Revolving around the ephemeral “web 2.0″ and the future of the internet, Web 2.0 Expo New York wrapped up over the weekend, and already the talks are up at the blip.tv Web2Expo page. (The San Francisco talks from April are also up for viewing.) The expo runs the gamut from technology to business, but most interesting were the talks on web 2.0 structure by Jay Adelson of Digg.com and author Clay Shirky. Shirky’s talk, It’s not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure., especially titillated my nerd bones, so here it is in all its bald-headed, fast-talking glory:

Basically, Shirky proposes that consequences we normally attribute to an explosion of available information thanks to the internet is actually attributable to a failure of the filters in place to deal with an already abundant amount of information. Since the invention of the printing press, he says, we have lived amidst “information overload”, such that we can no longer look at the phenomenon as a problem, but as a fact. An appropriate response, then, is to build better filters.

Notice that the solution is to build, not to fix. An overload of information has been our oxygen for centuries, but the type and amount of data we deal with now is vastly different than whatever has come before. Shirky ends by separating the types of filters needed into two categories: programming and social. The latter category is pretty nebulous, but “programming” is much more concrete, and already in use today. Digg, Netflix, Google, and every other website run on extrapolating from its users’ actions is utilizing so-called collaborative filters, and these are a pivotal part of the internet’s future.

Collaborative filtering works by ranking content according to prior users’ actions (e.g., Google looks at links, the paragraphs surrounding search terms, other mysterious data), then analyzing your own actions to serve up relevant content. With sites like Digg and Reddit, this involves users upvoting or downvoting submitted sites, and then you seeing the best sites in descending order (with maybe some specializing depending on if you’re at a subpage). With sites like Netflix and Amazon, your own consumption is compared to other consumers in order to serve up recommendations.

As we approach the singularity and the web becomes more ubiquitous, collaborative filtering will become increasingly sophisticated (and accurate). As Jay Adelson mentions, Google’s search rankings have become more powerful simply because of the diversity of its users has increased. Collaborative filtering thrives on multifarious data, and this will come quickly with a larger number of netizens, and more slowly through the growing number of connections between web services. Adelson points to the economic advantages of shared data (read: better advertising targeting), but this is of course of huge value to users and developers as well.

Low-level web curation, from Metafilter to Undress Me Robot, will always have its place online, but the future is definitely in these automated processes which leverage what each user is already doing to provide a highly personalized and more effective experience. However, obviously, collaborative filtering is simply an update of the sort of filter that has been around since the 1500s, moving from the editorial eye of a single person to the gaze of millions. The next big jump in information overload might break down even these strong filters, taking a paradigm shift to get back on top. And who knows where that will take us?

Paul Graham posts venture capital firm Y Combinator’s Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund. The list is 30 ideas long, and covers a wide breadth, from ousting Microsoft from their monopolizing grasp on office software (#11) to “[doing] to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica” (#23).

Thanks to another funding round, Twitter now has a rumored $15 million in funding. Joining the team are Bijan Sabet with Spark Capital and Jeff Bezos (you know, the guy that owns Amazon.com), which explains all the new bling. The best news? “Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model.”

Let’s just see if they can manage that before Google does.

Ian Rogers has unveiled Topspin, a new digital music marketing platform. The unveiling is more or less a well-done press release, meaning it says a lot without saying anything at all. However, Rogers did link to three of the ten artists they are working with: Josh Rouse, Jubilee, and The Dandy Warhols.

Since much of the value Topspin adds is in the artist control panel which is behind the scenes, these three examples show only the very tip of the proverbial Topspin iceberg. The visual design for each of these is done by the artist, Topspin is the enabling platform underneath. And what you can’t see, the back office where the artist manages pricing, catalog, metadata, fans, and most importantly marketing campaigns and analytics, is our bread and butter.

What struck me was the “The visual design for each of these is done by the artist” line. Really? I suppose this is a matter of technicalities; changing some colors in your MySpace or Virb profile is technically visual design, I guess. The Dandy Warhols site eschews the cookie-cutter template design a bit, but only to replace it with something really sparse.

Based entirely on these three examples (which are all we have to go on, but see below), Topspin seems perfectly primed to do….nothing great. The hidden “back office” is definitely a huge boon to artists and labels alike, but it is nothing that could not be achieved with good web statistics software (like AWStats or even Google Analytics) and a listserv manager. This is not to say that such a product will not be successful. Even if cheaper alternatives exist, bands/labels are likely to look to the company that combines all the services into a single, easy to use package. Maybe not so special, but admittedly pretty useful.

Outsourcing a significant portion of band management might not be especially tempting to big labels with enough money for a personalized solution (or a general disdain for digital music in general), but it’s perfect for independents. And not having to rely on big money for this sort of thing is going to allow a lot more bands to remain independent and a lot more indie labels to remain competitive.

My biggest complaint with Topspin is that they seem to be creating a system in which every band website is the same. Examples may be released in the near future that display a greater ability to produce original design, but I am skeptical until then. However, I am also open-minded, since the cheap design is almost positively a result of the bands being independent (probably no dedicated web team).

Another factor (and consequence of the bands’ independence) is that Topspin might not be utilized in exactly the intended way:

We are about demand creation, not demand fulfillment. I call this out because the line is admittedly blurry in our above examples, since our first product is very much about direct-to-fan marketing, which in many ways resembles demand fulfillment from the consumer perspective.

This begs the question of why unveil a product using examples that poorly display the product, but we’ll see.

No matter what, please take all of the above with a big grain of salt. Why? Because as I mentioned, Topspin is a brainchild of Ian Rogers, who knows exactly what he is talking about when it comes to digital music. His line Convenience wins, Hubris loses assures me that this whole endeavor is in good hands, regardless of any startup bumps along the way.

soundamus - web service that provides a RSS feed of new and upcoming albums based on artists you scrobble on Last.fm. Also known as: the most useful mashup of 2008.

Chez Pazienza: Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career:

As far as CNN (and to be fair, the mainstream TV press in general) believes, it still sits comfortably at the top of the food chain, unthreatened by any possibility of a major paradigm shift being brought to bear by a horde of little people with laptops and opinions. Although the big networks recognize the need to appeal to bloggers, they don’t fear them — and that means that they don’t respect them. Corporate-think dictates that the mainstream television press as a monstrous multi-headed hydra is the ultimate news authority and therefore is in possession of the one and only hotline to the ghosts of Murrow and Sevareid. Sure those bloggers are entertaining, but in the end they’re really just insects who either feed off the carcasses of news items vetted through various networks or, when they do break stories, want nothing more than to see themselves granted an audience by the kingmakers on television.

This, of course, is horseshit.

Two weeks ago, CNN fired Chez Pazienza for his blogging under his real name. The atrociously antiquated employee handbook states “any writing done for a ‘non-CNN outlet’ must be run through the network’s standards and practices department,” and CNN seems to have a history of exercising the rule without discretion. More than evidence of the company’s ridiculous bureaucracy, the story and ones like it illuminate the company’s unfortunate hypocrisy.

CNN’s willingness to fire someone like Jacki tells you everything you need to know about how backward the network’s thinking is when it comes to new media. It pays more lip-service to bloggers and their internet realm than any other mainstream media outlet, but in the end that’s really all it is — lip-service.

Sadly, the criticisms of conventional news media cannot be confined to its dealings with the internet and New Media. The problems are more fundamental, stemming from the overwhelming focus on profit margins that permeates every major corporation. It would be impossible to underestimate the effect this has on network news reporting. When news is seen as a necessary evil — barely profitable but wanted by all the target demographics — strict objectivity is thrown out the window. What stories are reported, and how they are reported, instantly changes.

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what’s worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, “What can we do to not lead with Iraq?” — the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn’t always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I’d “increased shareholder value.” (For the record, if you’re a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word “shareholders,” let alone be reminded that you’re beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public — to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up — and that’s not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

Pazienza’s lengthy diatribe is largely depressing, as any bitterly honest look at network news is likely to be. But it ends on an uplifting note. As more and more households gain access to the internet, conventional news media will become increasingly irrelevant. Until the fateful day, though, when we can cast off the entrenched Old Guard, people need to constantly call them on their shit.

Awhile back I was watching a great documentary on the birth of the punk scene, it closed with former Black Flag frontman and current TV host Henry Rollins saying these words: “All it takes is one person to stand up and say ‘fuck this.’”

I truly hope so, because I’m finally doing just that.

And I should’ve done it a long time ago.

Amen.

Rewind Kindly - Inspired by Be Kind Rewind, Austin based Filmmaking Frenzy is putting on a contest for people to “complete an up-to-five-minute, homemade, low-budget remake of a popular hollywood film”. Much love to Star Wars.

The Appeal of the MacBook Air - John Gruber proselytizes for the MacBook Air a bit more, comparing it to a sexy convertible coupe (not unlike the iPod Mini or Nano). I pretty much agree with Gruber, and am still surprised that there is a strong group of people who foresee the MacBook Air failing. Would I buy it? No. But it is a good machine for a lot of people besides me. (Then again, this is a lot more than $50 we’re talking about; analogies only go so far.)

Things I have learned from mostly linkblogging for more than 10 years - Ben Tesch has been speaking to my heart lately with all of his ideas.

It makes sense that a video post and a photo post and an audio post look different, but why is there only one type of text post? Why is a Tweet handled in the same way as a 2,000-word essay? Where is the book or movie review type? Jason has done this kind of stuff for years, and had to manage entire multiple blogs just to do it. Why can’t I take a feed, create a new post template specifically for it, and plug the feed into it? And if I can, why is it so difficult?

Alltop.com - Like popurls.com except organized by topic. Click a topic and find the newest stories from at least thirty related sites. For example, click Science and get the top stories from New Scientist, Nature, New York Times, ABC, and more. Or in their own words:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections—”aggregations”—into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page.

Facebook: the more people who join, the less useful it becomes.

In an all-too-long post, Ben Brown (self-professed internet rockstar) laments the failings of Facebook, likening it to a Walmart or Costco with a collection of mediocre crap that “just happen to be conveniently located in the same place.” In other words, Facebook has become another example of a faceless big business, and we as internet denizens would do better to frequent the Mom & Pop sites run by people that provide a better service with more heart. (Sites that, for instance, aren’t overrun by advertising or useless applications like vampire bites.)

My problems with such a conclusion is that it lacks any substance. It’s all clouds and sweet talking. Firstly, as Andrew Dupont puts it, “these are valid critiques of Facebook, but they’re also critiques of social networking sites in general, to varying degrees.” There is a clear catch-22 faced by any social network: in order to be popular, and oftentimes successful, the site needs (by definition) a lot of users. Having a lot of users, however, makes room for misuse of the system, resulting in “Facebook friends” and pointless add-ons. (Not to mention that advertising is the name-of-the-game these days, and your site is not lasting long without a good advertising model in place.)

Ultimately, the onus is on the user base to shape the system. If everyone on Facebook was more conservative in their use of the site, there would be little to complain about. But the users are by-and-large doing whatever makes them happy. This is not a bad thing at all, except for the few users who have become fed up with what has happened to their beloved Facebook. Again, it depends on how you use the site. I hate all the things Ben hates, but for whatever reason (perhaps due to who I have and have not added to my friends) I rarely come across these annoyances.

Yes, I agree that Facebook has gone downhill in some ways since its inception, but it has also improved in other ways. Furthermore, any complaints you levy against it, barring those dealing with privacy issues (Facebook, you underhanded bastards), can also be applied to any other social network. What social network has not grown more cumbersome as the number of users increased?

Secondly, what are these Mom & Pop social networks we should be supporting? Smaller social networks are inherently less useful in general. They may provide exponentially more utility in specific areas (such as Doostang, which is only for business networking), but hardly offer the broad reach that a site like Facebook offers. Another option like Virb is certainly much prettier than MySpace, but it will be covered in just as much spam as soon as it gets big. (Granted, it will be pretty spam.)

Finally, I have to stress there is nothing innately wrong with Facebook (in theory). Cry all day about it, but social networking is ultimately about (you guessed it) being social, and that is simply fun to do in a huge community where all of your friends live. It is important to understand that moving to a smaller social network would be like leaving Verizon for a cell phone provider with a fraction of the customers and the ability to only communicate within the network. The mom and pop cell phone service might be crystal clear, cheap as hell, and have loving customer service out the wazoo, but don’t go denying the substantial utility involved in being in a network with all of your friends just because it cost a bit more and sounds a bit crappier.

After years of trying to push their ways into the social networking business, Google and Yahoo are changing tactics. Forget Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360: think personal social homepages. The New York Times reports iGoogle and My Yahoo will soon be expanding to incorporate a more social twist:

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

(Of course, Yahoo unveils a new social network every month.)

Google is as tight-lipped as ever, but Yahoo is a bit more generous with information. The company is working on so-called Inbox 2.0, a project to add several features to the Yahoo Mail service. For example, the inbox will function socially, users will have profile pages, and other Yahoo services will be integrated to present a unified social experience.

Google, on the other hand, has only commented that they “believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social,” and “it is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”

The most obvious question is, “Why ignore Orkut and Yahoo Mash (and so on)?” How will the expansion of iGoogle and My Yahoo differ from those ventures? Right now, admittedly from the very little information available, the whole thing seems like Google and Yahoo are trying to (essentially) create Facebook, except with “email” instead of “messages”. Sure, Google and Yahoo could provide a more useful front page (though, more social?) and gather more users, but those are not fundamental differences.

Then again, assuming these projects are successful, a well-designed network with millions of users would certainly have enough gravity to pull people from Facebook and MySpace. Facebook is doubly vulnerable, since it lost its main attraction once its doors were opened to the non-collegiate public. MySpace, on the other hand, continues to be a piece of shit, which I guess makes it doubly vulnerable as well.

cumul.us has launched. I wrote about it not so long ago, and here it is, finally (after a whole 11 days!). Tune into http://blog.cumul.us/ for updates.

(And while on the topic of sweet uses for sweet things: Foamee, a Twitter service that “helps track who you owe beers to (and vice versa)”.)

Over the past two months, Ben Tesch has been developing a weather aggregator designed to harness the wisdom of the crowd (pardon the web 2.0-ism): cumul.us. The site will feature three aspects to provide the most accurate (and useful) predictions possible:

1. Firstly, the site will combine as many possible sources of weather forecasts as possible.

2. Secondly, you can predict the weather yourself. When you make prediction for a particular time and place, the site will go check all of its data sources and record what really happened, and give you a score based on how right you were. Since the site will be tracking the accuracy of all of this, you’ll be able to see who is more right, and follow them.

3. Thirdly, the site will give you information on the real reason you check the weather: to find out what you should wear. As people submit what they are wearing, it goes into the aggregation of what everyone is wearing in order to suggest to other people what they should wear.

The first feature is pretty straightforward (weather data from sources like The Weather Channel, Accuweather, and Weather Underground will be shown in aggregate), and it’s really the second and third features that set cumul.us apart. And specifically the second feature that is causing the most controversy.

Since everyone else is doing it, I am going to throw in my own two cents. I see the site succeeding (at least in larger cities), because I see the site becoming a very responsive measure of current weather conditions. My roommates and I are always checking weather.com, but never for any extended forecast. What we’re interested in is how the weather is now, and maybe later in the day too. Who cares today what the weather is predicted to be tomorrow? I can check it tomorrow.

As much as I depend on weather.com for this information, it is inaccurate a significant amount of the time. Sometimes it is (ostensibly) because the site has not updated (right now the current conditions are 25 minutes behind), but most of the time the forecast is just too delayed. Too often have I looked out the window and seen a downpour while weather.com has told me “cloudy” or “chance of rain”.

This is where I think cumul.us will be really useful. “Professional” weather prediction will still be there (see feature 1), but the added bit of citizen meteorology will really boost the site. It may not say much about the crowd’s ability to accurately predict weather, but I don’t think that will really be a problem. Meteorology is a difficult science, and it may very well be left to the professionals for any sort of substantial forecast. But for the little stuff, the “How is it out? And what should I wear today?”, the crowd is the place to be.

Anyway, the site will be launching in the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned. And check out the cumul.us photoset on Flickr for a preview.

An editor’s note in Edge 205:

In May, 2004, Edge published Danny Hillis’s essay in which he proposed Aristotle: The Knowledge Web. “With the knowledge web,” he wrote, “humanity’s accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable, and more useful. Anyone who wants to learn will be able to find the best and the most meaningful explanations of what they want to know. Anyone with something to teach will have a way to reach those who what to learn.”

To create the knowledge web, Hillis and his company Metaweb have started Freebase, “an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge”. While search engines such as Google have created a database of sorts out of all the internet’s information (i.e., websites), this database is only readable by people, and no computer-readable databases of this size exist. Freebase hopes to be just that, a database of the world’s information that can be read by computers and ouput however and wherever the user wants. But, the site is still in its alpha stages, and won’t be available to the public at large for awhile.

Until then, a middle road has emerged in the form of recently (a month or two ago) released Yahoo! Pipes, “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator”. Basically, Pipes allows you to mashup information from various websites. For example, one of the currently popular pipes combines Yahoo! and Google web searches with del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site) to restrict the search to sites tagged in del.icio.us. It is a very simple idea, but it underlines the general process of taking information from different websites (or from different places on the same website) to create an output you could not have otherwise. There’s a good article on Pipes over at O’Reilly that goes more into why Pipes is such a big deal, and how easy it is to use.

Freebase and Pipes will certainly differ in some key ways, but in general I see Freebase as being a consolidated Pipes. On Pipes, the information still only exists spread over dozens of websites, but Freebase will have all the information right there. In a sense, it’s a question of limitations. Pipes is limited to the API’s and RSS feeds of the websites it includes, but Freebase will be limited only by its users. Like the Wikipedia for databases.

I’ve probably mauled and maimed and done a great disservice to the whole idea, so go read Esther Dyson’s “Emergent Structure vs. Intelligent Design. It’s a piece on Freebase by someone who actually has behind-the-scenes (alpha tester, huh huh?) knowledge of how Freebase works.

The emerging media snack culture is featured in the latest issue of Wired. Given the popularity of link aggregators (kottke.org, Metafilter, etc.), instant messaging, highlight reels, television show video clips, and any number of other bite-size media bits you can think of, Nancy Miller argues pop culture now comes quick, easy to eat packages like cookies or chips. The logic is a bit dubious, but you have to love any article that describes the 10 Commandments as “Biblical PowerPoint” in its Epic History of Snack Culture. Also worth mentioning: the Snack Online section has some good links.

Of course, the whole “Manifesto for a New Age” seems a bit tongue-in-cheek; a simple lead-in for the other sections. Thankfully, Wired isn’t lost in its own bullshit. Ending the “Snack Attack!” feature is an editorial by Steven Johnson “in praise of the full meal. “Snack culture is an illusion,” he states, and rightly so. I recently finished watching the third season of The Wire (coincidentally, considering how often Johnson references it), and it is a prime example of how our culture is not turning into a snack culture. Where do shows like The Wire, with complex and intelligent characters and storylines that span over weeks and months, fit into snack culture?

I again agree here with Johnson when he says “we have more snacks now only because the menu itself has gotten longer.” As I see it, with the inundation of new ways to proliferate media, the whole media-sphere as has grown. In fact, all of the bite-sized video clips, highlight reels, sound bytes, and weightless television shows are foils to the page-spanning blog posts, 120-minute-long film opuses, and intricate television dramas. I, for one, am even thankful for the rest the snack media gives my brain after reading one of the newest linked articles on 3 Quarks Daily.

The one thing Johnson’s editorial doesn’t address is one of the main roles some snacks have come to play. He mentions “a more nuanced awareness of the right length for different kinds of cultural experiences,” but media like the link aggregators and video clips mentioned earlier go beyond length. Websites like video blog onegoodmove or Activate, a weekly news review, seek to pare down the available mass of information (news shows and world news, respectively) into a few, most interesting parts, but they are not replacements for non-snack media, and do not really intend for their audiences to get to them and just stop. Conversely, onegoodmove has room for discussion and links to external articles, while Activate always litters its news summaries with links to in-depth articles from major news sources.

Link aggregators work the same way. As of September 26, 2005, Google reported having over 8 billion pages indexed (but some trickiness showed Google to actually have at least 13 billion pages indexed), and I think it is safe to assume that over 15 billion pages have been indexed by now. Whether by the power of the masses or intrepid web surfers, link aggregators sift through these billions of pages and find the gold. Furthermore, this gold can be anything from bite-sized to king-sized (oh I am a consumer whore). Intelligent blogs like 3 Quarks Daily and Cosmic Variance epitomize the latter, with posts and links that sometimes take quite awhile to read and wrap your head around.

So, yes, pop culture in bite-sized pieces is being churned at an increasing rate these days, but so are the full meals. There’s enough media out there in any size piece to give you exactly what you’re looking for, so don’t feel guilty about having a quick snack every now and then, but fine dining is cheap these days. Don’t be afraid to get some good, worthwhile media in your diet. And in case you didn’t get it: go watch The Wire. Now.

A lot of cell phones come with games, but most of those games are pretty terrible. Thankfully, vampent has created a mobile Nintendo emulator. Of course, you’ll need good games to go with it, so start off with Mario Adventure. Hell, just go play Mario Adventure on your computer.

Mozilla is hosting a contest, a really awesome contest, if I may say so myself. With the Firefox Flicks ad contest, you can win some cool prizes for creating a 30-second Firefox advertisement. This seems like a great win/win situation.

Albumart.org is a great site to find any CD or DVD covers. And it’s AJAX powered, so it’s fast and classy too.

A lot of importance is placed on getting the right amount of sleep. However, a Vietnamese man has spent the last 33 years of his life entirely sleepless. Admittedly, that is an extremely rare case, but new pills are being developed to cure the need for sleep. Until then, get a good nights rest, and maybe read up a little on how your sleeping life affects your waking life.

More RIAA goodness: space and format-shifting (such as ripping CDs to your iPod) are now deemed infringing by the RIAA. Okay guys, seriously, the RIAA is a bunch of assholes.

On a lighter note, Genesis in Rap Songs. Best mixtape ever.

And back again to those heavier notes. The Los Angeles Times recently published an article on evangelist Ken Ham, who seeks to “arm you with Christian Patriot missiles.” Forget evolution, because “the Bible is the history book of the universe.”

Bernard-Henri Levy, who appeared on The Daily Show last month, has published an impassioned Letter to the American Left. “Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.”

Google Talk, another of Google’s steps towards complete web domination, recently added the ability to connect to Jabber servers. This might not sound very exciting to many people, but with a little tweaking you can now connect and talk to people on AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. Pretty snazzy, I would say. And while on the subject of Google upgrades, Gmail is now available for your domain. Although most website hosts provide some email addresses, Google is offering their usual unlimited amount of address and unlimited amount of storage. Pretty snazzy, I would say.

Japanese television is absolutely insane. For example, Nasubi.

Nippon Television’s (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn’t have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn’t have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn’t have kept him there for over a year until he had won $100,000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn’t have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

Complete List of Web 2.0 Products and Services

Library Thing - Catalog your books online!

Sharks are aggressive creatures of the deep, but they can’t write very well and they’re no match for a fierce manatee. Then again, none of this really matters when there are so many great videos you could be wasting time with.

Starting off today are some helpful hints on fighting sharks.

Next, some helpful hints on writing. I should probably be following those, but fuck it.

As good as the Google Maps idea is — and it’s a great one — people continue to think of even better additions. Case in point, Panoramio, where “every photo is linked with the place where it was taken, both physically and in your memory,” and “Panoramio helps to link photos and places.”

I am still a bit shaky on the definition of Web 2.0, but to tie this next link in I will say that Panoramio is a Web 2.0 site. Anyway… a definitive list of popular Web 2.0 sites. Now you know where I steal all my links from.

“Are wet spots following you? Catch them with Luv Linen! Enjoy all of the passion without any of the mess!”

Fortune just put out a great list of the 100 Best Companies To Work For, and along with it a few more lists such as best employers in your state, top paying companies, and more.

Getting away from the mundane and onto the beautiful, a trip through the pictographic labyrinth.

Manatees are some of the cutest sea creatures in the world. And they sound cute too. Well, maybe you won’t agree, but I love ‘em.

Just because you can be an asshole, doesn’t mean you have to be. Quelch your inner jackass.

Joe Kittinger was the first man to break the sound barrier without an airplane. That is, he fell so fast he broke the sound barrier.

Tonto! Jump on it! And then get drunk off my humps. But, of course, not before you survive.

A final link before I leave you: Patrick Stewart was on the TV show Extras, and he’s seen everything.