Seinfeld Graffitti in Amsterdam

Costanza-isms as Dutch Graffiti
Originally uploaded by bizstone

My favorite graffiti of all time.

Wired on TV

I'm pretty excited about the new Wired Science series on PBS starting early October. Also, They're using Twitter so you can follow wiredscience.

Try Tracking Twitter

When there are lots of people all over the world sending in short answers a a few times a day to a very open-ended question, there's bound to be answers which intersect with your interests. Now you can ask Twitter to deliver updates based on keywords, instantly via sms or im. We've been playing around with the feature for a while and it reminds us of why we got so excited about Twitter in the first place. Track Twitter today!

Uncorking My Brain

I'm not sure if my brain needs any more uncorking or not but Livy and I are at SFO right now waiting for our flight to Amsterdam for the PICNIC conference and festival, "where creative minds from the world of media, entertainment, science and the arts convene in Amsterdam."

A Bird with A Scam

Seagull becomes crisp shoplifter: "A seagull has turned shoplifter by wandering into a shop and helping itself to crisps. The bird walks into the RS McColl newsagents in Aberdeen when the door is open and makes off with cheese Doritos. The seagull, nicknamed Sam, has now become so popular that locals have started paying for his crisps."

Lookwell

Check out this pilot that Conan Obrien wrote with Robert Smigel in the 80s starring Adam West. I wish this were on today. Seems like it would be a great HBO original series.

Talking to Dutch Businesspeople

IMG_2167.JPG
Originally uploaded by High Profile

This is a photo of me at the Dutch event e.Day last week. I presented some information about Xanga, Blogger, and Twitter in a talk titled Social Alchemy: The Changing Nature of Communication. The event was in an giant old coffee factory so the area I was in featured four quadrants of audience and required me to have my back to some participants at least part of the time. It was tricky.

Chair

IMG_0435
Originally uploaded by bizstone

I didn't get out too much in Rotterdam because I was only there two days and one of those days was spent at a conference. However, I stayed at the Hotel New York which was a great spot to hang out. And, I got to visit with a local family and some Twitter fans—we had some great champagne and a nice dinner at their home on the river. Rotterdam is one classy place.

Blogger Play

Blogger gussied up the old office post scroller and made it into a fun product called Blogger Play. Click "show info" and then put it on super-fast mode so you can quickly assimilate all of blogspot. Now it just needs a spot for me to list my favorite blogs so I can read them slide-show style!

The Teaspoon Effect

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten: "... [A]n entrepreneur who says 'I wouldn’t use my product myself but other people would' wouldn’t make a very good impression." Unfortunately, it is possible for a good impression to be made—but the product itself will be devoid of soul.

My Desk for the next three days

Desk
Originally uploaded by bizstone

I'm not really sure if it was this morning or yesterday that I left Las Vegas. Nevertheless, I am currently in lovely Rotterdam in The Netherlands. I'm working away a this little desk right this very moment. Well, nine hours in the future as far as my Twitter colleagues back in San Francisco are concerned.

Twitter is Good Stupid

Poynter Online - Experimenting with Twitter: How Newsrooms Are Using It to Reach More Users: "Jacob Harris, a senior software engineer for The New York Times, says Twitter is 'the right kind of stupid.'"

Introducing Reason

In The Assault on Reason, Al Gore criticizes television as a one-way medium and notes that "Individuals receive but do not send, they listen but do not speak, they are given information but do not share it in return, they do not comment on it in ways that others can hear. Therefore, automatically, their ability to use the tools of reason as participants in the national conversation is suspended."

Fair enough. However, we've done a few experiments with Twitter that indicate it's possible to change this fact. Director's commentary during Fox's DRIVE inspired feedback among viewers, likewise Defamer Twittering the Oscars and our ongoing Greekshow viewing events. This weekend's partnership with MTV is further exploration. Continued experimentation means continued learning. Exciting!

I'm heading to Las Vegas tomorrow morning so expect updates. And watch MTV!

What Are You Doing?

New York Times Blog: "Like 'away' messages on instant-message systems and trendy Twitter broadcasts, status messages are a key form of social communication for a generation of people who are in effect writing their diaries in the form of electronic Burma Shave signs."

What Are We Doing?

fixing Twitter
Originally uploaded by bizstone

Update: Twitter's back. No need to waste paper.

We scheduled some Twitter downtime in the middle of the night last night so we could do some big hardware upgrades when most folks were not Twittering. However, we encountered some unexpected challenges. We're off schedule but we are moving right along and when we're done Twitter will be really upgraded.

In the meantime, if you want to print out this page and write down what you're doing, I'd love to see some handwritten Twitter-style updates. I just did one myself and phone-cam'd it to Flickr. Even though I made a spelling mistake it made me feel slightly better.

This Looks Cool

About BuzzFeed: "We use technology and human editors to find the hottest buzz on the web. Each weekday, we publish ten stories that highlighting the best stuff emerging from the Internet popularity contest."

Facebook and Twitter vs Email

Rising Email Immunity Leads to Conflict over Email Etiquette: "Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter, and other alternative tools trump email and make some people more immune to email than others."

Read This Guy's Email

Chris Engler's Email Blog: "This blog captures all email sent to my gmail account. Since I can't read my email at work, I thought this would be a clever way to view the full text of my emails instead of just seeing the titles through the igoogle interface. Yes, I am aware that the whole world will read my email. That's okay." It's mostly junk but it's an interesting concept.

Super Happy Japanese Kitty Game!

This is a game people play using Twitter. It's basically tamagotchi kitty meets Twitter. You sign up for a cat and the game creates a Twitter account for that cat using our API. When the cat says it's hungry, or purrs, or makes some "business," you @reply that you're cleaning up after it or whatever. The best caretakers get ranked on this page. Currently, "licorice"is in the lead. Seems really popular.

Miracle bagel!

Miracle bagel!
Originally uploaded by bizstone

Livy's favorite bagel is the salt bagel. All the other flavors were wiped out -- but not the salt. Therefore, it is a miracle bagel.