My friends and I have spent an embarrassing number of hours reliving our adolescent days, coming up with these groan-worthy puns. Occasionally, a few will touch upon the absurd and, very rarely, the sublime. After the jump I present to you the current, canonical list of Er-jokes. Add more in the comments or in emails and I’ll keep the list updated.
Go with low expectations and be pleasantly surprised. I actually had a ton of fun watching this one.
Devon likes to send me old emails when she’s travelling. After the jump, I’ve pasted a dream I wrote her about, five years ago. Please hold your comments about how insane I must be to dream such a dream:
One of Amos’ new efforts at DiscoverMagazine.com is a new “journalistic mashup” blog call 80beats, which reports on scientific topics of popular interest. Here’s a screen snip of the text from an entry about new solar panels that use internal reflection to collect sunlight:
As you can see, the body of the post is made up of quotes from other news sources, colored in blue. This is a format that I really like; mashed up news from many sources. Some blogs like this are even explicit about reporting on biases; the sources themselves are sometimes a part of the story.
What 80beats is doing well is to start developing a UI around the mashup text, allowing a very natural flow of the prose. Using blue text and the occasional editorial brackets means the reader can easily ignore the sources completely and read the post as an uninterrupted piece of content. The references are there, though, for anyone who desires more context.
I just came across a long-winded blog post from a friend I haven’t seen since high school. He’s now in Shanghai, being annoyed by the coarse manners of the locals. Something about his description of the place really resonated with me. It fully explains why I was so much more comfortable in Hanoi than Saigon, for example. Here’s an excerpt:
And i think that’s what drives me to keep looking for cool places to hang out or live. That’s why I love reading about Austin, Portland, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and other meccas for creatives, indies, and dropouts. The act of reading the articles about these places, followed by the act of imagining myself traipsing around these places, is purely fantasy–but that’s what some people are driven by. Maybe “fantasy” is the wrong word: you are driven by the sense that life is still big, and possibilities abound, and that you are free enough to craft, shape, mold that life into something that fits you. You know that you can’t change people (in Shanghai, everywhere) but you dream that there is some kind of place where you can just “fit in.” A place that resonates with you, that somehow possesses the kind of people and culture you need to thrive, to do your work, to relax and enjoy life properly, to lead a good life.
As i just explained, this too is the source of my discontent with China–it’s just too far from my fantasy city-state world where everyone is cosmopolitan and educated, stylish and cultured. Of course, I have never been anywhere that really comes close to that ideal. And even places like Paris and Athens that do come close only do so because I’m viewing them through the rose-colored glasses of the stranger, the one-time tourist. Delve deeper and you’ll no doubt hit a strata of complete asswipes too.
Here’s the full post.
Facebook has long lost its luster, so it’s just sad to be reminded that Friendster still exists at all. Recently, I’ve even been getting spam messages from my friends’ hacked accounts. Here’s an example:
Date: 07/7/2008 3:08 pm
Subject: Hey
Message:
Hi,
it’s been a while since we talked,
I hope you are doing good.
I got a new page for the cam app, take a look!
[link to spam site]
Smart, those spammers. They know I’ll open a message from a friend. That is, of course, until I start ignoring all Friendster messages altogether. Which begins now.
So, this is some serious Web 2.0 action: Instructables user zachninme (and ex-intern) wanted to have a rating system for comments on the site (so far, we only allow users to rate the instructables themselves.) He built a Greasemonkey script that any Firefox user can install; this injects a rating interface into all the comments whenever that user visits Instructables. Then, he wrote a backend using the new Google App Engine that collects all of the ratings, aggregates them, and pushes the show/hide logic back to the user’s Firefox client.
Voila: instant community/social feature, completely disintermediated from our site. The web being what it is, nowadays, he doesn’t have to run a server or get permission from us. Innovation accelerates…
Here’s a link to his announcement.
I just got an email about this new citizen journalism site. It looks pretty slick and already has some interesting content from around the world. Getting alternative viewpoints out of China, Iran, or even (at times) the United States is no easy feat, and these guys seem to recognize this.
Check out, for example, their tutorials on how to install Tor on your browser so that you can upload to or browse Demotix without leaving a trail.
Here’s the info from the release:
As many of you already know, my partner Jonathan Tepper and I have launched Demotix, a website for user generated news. Think of it like Flickr or YouTube, but only for original photo/video news taken by freelancers or the man on the street. They/You tell us what is going on, we tell the WWW and the world’s mainstream media. As of today, our site is now live. You can visit us at: www.demotix.com
Why are we doing it?
- Only four US newspapers have foreign news desks (the NY Times, LA Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal), and there are only 141 US foreign correspondents currently working today (in print and broadcast media)
- In the UK, a 2006 study of the broadsheets showed that more than 50% of the news was directly attributable to press releases
- The world’s media (over 90%) relies on the wire services – the Associated Press and Reuters – for their news. But some 80 countries, or 40% of the world’s nations, have no bureau from either agency.
The news is shrinking daily. We hope Demotix can plug that gap, and more. We hope Demotix will bring Web 2.0 to journalism. We hope to be giving a megaphone to the man and woman in the street with a story to tell.
Eventually we hope that Demotix will be THE place where anyone in the world can go, in safety, to upload news – major, minor, local, cultural, political, whatever. Even before launch, we have agreements with the Daily Telegraph, Newsweek, La Repubblica, and others – and will now supply them with a daily wire and picture feed of ‘citizen’ news. We have also built partnerships with Reporters Sans Frontieres, Witness, Global Voices, Committee to Protect Journalists, Committee to Protect Bloggers, Index on Censorship, OpenDemocracy and others. I have just come back from Cuba and Iran where the feedback we received was fantastic.
Please visit our site and let your friends and colleagues know that we exist (even better, pass this email on to everyone in your address book). Ideally, ask your friends who have interesting photographs and videos of great stories to upload them. And bear us in mind for whatever you witness. We need all the help we can get, so if you know anyone we should speak to or anyone who might be of help to us as we launch the start-up, please put us in touch.
Thank you for your help and please visit our site: www.demotix.com
My plan will be unchanged, it seems. I’m not sure what will come of the merger, but at the moment I’m just waiting for my contract to run out so I can get an iPhone. The Helio Ocean is not quite what it’s cracked up to be. Press release after the jump.
