Links for 03-21-2009

• Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore Answers Our Burning Questions - Today's News: Our Take | TVGuide.com - So IOW Kara was Gandalf the White. Have to admit that I always resisted trying to think to much about that sort of Christian overlay on LOTR even though it was clearly there.
• Is Your Memory Getting Cloudy? « Data Center Knowledge - Interesting but we've been hearing about in-memory architectures (that aren't just caches) for a long time and they've never come to anything.
• Kindle Content Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) - A good writeup of what works well (and what doesn't) on a Kindle. I've already found the sampling feature to be great.
• Music Discovery Deathmatch at SXSW « Music Machinery - I definitely will want to chase down the video of this.
• stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News - At the same time, I generally agree that local coverage isn't all that great today in a lot of markets. And outside of cities, it's very spotty with some great local papers and a lot of ones that are perfunctory at best.
• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky - I find that Clay sometimes goes a bit over the top in his social media enthusiasm, but this strikes me as very balanced and perhaps the best piece I've read on the future of newspapers and journalism question.
• The Way We Live Now - Growing Up on Facebook - NYTimes.com - "It could be that my generation was the anomalous one, that Facebook marks a return to the time when people remained embedded in their communities for life, with connections that ran deep, peers who reined them in if they strayed too far from the norm, parents who expected them to live at home until marriage (adult children are already reclaiming their childhood rooms in droves). More likely, though, the very thing that attracts us oldsters to Facebook — the lure of auld lang syne — will be its undoing. Kids, who will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon the service (remember Friendster?) and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves."

Links for 03-06-2009

• Last.fm Boffin - Local Radio Tech Demo [Update: 0.0.4 released!] – Audioscrobbler Beta Discussions – Last.fm - Very interesting looking tool from last.fm to tag your local music. [via Paul Lamere]
• telematics - Fascinating video of building a city. via The Long Now blog.
• The Passion of Steve Jobs - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
• Computer Data Storage Through the Ages -- From Punch Cards to Blu-Ray - Page 1 | Maximum PC - OK. I'm going to slap these guys: "And if you've lived long enough to remember the IBM Punch Card first hand, just ask and we'll SPEAK LOUDER."
• The Stock Industry May Be in Freefall, But Assignment Photography Lives On | Black Star Rising - I've read some other things suggesting microsotock has gotten more competitive in terms of quality. As I said at the time, the end game in stock seems to be at least partly along the lines of going back to professionals--but professionals making a lot less money.
• Cool Tools: SuperMagnetMan - ooh. Dangerous magnets! Yes!
• Growing Rich by Blogging Is a High-Tech Fairy Tale | Newsweek Daniel Lyons | Techtonic Shifts | Newsweek.com - Good piece on the economic of blogging.
• Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. - broadstuff - I'm not sure this is all *quite* fair but there's a lot of truth to it and it's quite funny. e.g. "Translation: By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph and will connect to anyone and anything they damn well want - especially Celebrities - not just their "Friends"."

Links for 03-05-2009

• The 7" Eee is going away? That's OK | Education IT | ZDNet.com - This move by Asus highlights that people don't want netbooks for small's sake. They want cheap.
• Analysts see bright spots in dark photo market | Underexposed - CNET News - Digital SLR's growing; compacts shrinking.
• Wall Street on the Tundra | vanityfair.com - "Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” "
• Is the Mac Mini Apple's Best Value, or Irrelevant? - Talk Back by Digital Trends - I'm more inclined to side with Larry Dignan here. I actually agree with Rob that the Mac Mini could be a good device to hook up to a HDTV. But, as things stand, it's a lot of money to devote to a dedicated device (at least for me).

Links for 03-04-2009

• Excerpts, Scraping and Fair Use | PlagiarismToday - When is excerpting just basically scraping? In the blogging for eyeballs game, there's a lot of incentive to do at least some percentage of posts that combine liberal excepting with very lightweight commentary.
• Real Dan Lyons Web Site » Blog Archive Tech blog roundup « - "I wrote recently about how the economics of blogging kind of sucks. But I neglected to mention the fine contribution to journalism and world knowledge that blogs represent. One of the great things about the blogosphere is the unique information that each blog provides. For example, today Apple announced some new machines. In the old days you’d just have to read about that in the newspaper. Today you can set up a feed reader or just bookmark a bunch of blogs and get really exciting, nearly identical, not-in-depth coverage of this same momentous news."
• The Recession Speeds Chip Industry Consolidation - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - Typically good overview by Ashlee Vance on what's going on in the chip manufacturing space.
• Why computer voices still don't sound human. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine - Interesting piece on the problems with computerized text-to-speech.

Links for 03-03-2009

• 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits - Some interesting thoughts about taking unusual portraits.
• The Netbook Models You Love (And Don’t) | Smarterware - Cost really seems the big thing here. If you're willing to pay for an ultraportable that costs 2-3x, I don't find the relative form factor, weight, and performance of netbooks especially attractive tradeoffs.
• Gadgets Greet Business Travelers - Business Travel Column - Joe Brancatelli - Seat 2B - Portfolio.com - ""If you had the answers, you'd be the next Bill Gates," one long-time computer executive told me last week. "We're all struggling with devices, concepts, pricing, computing platforms. There are lots of cross-currents and no consensus."" Today's mobile world is hard to figure out--and I don't expect it will gel into something simple anyway. (I tend to agree with the ultimate comment that we tend towards at least a pocketable device and a lightweight (but non-pocketable one).
• Twitter / Werner Vogels: remember that the key driv ... - Which is a problem for pure cloud-based backup.
• Twitter’s public/private space design, aka “How to find girls on Twitter” | Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen - "Private spaces are better for scaling across different demographics long-term, since it keeps different audiences segmented from each other. The downside is that you need to conquer the critical mass problem over-and-over again Public spaces are better for getting to critical mass once, and generating fun. But the downside is that if you randomly get a bunch of Portuguese-speaking members, then your entire site might become known as “that Brazilian social network.”
• Allen On Travel - "There's no substitute for person-to-person human contact, and most businesses, including mine, will have to figure out what is the right balance between the new tools and capabilities and really being there. However, I don't see myself or any colleagues reaching the 200,000 mile mark via air in a single year ever again."
• Andrew Lark: Kindle This - I suppose it would be very old school of me to wonder whether Amazon simply doesn't care about having a social media strategy for the Kindle.
• What Fonts Are Websafe in 2009? - SitePoint Forums - Discussion of font alternatives for Web design. (It has somewhat of a Vista/Windows 7 flavor because of the new fonts included with these.)
• At work - The Big Picture - Boston.com - An especially good edition of an awesome feature.
• The Coming Cloud Computing Wars | SYS-CON MEDIA - Cloud in the context of what it means from a vendor perspective--a struggle for relevance. Good piece.