DefinitiveInk

links for 2009-05-29

• Bing - A better way to search from Microsoft
  bada bing
  (tags: search)
• Organic Dairies Watch the Good Times Turn Bad - NYTimes.com
• Gawker - The Quiet Newspaper Meeting That Could Have You Paying For Online News. Soon. - Newspapers
  images of a dark room filled with cigar smoking, owners....

Tough to be a sea lion

I used to think that the sea lions at the Prospect Park Zoo had an okay life, that is an okay life for an animal kept in a zoo, but yesterday seeing them surrounded by hundreds of kids making sea lion noises sounds was a bit jarring. They seemed to be in hiding. There must have been at least twenty school groups there. It wasn't the outing I had in mind,  so Willa and I left after checking that no sea lion had become a stowaway.

links for 2009-05-27

• Ditch The Generic: Weebly Launches Free WYSIWYG Virtual Storefronts
• When Layoffs Are Immoral - The Moral of the Story Blog - NYTimes.com
• Time to Train for Your First Marathon - Well Blog - NYTimes.com
  "Every weekday for the next five and a half months, the Well blog will highlight a daily Run Well feature to help all of us get marathon ready." Huh really, a series on running? A friend who is training for the marathon told me about this series that is running in the health area of the NYT. I have to admit I don't go there very much. It feels to me like a stealthy discovery of great things. Good recipes, this series on running. 3,000 topics. What I can't figure out is why something so good is so hidden. There are no links (that I could find) from the sports section to the marathon articles, nor are the healthy pizza recipes tied in to the dining section. What gives?
• Selected Cases of Judge Sonia Sotomayor - The New York Times
  nice document reader on the NYT. Wish I had something like this built Ron Suskind's site for The Price of Loyalty. I put up a lot of pages from .pdf's by hand.

painting on an iphone

This week's New Yorker cover was drawn on an iPhone using an app called Brushes which also enabled an artist to make the image on the left.  I believe David Hockney probably uses it too. There is an interesting post on the iPhne as a medium on a blog called artfagcity. I'm excited to try it out. Anyone have any experience with it?

links for 2009-05-25

• WAY Too Many Tweets Are Coming From Drivers
  the book Traffic is very much still on my mind. Yet another reason to dislike twits
• Why I Got A PhD In Political Philosophy And Then Became A Motorcycle Mechanic

links for 2009-05-24

• feedly: a magazine-like start page
  this is a great looking firefox extension. It takes feeds out of google reader and organizes them on a customized startpage. (thx catherine for showing me this)
  (tags: firefox rss)

links for 2009-05-21

• Village Voice Media Sites Now Get 40 Percent Of Traffic From Blogs; Planning Local Ad Network
• Yahoo readies Placemaker for local-aware content | Webware - CNET
  yahoo continues to innovate in this space despite all of the braindrain and turmoil in their management. One less possible exit for my old company.

links for 2009-05-20

• 10 Things Investors Need To Know Before OpenTable's IPO (OPEN)
  nice breakdown of opentable's business. i've been thinking and working around cost per leads now...
  (tags: business)
• Michael Steele - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  decided to read his bio as I can't believe some of the things he says. think it is an act. interesting story.
• Yahoo Announces New Model For Search - Liveblog | Epicenter | Wired.com
  "Yahoo thinks that understanding the web, rather than indexing it deeper and faster is its future of search...It’s a compelling message, but its not clear how it will move the search share needle so that Google falls below 60 percent or Yahoo gets above 25 percent."
  (tags: search yahoo)

Threadless Tees gets on the twitter bandwagon

threadless is now printing shirts with sayings from twitter. now you can wear little 140 character bits of user generated brilliance instead of endless cute drawings of birds.

links for 2009-05-19

• iHockney: Artist David uses his Apple phone to paint mini masterpieces | Mail Online
• Memo To Networks Re Hulu: You’re Making A Big Mistake | paidContent.org
  Essay by Kevin Wassong of Minyanville @Hulu being a network killer. "So how might this represent a massive destruction of media value? Start with the premise that Hulu is creating the uberbrand of media, and the networks have simply relegated themselves to being content producers. In essence, the networks have quit. What happened to the value of a network brand?"
  (tags: media)

links for 2009-05-18

• Why E-Books Look So Ugly | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
  (tags: e-books publishing)
• Obama Notre Dame Speech: FULL TEXT
  what a speech!
  (tags: politics)

New York Times working to collect GM dealer stories from their article on closings

Just caught this on the NYT home page. See the e-mail addy right below the lead? Also it appears at the bottom of the article. Would be interesting to learn how many respond.

Is Chariots of the Gods a key clue and influence on LOST?

As LOST first flashed on the large Easter Island like statue and spent time down in a Egyptian hieroglyph covered temple, I started trying to remember this book.  After last night's finale of LOST I am more convinced than ever that the "pseudo-science" of Chariots of the Gods has played a big part in LOST. In fact I am convinced that Jacob and his fellow islander and sworn enemy (who may or may not have a corporal form, and who may or may not be smokey or maybe a HAL like computer) are aliens. Watchers ,"it always end the same way" waiting in classic fashion until the human race has a breakthrough so they are worthy of contact. On what do I base this astounding theory you ask?  J.J. Abrams is about my age and from NY too so I would bet that we both read the book and watched the movie on channel 9 sometime in our childhoods, perhaps many times, since they repeated things often.  I'm not saying things are as simple as that but I think there is a connection. Thoughts?

links for 2009-05-13

• Stage 4 through the lens. A Don Karle gallery. - VeloNews
  Cycling journalists have the best gigs. Probably even more so than the ones covering golf.
• Economist's View: "Adam Smith and Web 2.0"
  very interesting article "We’re socially comparative beings. We care deeply about the conduct, opinions and values of our peers, using comparisons with them to orient our own ideas about what we need or value and how wealthy we want or need to be. As for the subtler aspects of our economy, from the motivation of employees to those amazing things Web 2.0 is bringing forth, well, homo economicus doesn’t seem to get close to what’s going on...Enter Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, published 250 years ago last month, a book he intended partly as a theoretical foundation for his later economics. ...Web 2.0 is scaling up the scope for human sociality and opening up new vistas for the expression of self-interest. And yet profit-seeking is only a small part of how that self-interest is manifesting itself.
  (tags: economy social_media web2.0)
• Google Squared Is Search Results In Spreadsheet Format (GOOG)
  as my friend Juan just posted on Twitter "jlopezvalcarcelGoogle Squared shows results in spreadsheet format bankers and consultants value-add is now commoditized :-) >"
  (tags: finance google)

twitapocalypse - fonzie jumps the failwhale on Current and some other twitter thoughts

Current's follow up cartoon on Twitter. Very funny. Have been thinking that Oprah, the Nielson study, and other things have been implying jumping the shark but a the video shows the borg keep coming. Four other related things/thoughts below

• A friend at the NYT who wanted my advice on blogs had to cancel lunch with me today to attend an education session on using twitter for reporting. Wonder what was covered, posting for comments or to see what people were saying?
• Dave Winer's 100TWT.com which follows the tweets of the top 100 twitterers with the most followers. This might reinforce the video or it might not. Looks like a ratio of 2:1 every NYT or TechCrunch post to something like #41 "wilw: BROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONS"

links for 2009-05-12

• Micro Persuasion: The End of the Destination Web Era
  (tags: media)
• Germany Imagines Suburbs Without Cars - NYTimes.com
  (tags: sustainability cycling traffic)
• Newspapers: Dumb, Fat & Lazy?
  "Things are bad out there. Many of my friends are out of work, while others are secretly dreading the day when the axe falls. Predictably, many blame the likes of Google for their woes. Yet Kurtz points out that his own employer is talking to Google in an effort to figure out new ways to make money. So is The New York Times.

  Let me see if I have this straight: Instead of coming up with a smart strategy and innovating, they’re going to Google to help fix their own mess. If an industry can’t think for itself, well, what do you call it? How about dumb, fat and lazy?

  Just to be very, very clear, I am not talking about the working stiffs — the journalists who pound the pavement, every day, looking for news and their editors. I am talking about the members of the executive suite, which with every passing day prove themselves to be as calcified as the remains of a T. rex."

  
  
  (tags: journalism newspapers)
  
  
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  Eight Hyperlocal Startups Receive New Voices Grants | Placeblogger
  
  
  knew about susan mernit's oakland local. here is the complete list. interesting projects
  
  
  (tags: local hyperlocal journalism media)
  
  

links for 2009-05-11

• NewBizNews: Metro « BuzzMachine
• NewBizNews: Hyperlocal « BuzzMachine
  very interesting post with really interesting comments esp the ones from the head of frontorch - which appears in the prior bookmark.
  (tags: hyperlocal journalism)
• Challenging Conventional Web 2.0 Wisdom at Ghost of Midnight
  FrontPorch Forum is a network of online forums in VT. The majority of people who live in Chittenden County (which includes 1/3 of Burlington) subscribe and an amazing % participate. This post has a very interesting chart. I found them through a link in the comments section of BuzzMachine post.
  (tags: local hyperlocal community)

links for 2009-05-09

• Bloggasm » The 50 most popular newspaper blogs
  (tags: blogs newspaper)

Our garden has an unexpected connection to FlatbushGardener

Last night at blogfest I found out that FlatbushGardener used to live in our apartment. We had been getting the occasional piece of junk mail addressed to him and I wondered why so I got to use last night's event to ask. Small world. His blog has long been one of the best gardening and urban nature blogs around and it first caught my eye when I was running GardenWeb and creating the GardenVoices reblog. We were both blessed with getting to look out on, and care for, the garden that our landlord built years ago. From early spring through late fall we eat most meals out on the deck that overlooks it. The garden lightens our days  and even makes things like an oven that sets off the smoke alarm trivial. I also found out that he had  planted some columbine which you can see flowering along the wall on the bricks along the wall on the right in the photo.  You can also see a close up of them in a photo on his blog that was taken in  from 2004. One day we will move on from this apartment too and maybe it will lead to a surprising connection.

links for 2009-05-07

• The Praized Blog » Blog Archive » I Have Seen the Future of Local Media
• Three Reasons Why Twitter Will NOT Index the Links You Share - NYTimes.com
  really a shame that delicious, a service which I am very fond of and set up blog integration with, sat by and enabled bit.ly and others to get into the url shortenting space. the same could be said of digg. i'm unsing a firefox extension to save this to delicious right now. why isn't it shortening it and enabling me to send it to twitter and playing a part in real-time search.
  (tags: twitter del.icio.us)