Links for 02-11-2008

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Does Microsoft need consumers? Yes. - As he often is, Nick is spot on: "But the importance of the consumer market to Microsoft goes well beyond money. There is no bright line between the use of Office in businesses and the use of Office in homes and schools. "


• Cool Tool: Big Green Egg - Looks like an awesome smoker.


• Complex Diagrams » Generation of Complex Diagrams: How to Make Lasagna Instead of Spaghetti - Always interested in new ways of presenting complex data. I haven't checked this out yet.


• Microsoft will pay high price for failing to learn history lessons | Media | The Observer - via Matt Asay. Check out the second paragraph--it's too good to quote only partially here.


• Starbucks ditches T-Mobile for AT&T | The Social - CNET News.com - This is welcome and exciting news.


• James Governor’s Monkchips » Note To Furl: should you be more del.ici.ous? - It's striking how little has changed. This post was written 4!! years ago.


• Subtraction: Charityware - The problem is that OLPC was never setup for end user sales. So the consequences of being pressured into it (for both financial and community pressure reasons) aren't especially surprising.


• Tiinker is the Anti-Digg - ReadWriteWeb - Something else to check out.


• Web 3.0: Is It About Personalization? - ReadWriteWeb - I'm starting to spend some time getting my arms around where the web is evolving to.


• apophenia: a google horror story: what happens when you are disappeared - I've read similar stories with respect to Flickr. This is another face of the data transportability issue in addition to the security one.


• Printing photos onto canvas- Photo on canvas poster printing equipment: Photogonia.com - I've seen some photos output like this. Quite impressive. Don't know about this specific vendor.


• The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives | WHDb - Not all the alternatives are that comparable to the proprietary packages but this list offers up a lot of things to check out--especially if you just need something lightweight.


• The Economics of Online Backup - Inside Lightroom - A good look at the costs of backing up online in the context of photos. Bottom line: it's not especially cheap. I've tried it but for the ~200GB I'd need, the extra security isn't worth it.


• PhotoKeywords | Microstock Diaries - I'm very bad about metadata. Wonder if this would help?


• Wired News from the Past - The history of the AP.


• Reuters CEO sees "semantic web" in its future - Definitions remain fuzzy here but some interesting trends popping up above the noise.


• tecosystems » Where’s the Network? - SOG's views on this largely mirror mine. If you believe we'll have five "computers" (rather than 100s or 1000s), I'm not sure premium "arms merchant" is where you want to be.


• YouTube - Pachelbel Rant - Very funny. A friend sent this to me after I mentioned I sometimes use a "mix tape" of Canon in D variants as background for writing.