Mashup Department: Kill fire ants by turning them into a horror movie. I wonder if Lou Diamond Phillips is in it?
Literary Acumen: Impress your friends by interpreting nursery rhymes for them.
What’s a Blog, Again: Prob Logger (I know, but that’s a cooler name) has 10 ways not to promote your blog.
This Reminds Me of Something: Task.fm looks like a neat little Twitter inspired idea that takes more time than, say, adding the event to your calendar. But these days, it’s all about the 140.
Fancy Jargon Department: I’m over Wolfram|Alpha before I even see it, simply because it calls itself a “computational knowledge engine.” One thing I’ve learned in my 15 years or so online is that really cool stuff doesn’t need fancy jargon. There is generally an inverse relationship between fancy jargon and usefulness. The (ugh) “semantic web” is the best example of this. If you want to feel semantically smart, here’s more on the so called Google killer.
Nerdywood Squares: Google took a quick break from being killed by Wolfram to work on Google Squared, which extracts data from web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. Here’s a news flash- for 99% of the population, Google search works just fine. There are far too many people trying to fix what ain’t broken. Here’s a screen shot, which doesn’t really get me all that excited.
See Google Blogoscoped for more
It Just Does Department: Popular Science looks scientifically at just exactly why shit happens.
Keep Photography Beautiful: Tintii looks like a cool application for photo manipulation.
Department of Musicology: The “B” Side did a cool thing for Lattimore Brown. You need to read that story, and watch the EconoLodge & Holiday Inn rehearsal videos. And especially the video of his appearance at the Ponderosa Stomp Music Conference.
That Micro-financing Sound: Linda Thompson is using micro-financing to raise money for her next record. You can get a free MP3 if you’re willing to give out your email address. I donated a little bit. For $5000, she’ll actually record one of your songs. I wish I could afford that. I’d ask her to record When You’re Sitting at the Bar (which she could clobber).
Newsome.Org 