December 2008
49 posts
Police bikes in front of Saul's →
Dec 31st
San Francisco skyline →
Dec 31st
Baby Asus, Mac Daddy →
Dec 31st
Mimi Canter, age 7 →
Dec 31st
Marc Canter's fence →
Dec 31st
Tech News for Everyone? →
Matt Cutts started a thread on FriendFeed about TechMeme. He’s noticed something that almost everyone who is a regular clicker on TechMeme has noticed. There’s really not much tech news…
Dec 29th
Tweetree, day 3 →
I’m still very impressed with the service and the team. 1. They’ve implemented the client side of the thumbnail code I inserted into my AFP pictures site, so now when I post one of…
Dec 29th
Bootstrapping thumbnails for photo apps →
You know I like Tweetree, I gushed about it yesterday. The main thing I like is that it gives you a graphic view of things you link to from Twitter messages. So in addition to seeing a…
Dec 28th
Tweetree →
You heard it here first, this thing is great! http://tweetree.com/davewiner It pulls in content it knows about like Flickr pics and YouTube videos so you can view inline. It figures out the…
Dec 28th
Keepin it simple →
Ever since Twitter came out I’ve been developing mini-apps that connect it with other services and utilities. Some have stood up over time, esp the Flickr-to-Twitter and Twitter-to-Identi.ca…
Dec 27th
My brother Om →
Om just wrote a one-year retrospective on the big event last December that set his life on a new course. It’s a beautiful piece. For people like Om and myself, it took a big wakeup call to help…
Dec 27th
Social search, not authority-based →
Loic Le Meur wants Twitter’s search to emphasize people who have more followers over those that have fewer. I think this is a bad idea. On FriendFeed, Jeremiah Owyang wants priority…
Dec 27th
Four movies and other follow-ups →
Yesterday was the NakedJen Film Festival in Salt Lake City and Berkeley; it was also Christmas Day around the world. The festival is for movie lovers wanting to indulge in a massive amounts…
Dec 27th
$249 to burn →
With Christmas coming up, I wanted to buy something cool and electronic and gadgety, fun and impulsive, under $249 on Amazon. But I couldn’t find anything I don’t already have. When I was a kid the…
Dec 24th
Blogger of the Year →
I guess Christmas Eve is the day to announce the Blogger of the Year. It’s only the second time I’ve done it, and I did it last year on this day, and it seems like a good day to do it. That’s what…
Dec 24th
The NakedJen Film Festival →
Read up on the NJFF here. We’re going to be doing one in Berkeley too, on Christmas Day. Gotta start planning it. Basic plot. 1. Three movies that open Christmas Day. One of…
Dec 24th
Obama's bone-headedness, day 2 →
There’s an epic discussion taking place under yesterday’s piece about Rick Warren and the Obama inaugural. Really something to behold. Lots of intelligent discourse about something that’s very…
Dec 23rd
Rick Warren is over the top →
Thanks to David Weinberger for offering a foil for me to argue with on the case of Rick Warren giving the invocation at the Obama inaugural. I posted a rough version of this in a comment on Doc…
Dec 23rd
Bailout hall of shame →
Dec 23rd
Posterous →
I’ve noticed that Mike Arrington tends to use Posterous for pictures he posts while traveling, pics of his dog Laguna, random stuff. I wondered why he used it instead of Flickr, which is…
Dec 22nd
CTO of the Year →
Tis the season for X Of The Year awards. Time has Person Of The Year, I have Blogger Of The Year, and InformationWeek has CTO Of The Year, who they just announced is Werner Vogels of…
Dec 21st
Web 2.0 gas prices, revisited →
On June 29, I took a picture of the prices at a local gas station, thinking they were worth documenting for two reasons: 1. The prices were so shockingly high. 2. I thought they’d continue to…
Dec 21st
Measuring the worth of a blogger →
It occurred to me that one way to measure the worth of a blogger is how much intelligence do they add or subtract to or from the universe. Sometimes it seems some bloggers just subtract,…
Dec 21st
Blogger of the Year 2008 →
Last year, after giving it much thought, I decided to give out an award that I called, unoriginally, Blogger of the Year. I felt entitled to do so because I am a blogger, like millions of…
Dec 20th
Where are snowcams? →
They’re calling it #snowmageddon on Twitter. I know it’s snowing a lot back east cause it’s raining a lot here on the California coast. And now it’s raining some more. More rain here, more snow…
Dec 19th
Goodbye to an icon →
Doc Searls writes that Out Of Town News on Harvard Sq in Cambridge is going out of business on January 1. There are efforts to revive it as a print-on-demand business, but come on, that’s…
Dec 19th
Is a netbook a cheap laptop? →
Two people I respect enormously, John Gruber and Michael Gartenberg, both joined in the discussion of what netbooks are with the same theory. “What is the difference between a ‘netbook’ and a…
Dec 18th
Embargoes are stupid and unbloglike →
See this FriendFeed post. http://bit.ly/BrEAf Thanks!
Dec 18th
What is a netbook? →
In October, I wrote a piece that explained why I like netbooks. It listed a set of criteria that says if something is a netbook or not. Yes, it’s my opinion. But someone has to start this…
Dec 17th
My great uncle's letters →
German author Arno Schmidt was my great-uncle on my mother’s side, my maternal grandmother’s younger brother. I never met him, but when he died in 1979, my mother ended up with a…
Dec 16th
Singin in the Rain, day 2 →
I didn’t know so many 20s and 30s film enthusiasts were tuned in to Scripting News. I am one myself, the 30s were probably the biggest growth decade for film, at the dawn of the decade sound was just…
Dec 15th
Netflix is dix →
My credit card account got hacked, leaving me in a sticky wicket when I got to NY. I was able to convince the credit card company to let me check in, just, and then when I got to the room…
Dec 15th
Twitter federates with Google? →
Not sure what to make of the announcement that Twitter is becoming part of Google’s federation. That could be the wrong way to describe it. Here’s what I do know. You’ll be able to use…
Dec 15th
The lame duck ducks, redux →
Yesterday I posted a video of US President George Bush having a pair of shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist while yelling insults at him. Bush did what you’d hope he’d do, he ducked — then…
Dec 15th
The lame duck ducks →
Watching the video I gotta say — this is not cool. I may detest Bush, but he’s still the President of the United States.
Dec 15th
Singin in the Rain →
I’ve been looking for this song, in video, for years — and today I found it on YouTube, while flying from NY to SF on American Airlines flight 15. It was the closing song of the Hollywood Revue…
Dec 15th
First post from 38K feet →
I’m on an American Airlines flight from New York to San Francisco. It has wifi from Gogo Inflight. Aside from immediately posting a note on Twitter, I checked to see if it had enough bandwidth…
Dec 14th
Greetings from Dallas airport →
Changing planes here for NY/JFK. Going to take the AirTrain into NY, this time I’m going to get on the LIRR in Jamaica and ride it into Penn Station. I hear from people who are regular JFKers…
Dec 9th
Is your subway system a platform? →
Does it have an API? Funny thought perhaps, or maybe only in the Bay Area — but our subway system — BART, has an API. And it’s kind of fun. I spent a couple of hours today hacking together an…
Dec 9th
Super-busy day today →
A hugely long to-do list and a chance to learn something I think I’m going to spend my entire life learning, over and over. Because it’s so much fun… Intelligence and creativity are great,…
Dec 8th
The space between Twitter and FriendFeed →
I’m a longtime Twitter user, and as you may know a very regular user of FriendFeed. Each has its strengths but if I had to choose, sort of like Sophie’s Choice, I’d have to go with…
Dec 7th
Soon it will be time to start over, again →
Here’s how the tech industry cycle goes. A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from…
Dec 5th
Bathtime in Clerkenwell →
Dec 4th
TechCrunch federates with Facebook →
TechCrunch: “TechCrunch readers can now use their Facebook accounts to sign in before leaving comments.” Interesting. And it integrates with Facebook’s news feed. I left a comment…
Dec 3rd
New news flows →
When we talk about news on the net the conversation is dominated by the interests of news organizations. The stories we tell are from their point of view. The vexing problems we face are…
Dec 3rd
XML-RPC update →
Its been a long time since I written about XML-RPC, it’s one of those things that when I do, the flamers show up and get all personal. I shouldn’t let that get in the way, of course; and…
Dec 3rd
A Plan B for news? →
Jeff Jarvis responds to my series of pieces about news after the hypothetical collapse of the news industry. I wrote a comment there, which I’m reproducing here, with some light edits. …
Dec 2nd
An image processing web service →
On Sunday, I wished for a web service that would take an image, a height and a width, and return a thumbnail for the image. Andrew Burton put up a service, I gave it a try, with no luck. Maybe…
Dec 2nd
Pownce we hardly knew ye →
I was a Pownce user. (Ack it can’t find my page — and I was a premium, paying user! Oy. When did that happen?) There were some things I liked about it, but I agree it’s time to pull…
Dec 2nd