Morning Reading: 8/20/06

Test your blog’s popularity with Socialmeter. (via Steve Rubel)

Famster, social networking and more for families.  It seems to do everything an online family needs and more.  It will take a little time to learn your way around, but I’m reasonably impressed with it.

Henry Hereford helps make my point by calling me riff-raff.  Me and the other typing monkeys say thanks, we think.

Someone has bid $50 large for Kiko.  We’ll see if it’s real or another sad attempt at getting 15 minutes.  I’d say the chances of the bidder actually paying $50 large for Kiko are about 100 times higher than the chance that whack-job killed JonBenet.

Daniel Terdiman on the evolution of Second Life.  Early versions required hand grenades to terraform land.  I have often wished for a hand grenade when trying to get the desired slopes on mine.  If only to blow myself up out of frustration.

In the most absurd quote of the day department, Google’s CEO believes TV ads are “a waste of your time.”  Why?  Because they aren’t targeted.  But never fear, Google has a plan to deliver “targeted measurable television ads.”  Hey Google, how about do us all a favor and don’t.  Go make something we want, as opposed to something we don’t, and get back to us.  Entire industries (TIVO, satellite radio, etc.) have been built on ad-avoidance.  Doesn’t that tell you something?

And at the risk of piling on, why isn’t every right-thinking blogger and writer in the world pointing out the gigantic, indisputable conflict of interest in wanting to  “obtain and control every piece of data in the world, including users’ personal data,” and planning to use that data to stuff targeted ads down out throat for a profit?  Isn’t this sort of like giving all our data to telemarketers and then giving them phones and telling them to dial away?

A Florida TV station reports that old ladies like cats and that herds of cats will, in fact, attack birds and squirrels.  Wow, I didn’t know that. (via Drudge)

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