By Cory Doctorow at 10:27 pm Thursday, Jan 13
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Technorati has unveiled a new "tags" service that is one of the most exciting things I've seen all month. Technorati Tags are like Del.icio.us Tags and Flickr Tags -- they're keywords you assign to your stuff. If you tag a Del.icio.us link with "Toronto" and I tag a link with "Toronto," Del.icio.us will figure out that we're both talking about the same thing and feed both links to anyone who's searching for new links about Toronto. Likewise with Flickr: upload a photo and tag it "spider" and it will be returned along with all the other spider pix in the system when a searcher asks for the "spider" tag.
Technorati Tags are keywords that map to category names, keywords, and other cues in blog posts. When you bring up a Technorati Tag for "computers," you get all relevant blog posts that Technorati knows about, presented on a page with relevant Del.icio.us links and relevant Flickr images. Technorati Tags blend three different Internet services and three services' worth of tags to tease meaning out of the ether. Brilliant.
The photos come from our friends at Flickr. Flickr is a great photo sharing community. If you'd like your photos to appear on our tag pages, join Flickr and post your photos there. And remember to tag 'em!
The links come from the nice folks at Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a web-based bookmarks manager. If you'd like to contribute links to Technorati Tag pages, you can join Del.icio.us, post and tag some links.
The rest of the Technorati Tag pages is made up of blog posts. And those come from you! Anyone with a blog can contribute to Technorati Tag pages. (Don't have a blog? Give TypePad a try!) There are two ways to contribute:
* If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom (like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, Radio), just use the included category system and make sure you're publishing RSS/Atom and we'll automatically include your posts! Your categories will be read as tags.
* If your blog software does not support those things, don't worry, you can still play. To add your post to a Technorati Tag page, all you have to do is "tag" your post by including a special link.
Link
(
Disclaimer: I am an advisor to Technorati)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:20 pm Thursday, Jan 13
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GTC, the
horrible long distance company that slammed me last year, is still bugging me. They wrote:
Dear GTC Telecom Customer,
A recent attempt to charge your credit card was unsuccessful. As a valued GTC Telecom customer, we are concerned about your current unpaid balance.
If you have a new credit card that you would like to use to pay your bill, or if your credit card on file with GTC Telecom needs to be updated (such as an expiration date), please log on today to our secure website, https://www.mygtc.com/ccupdate.asp, to update your credit card information.
If you have any questions about your GTC Telecom account, please feel free to email us at service@gtctelecom.com.
Thank you for choosing GTC Telecom.
Online Services
service@gtctelecom.com
Optimistic fool that I am, I called the phone number on the GTC site (1-800-486-4030), but like every other time I've called the number in the last six months, I am put on hold for an half hour and then the line goes dead.
So I tried sending email to service@gtctelecom. Every time I've sent email there it has been like throwing it down a mineshaft. But this time, something different happened. The email bounced.
I just sent email to the FCC and the California Public Utility Commission to complain about this lousy company.
I'm wondering if anyone has had a good experience with GTC telecom. I hate them.
By Xeni Jardin at 3:07 pm Thursday, Jan 13
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Shown here, a sneak peek at the cover for Warren Ellis' forthcoming serial comic
Desolation Jones. Art by J.H. Williams. Out in April, solicited for ordering in February.
Link to more info, and
link to full-size image.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:13 pm Thursday, Jan 13
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"Bezos' Seattle-based
Blue Origin suborbital space venture is starting the process to build an aerospace testing and operations center on a portion of the Corn Ranch, a 165,000-acre spread that the 41-year-old billionaire purchased north of Van Horn, Texas."
Blue Origin is hiring, by the way. On its jobs page, it lists its hiring criteria:
1. You must have a genuine passion for space. Without passion, you will find what we're trying to do too difficult. There are much easier jobs.
2. You must want to work in a small company.
3. We are building real hardware -- not PowerPoint presentations. This must excite you. You must be a builder.
(Neal Stephenson works there part time.) It probably gets about 10,000 resumes a day.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:24 pm Thursday, Jan 13
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(Click thumbnail for enlargement) This is a little like the idea John Battelle
proposed in his blog.
Folks who read this blog also read that one," for example. Or "Blogs who link to this blog also link to that one." If we put a sophisticated interface with some dials and levers, it could really be a neat tool for exploring relationships in the blogosphere. I could imagine some cool slices that might parse this wildly growing ecosystem in interesting ways.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:20 pm Thursday, Jan 13
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This is really neat -- some guy built a little tsunami simulator in his basement (I'm assuming that the kid in the photo is the son of the creator, and not the creator, but I could be wrong. He might be a child prodigy for all I know). His explanation of why the tsunami was so devastating was really interesting.
Link (Thanks, Jon!)
UPDATE: Robert sez: "Saw your post on BoingBoing, so I have to forward you a link to a "real" Tsunami Simulator here in my town. It's a pretty kick-ass facility, supposedly the only one of its kind in North America." Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:11 am Thursday, Jan 13
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David-Michel Davies recently went to India, and has chronicled his trip in his new blog. He discovered a treat there, called
paan.
Specifically, Paan is made by taking a betel creeper leaf, adding some ingredients -- the masala-- and then folding it up into a triangle for chewing/consumption. The ingredients can be a wide range of things, but generally Paan falls into two main categories: Mitha (sweet) or Saadha (with Tobacco). The Mitha Paan (I didn't try the tobacco variety) usually has betel nut, lime paste, almond powder, grated coconut, pistachio powder, and sometime a very sweet cherry jam or chutney. The combination of all these ingredients makes for a very tasty and refreshing after dinner treat; the plant enzymes, lime paste, and mild stimulant from the betel nut acts as a digestion enhancer and breath freshener.
Link
UPDATE: Kevin Kelly took this photograph while traveling in Asia. It appears in his book, Asia Grace. He sez: "This is a cool ornate paan shop in southern india. That's it. That is the entire shop. A shelf about three feet deep and maybe 8 feet wide, with two guys sitting all day on the shelf (about waist high). In many ways it is the ultimate walk-up service set up. No bending, reaching, or waiting. Imagine it as an ATM for treats, or a gonzo vending machine, only with live human animation, mirrors, beveled glass. Maybe by now they could have LEDs at night."
UPDATE:Kurt sez: "Coincidently, last night I stumbled across Benjamin Feen's photo album from his current trip to India, where he has a step-by-step photo sequence of the creation of "sweet paan" on page 3. Link
UPDATE:Farhad Manjoo points out this old BBC article that warns of oral cancer in paan aficionados. Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:07 am Thursday, Jan 13
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They're all but worthless in the internal currency market, but dollars bills have found a new purpose: as canvases for Kamiel Proost's whimsical paintings.
Link (Thanks, Rev.Dr. Spyder X!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:41 am Thursday, Jan 13
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Here are a bunch of MP3s with lectures and interviews with psychedelic neuronauts Robert Anton Wilson, Mark Pesce, and the late Terrence McKenna (who I just learned owned an original set of
Ernst Haeckel books).
Link (Thanks, Matt!) UPDATE: More McKenna lectures (not very good sound quality) here.
Even more trippy MP3s here! (Thanks, Robai!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:32 am Thursday, Jan 13
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Iapetus, one of Saturn's moons, has a "topographic ridge that coincides almost exactly with the geographic equator," giving it the look of a cheap plastic toy with mold flash.
The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain. Along the roughly 1,300 kilometer (800 mile) length over which it can be traced in this picture, it remains almost exactly parallel to the equator within a couple of degrees."
Link
By David Pescovitz at 8:14 am Thursday, Jan 13
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During the 1990s, my friend Greg Dulli was the singer for the
Afghan Whigs. His current ensemble, the
Twilight Singers, has released three exquisite albums including, most recently, an amazing all-covers record called She Loves You. Greg has always drawn inspiration from old soul and R&B and now he's put together a new band, Uptown Lights, just to play his favorite tunes.
"Formed primarily to throw house parties in their hometown while they work on their respective individual projects, Uptown Lights revisits the days of dressing uptown and throwing downtown.
Armed with a setlist featuring the songs of their heroes, like O.V. Wright, Joe Tex, the Temptations, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and many, many more, this show is not to be missed..."
The first gig is February 19 in Los Angeles. No tour is planned yet, but they promise to post occasional live MP3s. Black out the windows, it's party time.
Link (via Summer's Kiss)
By David Pescovitz at 7:32 am Thursday, Jan 13
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The actors behind the Spanish language version of The Simpsons are involved in a labor dispute between Mexico's National Actors Association and a Mexican contractor who handles the dubbing of the show. If the matter isn't settled soon, new actors might be hired to replace the original Spanish cast. From the Associated Press:
(Nancy) Mackenzie, the voice of Marge, has been with the union for about 40 years, dubbing television shows that include "Dallas" and "The Dukes of Hazard."
Losing the part in "The Simpsons" would be hard to take, she said.
"You get to the point where you care deeply for your cartoon character," Mackenzie said. "You love them. You go to bed with them at night. It's a sad state, and not because of the money. It's for love."
Link (Thanks, C-lo!)
By David Pescovitz at 5:57 am Thursday, Jan 13
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Prince Harry was photographed at a
formal costume party sporting a Nazi uniform. The Sun newspaper ran the picture on the front page, resulting in a quick mea culpa from the possible future King of England.
Link
UPDATE: BB reader Greg Phillips kindly pointed out that a "fancy dress party" is the equivalent of a "costume party."
By David Pescovitz at 1:23 am Thursday, Jan 13
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A male fly looking to mate often brings a female a gift such as a tasty bug. While the female eats, the male takes care of business. However, a new study by biologists at the University of Western Australia posits that some male flies trick their mates with fake gifts like seed tufts or leaves. From an Animal Planet article about the study:
(Researcher Natasha) LeBas explained that cheating with token goodies does not hurt the species overall, but instead reveals the battle between the sexes over how much males and females wish to invest in reproduction.
"Each sex wants to invest less and wants the other sex to invest more," LeBas told Animal Planet News. "This study is an example of a species in which males who invest a lot, by giving nutritious gifts, seem to have a successful way of investing less, by giving tokens, because females seem to take some time to give up trying to feed from the token."
Link
By David Pescovitz at 1:02 am Thursday, Jan 13
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My latest article for TheFeature is an interview with Hartmut Neven, a machine vision researcher who is leveraging the ubiquity of cameraphones to bring biometrics to the mobile masses and hyperlink the world through a system best described as "a visual Google.
TheFeature: What do you mean by "visual Google"?
Neven: You take a picture of something, send it to our servers, and we either provide you with more information or link you to the place that will. Let's say you're standing in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. You take a snapshot with your cameraphone and instantly receive an audio-visual narrative about the painting. Then you step out of the Louvre and see a cafe. Should you go in? Take a shot from the other side of the street and a restaurant guide will appear on your phone. You sit down inside, but perhaps your French is a little rusty. You take a picture of the menu and a dictionary comes up to translate. There is a huge variety of people in these kinds of situations, from stamp collectors, to people who want to check their skin melanoma, to police officers who need to identify the person in front of them.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 12:22 am Thursday, Jan 13
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Denise sez, "Cory reviewed Wallace Wang's latest book,
Steal This File-Sharing Book recently. I recorded an interview with Wallace this afternoon, and it's available as a podcast on my blog. Wallace and I discuss the future of P2P networks, nefarious knitters, macchiato moms, the Grokster decision, the economics of digital media, and — what podcast would be complete without a little porn?"
Link
(
Thanks, Denise!)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:18 am Thursday, Jan 13
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I took a pic of this sign at the security checkpoint in the airport in Lyon, France -- it says that you can get a three year prison sentence for trafficking in counterfeit trademarks.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 12:16 am Thursday, Jan 13
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Peyton sez, "the USGS photo site you linked to last night only allows 300 downloads of full sized images per day. Oops! So I hooked up the owner of the site with blogtorrent and helped him troubleshoot his firewall/router issues."
Torrent Link
(
Thanks, Peyton!)
