Interview with Amy Franceschini, founder of Futurefarmers.
Interview with Amy Franceschini, founder of Futurefarmers. Franceschini also had a hand in Atlas Magazine (blast from the past!), which was one of my favorite sites back in the day.
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Because of the Eolas patent crap, Microsoft
Because of the Eolas patent crap, Microsoft is updating Internet Explorer so that you need to click to “activate” any Flash or Quicktime applet. There’s a workaround that involves replacing all your
David Galbraith notes that several of the
David Galbraith notes that several of the top sites on the web don’t validate: Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, and even “Web 2.0” newcomers Flickr, Digg, and Del.icio.us. “Are all these companies wrong, or is there something wrong with current accessibility standards?”
After four days as a porn site,
After four days as a porn site, suck.com is back to its old self. No explanation yet about the outage.
Suck.com is (temporarily? forever?) a porn
Suck.com is (temporarily? forever?) a porn site. If it’s gone for good, it’s the end of an era. (thx, owen)
Update: Andy’s got more info and is trying to see if an archive exists anywhere.
Matt’s first impressions of and experiences with
Matt’s first impressions of and experiences with the Web sound a lot like mine (visiting those first few sites with Mosaic was a transformative experience for me, like falling in love), except I did quit grad school.
Adobe is planning on combining Flash Player
Adobe is planning on combining Flash Player and Acrobat Reader? As Todd says, “I don’t know about you, but I just got an acrid taste in my mouth”.
Update: John Dowdell notes that Adobe has clarified their position re: the above combination: “we will continue delivering the Flash Player as a small, efficient runtime for content and applications on the web”. (thx, neil)
The bookselling biz
On the plane on the way back from Vietnam, I was reading this article about how bookstores are preferable to shopping for books online[1] when I ran across this quote from David Sedaris:
One thing about English-language bookstores in the age of Amazon is that it assumes that everybody has the Internet. I don’t. I’ve never seen the Internet. I’ve never ordered a book on it, and I wouldn’t really want to”
This seems almost impossible and might even be a joke, but it would go a long way in explaining how he gets so much work done. He’s got continuous complete attention while the rest of us have only partial.
[1] Which article was not very convincing since it included this passage:
[Odile Hellier, owner of the Village Voice bookstore in Paris] said that she thinks the act of buying books in a store rather than online is essential to the health of our culture.
“My fear is that while the machine society that we live in is very functional, very practical, and allows for a certain communication, it is a linear communication that closes the mind,” she said.
She said that although Internet sites perform many of the functions of a bookstore - recommending similar books or passing on personal impressions of a book - nothing equals the kind of discovery possible when visiting a store and scanning tables covered with a professional staff’s latest hand-picked selection.
I always chuckle when someone (usually grinding an axe) describes the web as so flat and with little social aspect. I love bookstores, but in many ways, shopping for books online is superior.
Michael Sippey offers some suggestions on how
Michael Sippey offers some suggestions on how web startups could benefit from how grade schools function. Snack time, gym class, field trips, and using periods instead of a calendar.
On the eve of the 15th anniversary
On the eve of the 15th anniversary of the creation of the web, James Boyle muses on how we should celebrate. “We probably would not create [the web], or any technology like it, today. In fact, we would be more likely to cripple it, or declare it illegal.”
Fun compilation of the 100 greatest internet moments. (
Fun compilation of the 100 greatest internet moments. (via waxy!, i think)
A man asks MetaFilter for help in
A man asks MetaFilter for help in tracking down his grandfather’s address in 1938 Vienna and after only two days, he’s got the address as well as a bunch of other information he never knew about him. This internet thing is gonna be huge someday.
things magazine has a nice little post
things magazine has a nice little post on the Internet as reliquary. Reminds me of Julian Dibbell’s comparison of weblogs to wunderkammers.
Steven Johnson’s thoughts on Web 2.0. He compares
Steven Johnson’s thoughts on Web 2.0. He compares it to a rain forest, with the information flow through the web being analogous to the efficient nutrient flow through a forest. “Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest.” Compare with Tim O’Reilly’s recent thoughts on the subject.
Steven Levy profiles Tim O’Reilly for Wired.
Steven Levy profiles Tim O’Reilly for Wired. Kind of ironic since O’Reilly Media has put itself in the middle of what’s happening on the web, a position that perhaps should have been occupied by Wired, had they not sold all their online properties several years ago.
Update on the Million Dollar Homepage…it’s
Update on the Million Dollar Homepage…it’s actually starting to fill up. He’s sold almost $100,000 worth of space so far. This is beginning to look like an absolutely brilliant idea.
An interview with David Greiner of Campaign
An interview with David Greiner of Campaign Monitor. Some good stuff in here about starting a small business on the Web.
Greg reminded me that today is the 10
Greg reminded me that today is the 10th anniversary of the launch of Suck. I started reading a few weeks after it launched, but I do remember going back to read the first article that kicked it off. Here’s a lengthy and comprehensive look at Suck’s history.
Short interview with Josh Davis. More of
Short interview with Josh Davis. More of his work can be found at joshuadavis.com and once upon a forest.
How did a site dealing with digital
How did a site dealing with digital video codecs become the place for lonely people to go on the web? Moviecodec.com is still the second result for the “i am lonely” search on Google; here’s the thread in question.
Salon profile of 37signals and “the next
Salon profile of 37signals and “the next web revolution”. Also noted (for the first time in public, I think): Adaptive Path’s secret web app is “a tool to help bloggers measure traffic and other stats on their site [and] will be out by the end of the year”.
Andy Baio dug up this circa-1995 version
Andy Baio dug up this circa-1995 version of BobaWorld, one of my earliest favorite pages on the web. Boy, that square imagemap at the bottom of the page takes me back.
A text message love affair gone wrong
A text message love affair gone wrong. “How had we managed to speed through all the stages of an actual relationship almost solely via text message? I’d gone from butterflies to doubt to anger at his name on the screen, before we even knew each other.”
Wired’s got a “10 years of the web”
Wired’s got a “10 years of the web” thing going on in their August 2005 issue. Web nostalgia is sooooo yesterday…
The olden days
Yesterday was web nostalgia day on kottke.org, with nearly the entire day’s worth of remaindered links dedicated to blogging old school web memes and information as if I had just seen them for the first time. No reason really, just a bit of fun.
Oh, and something[1] tells me that the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe email is a fake.
[1] “Something” being the gigantic amount of email I received yesterday after posting this link. For a good 2 hours or so, an email arrived every two minutes telling me that the cookie thing was a hoax. It was kind of incredible, by far the most feedback I’ve gotten in several months. Boy, you folks don’t think much of me, do you? ;)
The Hyperreal home page has lots of
The Hyperreal home page has lots of information about rave music, rave culture, and drugs.
Sucksters Polly Ester and Terry Colon on
Sucksters Polly Ester and Terry Colon on Bubble Goo in the always excellent Filler.
Cello is a graphical WWW browser like Mosaic
Cello is a graphical WWW browser like Mosaic. “Cello runs under Microsoft Windows on any IBM PC with a 386SX chip or better. While we have run Cello with only 2MB of RAM on a 386SX-16 machine, we think you’ll like it better on a machine with more memory and a faster chip.”
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