Morning Reading: 9/4/06

Here’s a little about the origins of Labor Day.

Neil Turner has a handy page with lots of photography tips.

Is there anyone who isn’t operating or planning to open an online music store? Is anyone actually trying to come up with something new or is everyone too busy playing follow the leader?

Mark Evans has a brief comparison of Qumana and Live Writer.

Here’s a site that covers the origins of rock band names. I can only speak for the entry on the Beatles- I heard George Harrison describe the naming of the Beatles the same way.

100 Acre Deadwood. Humorous, but not work or kid safe. (via Marc Canter)

And, in case you missed it, 88 Lines About 44 Bloggers.

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Morning Reading: 9/3/06

PVR functionality is coming to Nero.  Good news for those of us in the ABR club (anything but Roxio).

Happy Anniversary to Warner Crocker and his better half.

From the It Was Only a Matter of Time Department: the government admits to capturing aliens in Roswell, NM. (via Zoli Erdos)

ZDNet and the Resource Shelf speculate about Google Archive Search.

Congrats to Frank Gruber on his new gig.

Here’s a very funny Conan O’Brien 1864 baseball video.

The Washington Post on quieter computers.  Mine sounds like a jet taking off.

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Morning Reading: 9/2/06

Tom Morris creates a way for you to create a news river for any site. Here’s the Newsome.Org river. This is cool and helpful.

Science Project: B-Movie Monster Biology. The Incredible Shrinking Man is cold. And hungry. And thirsty.

Morning Math: Eager, forgetful reporter + 6000 volts = this.

Nick Carr announces a Rough Type sibling blog- Rough Sort. Nick is to blogs as Mark Spragg is to novels- they both can turn a phrase better than anyone else in the business. You want an example: “If you squint, you can just make out in the shadows cast by their high-flown words a sad tableau of lonely people peering into computer screens. Or is that just a trick of the light?” I don’t completely agree with his point, but damn, that’s beautiful writing.

From the Name Everything Wrong with this Sentence Department: “Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil,” Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope’s caster-out of demons.” (via John Dvorak)

Just for the record: MySpace’s new music deal is much more about becoming the new MP3.Com (the original version) than it is about trying to challenge iTunes.

3+3+3? Ronnie Isley of the Isley Brothers is going to the pokey for 3 years. 3+3 is one of the best records ever made.

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Morning Reading: 9/1/06

The eBay as an exit strategy movement takes another step as Huckabuck, a Web 2.0 search application, goes on the block.

Karl Martino on the deja vuing of social software.

Darren Rowse on what to do when you lose blogging momentum.

TVSquad takes a look at the upcoming season of Battlestar Galactica.  By far the best show on TV.  Deadwood is second.

New Live Writer plugins: Firefox, Delicious, and a table maker.

Once you teach your dog to drive, you can pimp him out with a wig.

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Morning Reading: 8/31/06

Thomas Hawk begins a living post about computer problems.  This is a good idea and it’s comforting to know that I’m not the only geek who gets whipped by his computer every now and then.  My personal burden is the power supply that is happy one moment and dead the next.  It’s especially fun when that happens on Friday night of a three-day weekend.  My solution- I have a spare power supply sitting in a box in my study.  In fact, at one point I had two spares.

I have longed for the union of Blackberry and Treo for so long that somehow this seems anticlimatic.  Why is this limited to the Treo 650?

 More RIAA foolishness: a suit against a woman who alleges she “has never even used, or even turned on, a computer.”

Rogers Cadenhead on a rumor that Warren Buffett got married. The Omaha World-Herald confirms.

This won’t be of interest to many, but it will be beloved by a few.  I came across a fantastic series (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) last night on the Nashville Rock Scene, post 1978.  People outside of Tennessee don’t realize it, but Nashville has a tremendous rock scene.  Of the bands mentioned, I watched Jason and the Nashville Scorchers, the Dusters, Raging Fire (the talented and delightful Melora Zaner worked for Microsoft last I heard), the White Animals, Web Wilder, and John Jackson and the Rhythm Rockers.  Others I would have mentioned include Dave Olney and John Scott Sherrill.  Wasn’t there also a band called the Shades that played at the Villager a lot?

Dave Winer posts on Foo Camp.  If people were really interested in effecting positive change, the blogosphere would get together and boycott invitiation-only throwbacks like Foo Camp.

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Morning Reading: 8/30/06

Fred Wilson on Spiral Frog: “I actually don’t want free music, I want to pay for music without copy protection on it.”  Marshall Kirkpatrick‘s take: ” SpiralFrog will offer free downloads wrapped in a still undisclosed form of digital rights management technology. How tired.”   Amen brothers.

Finally, a thesis (and prize-winning at that) someone might actually read. (via John Dvorak)

From the Perky Little Article Department: 20 things you don’t know about death.

Here’s the 2006 Ultimate Developer and Power User Computers Utilities list.

URL Investigator looks like a pretty cool service.  Page ranks, whois, link counts and more.

LibraryThing– catalog your books online.

Zoli Erdos on the Wikipedia Enterprise 2.0 debate.

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Morning Reading: 8/29/06

Flickr now has geo tagging. I’m not that excited about it for my photos, but it could do wonders for guided tours of cities and other attractions. Zooomer has had geo tagging for some time. The next big feature should be audio tagging- hosted or linked audio files describing the photo or the location.

My dog has been after me for years to give him driving lessons.

Jeneane Sessum on the Attention Deficit Economy.

Dave Rogers and Seth Finkelstein on the divine right of kings.

Jim Thompson mines a YouTube gem. Someone should start a movement to get as many WWII veterans as possible to record their stories.

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Morning Reading: 8/28/06

While I love the show, I too was disappointed in the Deadwood season finale.

According to Download.Com, Yahoo Finance now has free streaming stock quotes. Note that streaming does not equate to real-time- they are still delayed by 15 minutes.

Jeneane Sessum to Robert Scoble: “Close the Dave Winer playbook and be yourself.” Sounds like good advice to me. Follow up.

And on the topic of Scoble, this post criticizing him for not allowing his content to be stolen and reused without attribution is either a weak stab at satire or the most ridiculous post ever. James Robertson agrees. Scoble responds. Thankfully, the offending blog seems to have been suspended by its ISP.

I missed the whole Lonelygirl15 debate, but Mathew Ingram has a good primer on it, including links to a couple of others speculating on whether this is a real person or some sort of viral marketing. I watched about 10 seconds of one episode on YouTube, and lost interest- in the video itself. But it does occur to me that too much artifice in the name of viral marketing would dilute the beauty of video blogging as a medium.

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Morning Reading: 8/27/06

Kiko sold for $258,100, therby validating my belief that eBay is a legitimate exit strategy for Web 2.0 companies.

Rahul Sood, the president of Voodoo PC on his email conversations with Michael Dell (good stuff in the comments as well).  (via Dwight Silverman)

Psychology Today on the Hidden Side of Happiness.

Make a paper star and throw it at somebody.

This might be the funniest site on the internet. I’m laughing so hard I can barely type.

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Morning Reading: 8/26/06

Steve Rubel likes Original Signal, an aggregator of the 15 most popular Web 2.0 blogs.  I prefer Techmeme where the coverage is broader and more inclusive.

Mashable has an interesting and comprehensive history of Facebook.  We didn’t have computers, much less the internet, when I was in college, so I know nothing about Facebook other than what I’ve read, but I like the fact that Facebook is limited to students.

Dave Winer responds to the recent river of news criticism.  I like the last part, where he talks about working with Josh Bancroft.  I hope he does.  Meanwhile Scoble gushes over Dave, compares him to Douglas Engelbart and apologizes on behalf of all of us for doubting him.  Wow, even The Commander and Jetstream never had Hero Support like that.

Christopher Carfi has a great series about getting found in the long tail.  Read the whole series, because it is good stuff.

When I hit 60 I hope I don’t start having stupid ideas like this.

I told you the real world doesn’t view the internet through tech colored glasses.

Karl Martino on influence in the blogosphere.

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