Urchin from Google, Google Analytics helps businesses use performance data to improve their online marketing campaigns and websites."

About wikiCalc 0.1

What is wikiCalc? Dan Bricklin explains: "The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool that creates normal web pages. It is for creating and maintaining web pages that include data this is more than just unformatted prose, such as schedules, lists, and tables. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit ability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet."

Two Years Ago

Yesterday would have been my two year anniversary at Google. Instead, I'm coming up on two months at Odeo. Has it already been more than two years since I moved from Boston to San Francisco? Crazy.

Simplicity

What a fun and nice blog design this is.

Get Ready for The Upcoming Festivus Season!

The Festivus Pole: "The first name in Festivus presents News and Comment on the upcoming Festivus season, as well as the only festivus pole on the market that meets Frank's original exacting standards for the Festivus Season."

Weird

Check out the photo on the front page of this newspaper. Quite recursive, wouldn't you say?

From Memex to Metaverse

If you haven't been following this new blog, I suggest you get caught up and start doing so. What will the web be like in the future? That answer is taking shape over at Abandon the Web!

In short, the paradigm will change from Memex to Metaverse—a Metaverse in which you can still access the Memex, along with new ways of interacting with humans and information.

It's smart folks like this who are shaping the future of our technology and it seems fitting that it's emerging on a humble blog.

Man Bag

Words: In The Mail: "I don't know about you, but knowing that this man bag is pilfer-free is nothing short of spectacular."

The Ukraine Is Weak

Play RISK on Google Maps.

TiVo Plus Yahoo

TiVo has teamed up with Yahoo so I can browse shows from the web and program my TiVo. Livy is going to love this because she claims I always "double guess" her season-pass scheduling skills. Now I can double guess from work!

Pew Internet And American Life Project Report

Teen Content Creators and Consumers: "Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations."

Have Some Freakonomics Why Don't You?

Congratulations to Stephen and Steven on one million blog visits as well as one million copies of Freakonmics printed.

I Should Probably Try This

I recently came into ownership of a fancy schmancy Treo 650. I haven't installed anything on it yet but I have been using it for taking photos. Now I've just heard about Mobup, a small J2ME application that manages photo uploads on Flickr from your mobile device making heavy use of the Flickr APIs. You just shoot your photo and add title, tags and description from the same application with optimal user experience and to post the photo to your blog. Sounds pretty good.

At The Opera

I took this photo with my camera phone just as we arrived at the San Francisco Opera a few weeks ago. We're going again later this month because its a good time.

Ingenious

Amazon Mechanical Turk : "Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it."

This is one of the ways that CAPTCHAs are solved by spammers and Amazon has turned it into a product. Wicked! The ways CAPTCHA are solved by spammers include but are not limited to asking people who want to see porn solve them framed from another site, employing people in places like Costa Rica to solve them all day as a "computer industry" job; and of course, using software to solve the test. (Which, according to Carnegie Mellon cannot be done.)

Anywhoo. It's cool to see an ingenius and useful technology idea reverse engineered from the secretous ways of our evil spam overlords.

Sneaking Into Google for Lunch?

Umm yeah. I would not recommend this.

To get into Google’s internal offices requires a discussion with security, sign in, badge, and escort. However, the dining area has no specific security into or out of it. If you can get past parking security, you can walk right in and eat.

Security at Google is top notch and they will check your badge. Plus, you'll have much more fun if someone invites you and shows you around. With the number of people Google hires on a regular basis, your chances of having somone in your social circle invite you to campus grows substantially every week.

Unfortunate Typo

New York Times: "Quaker Maid Meats Inc. on Tuesday said it would voluntarily recall 94,400 pounds of frozen ground beef panties that may be contaminated with E. coli." Beef panties?

Comment Moderation

Blogger launches Comment Moderation. In other words, you can decide if the comments people leave make it to your blog or not. Good for fancy folks.

Techcrunch vs. Grandpa Phil

Technologist J. Michael Arrington is disappointed by the (private beta) release of Odeo's content creation tools. However, Grandpa Phil's bedtime story about Henry and the Porcupine is strong praise with nary a mention of technology.

BagelEx

You can get H & H Bagels overnighted via FedEx from New York City. If you are crazy.