Anil Dash

Many people will be familiar with Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, who was one of the most high-profile of the wave of hipster grifters during the 2010s. Today, she's beginning to pivot into some kind of reality TV/competition game show...

It’s hard to really take in, after all these years, that most people have no memory of the day. The majority of people in the world were either not born, or not old enough to be aware of what was going on, and then many who would recall are either...

As I write this, we’ve just heard news that Oprah is planning to do a big broadcast special about AI and society. Despite the fact that it hasn’t aired, and I haven’t seen it or talked to anyone who’s seen it, we can reliably predict many of the...

A lot of the ways that the ultra-wealthy think about, and act about, money seem almost incomprehensible to those outside of their orbit. Having had a chance to get some visibility into how a number of billionaires and centimillionaires think and...

Okay, previously we covered many of the most common things you'd want to know about a board of directors at an organization, including the basics like what a board actually does. Next up, I put out a prompt on my various social media channels to...

Nearly every organization that is designed to have impact has a board of directors, whether that's a small non-profit, or a giant corporation, or anything in between. But having served on a number of boards across that entire range of institutions, I...

You might have noticed, it’s not a super fun time to be in the publishing industry, especially if you’re trying to do journalism. The years-long drumbeat of bad news issuing from nearly every newsroom has left people understandably despairing about...

When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start...

I have a lot of thoughts about systems and how they work, and how we can teach systems thinking to others. Maybe one good place we could start is by capturing this old tweet of mine, which probably deserves a permanent home since I don't use Twitter...

David Letterman (whose team is doing a wonderful job of presenting and narrating his formidable archives) recently posted an amusing anecdote about Prince's first appearance on his show, in December of 1994. It's a fascinating story, because it...

Whether it's resumes or reports, budgets or broadsides, I'm pretty regularly sent working documents from a wide range of people, and over the years I've noticed some consistent patterns that lead those documents to be less effective than they should...

You've heard the call to action at the end of nearly every podcast you've ever listened to: "Listen to us on your favorite podcast app", or in the phrasing of podcaster extraordinare Roman Mars, "...wherever you find podcasts"....

It has been a full generation since the last time I can remember the definitive, most credible perspectives on a major tech news story happening across multiple people's personal blogs, but amazingly, the open web renaissance has brought us the kind...

Not too long ago, I said "Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again."...

I find myself often having to explain to people how our reaction to certain events or actions depends a lot on the existing context where we were relating to someone, and while it's imperfect, there's an analogy I often use to do that job. Imagine a...

I didn't think I'd keep reflecting on this day, but somehow I can't. It's been with me for most of my lifetime that I can remember, and perhaps more importantly, the world's narrative about what happened that day is completely unrecognizable to me. I...

It's happened again! I'm an answer in today's Daily Crossword Puzzle over at Vulture, called The Single Puzzle This is thanks (once more) to Malaika Handa, seen previously in one of my earlier crossword appearances. Yes, this somehow happens fairly...

Today, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman shares a key insight that his headline editor summarizes as The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me. While this is true, what's even more key to me is why the most prominent tech tycoons (who are one of the...

There's an extraordinary amount of hype around "AI" right now, perhaps even greater than in past cycles, where we've seen an AI bubble about once per decade. This time, the focus is on generative systems, particularly LLMs and other tools...

Back in the latter part of the 20th century, a lot of subcultures held onto a concept called "selling out", a nebulously-defined idea based on a negative view of compromising one's values or creative expression in the pursuit of money or,...

Back in 2021, my friend Jesse Thorn interviewed two of my creative heroes, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, for an absolutely indispensible episode of Bullseye. The whole show is incredible, but the highlight for me is at the 47:43 mark: Jesse:...

I've been saying this for a few years now, but it's worth recording here for the record: It's impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social...

Mastodon and the fediverse are clearly taking off, bringing in millions of new users, and also organically inspiring a wave of technical innovation that dwarfs all of the efforts that the bribes and empty promises of the Web3 crypto bubble couldn't...

You should absolutely keep some ketchup around the house. And soy sauce, and Sriracha, and a good BBQ sauce. And some honey. But if you really want to add flavor to all kinds of dishes (I don't mean fancy stuff, but like, if you want to punch up a...

The only time someone remembered September 11, 2001 to me in the last year was when a stranger mentioned it as part of the reason he was trying to assault me. So it's clear that the events of that day have fully passed into myth, useful only as...

[cw: violence] I just wanted to capture this story here once so I don't have to tell it to anyone again. Because, while I am okay now, it is unpleasant to keep having to repeat the story to new people over and over. The short version is, I was...

Just to document a conversation that I've had a number of times in the last year, its important to understand the implications (and indeed, the motivations) of much of current public health policy. Now that more than a decade has passed since the...

Somehow, improbably, I am again referenced in a crossword puzzle, this time it was the Sunday Boston Globe from back on April 17th. This time, I have Joon Pahk to thank! Who knew there were so many small fringe benefits to having a four-letter name...

Listen, I'm not the one making this assertion. It's Vulture's daily 10x10 crossword puzzle for May 17th, entitled "The Sexual Tension Puzzle", in which I am, apparently, a clue. (Sorry to spoil the answer to 25 Across!) Don't believe me?...

The Webby Awards have recognized Kevin McCoy and I with their Lifetime Achievement Award this year, for "developing a blockchain powered way for artists to own and monetize digital work, which laid the groundwork for what would be known as...

If a company is debating whether a user's account should be suspended, they've already failed to build a modern platform that follows best practices. Why are today's billionaires competing for control of tech that’s broken by design? It’s unusual to...

Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again. If you had to pick the unexpected...

Security reports from other sites are welcome. Why aren’t safety reports? One of the most fundamental triumphs of the last few decades of open source culture is the open sharing of bugs and how to fix them. There are mature, effective systems for...

Here’s how you do it. Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to this insistence on being solely a “neutral” tech company in every aspect of decision-making,...

You can't win unless you know what you're fighting for. Many of the most important and valuable milestones of progress in society have been achieved through compromise and incrementalism. It's no surprise that idea of negotiating a brokered future in...

Though he’s one of the most gifted and important artists to have ever created popular music, Stevie’s legacy as a tireless and fearless advocate for justice may he even more powerful, and is too often overlooked. We should heed every word he says. On...

Each year, folks ask me for predictions about what's going to happen in tech in the coming year. Generally, what they're really asking is what I hope/expect is going to happen to the five or six biggest companies in the tech industry. That matters,...

I've been blogging here for more than 20 years, and the only organizing principle behind what I write here, if anything, is a fascination about how we make culture, and especially how we make culture around, and with, technology. Nothing has...

I've spent a couple weeks using a new 14" Apple MacBook Pro daily (as a replacement for my last machine, which was a similar, but rather terrible, 2016 MacBook Pro) and thought it might be valuable to share a few observations that might help you...

The key to protecting people's privacy on the internet isn't in trying to stop users' data from being sent to different services, it's in poisoning the well by having user data be so inconsistent, disconnected, spurious or expensive to collect that...

One of the biggest sources of miscommunication is people having different styles of communication, or different norms about the right way to express emotion or context even if there's agreement on more straightforward aspects of verbal communication....

Recently, a motivated Prince fan created a spreadsheet that attempts to catalog the entirety of Prince's thousands of recordings over the course of his career. Beginning in 1973 as a then-15-year-old Prince taped his first few tracks, and going...

Every year, for twenty years now, I've written an observance of this day. Sometimes it's for myself, sometimes it's for the small cohort of folks who've checked back in with me on this day every year since then, a group which has shrunk a bit over...

Amongst the many new publications that's popped up in the current newsletter boom, I've been enjoying Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci's "Embedded". One of the biggest reasons why is the recurring feature "My Internet", which details...

Here are some before-and-afters from a set of photos my parents took on a visit to Manhattan in 1985. I tried to replicate the angles as best I could in the modern photos. MacDougal Street Sixth...

The Konami Code is one of the longest-running inside references amongst both gamers and coders, acting as something of a shibboleth for a certain kind of nerd. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment...

After a pause of a few years, Twitter announced today that they're going to resume allowing any user to request the blue verification checkmark for their account. The social and technical dynamics around Twitter verification remain as fraught and...

Anytime a big new market pops up, people rush in to stake their claims and make their fortunes. Our culture loves creation myths, especially in technology. Fables about lone geniuses are ubiquitous in the tech industry, with their fundamental falsity...

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest games ever made, and one of the breakout hits of the Nintendo Switch platform, which is on its way to becoming one of the 10 most popular video game consoles of all time. But now, years...

On this day in 2007, Prince won Super Bowl XLI with a soaring halftime performance that climaxed with the skies opening up to honor his guitar solo. It is not just the best-regarded halftime show ever, but was to that point the most-viewed musical...

It is almost impossibly difficult to explain Robin Byrd to anyone who was not an adult living in NYC toward the end of the last century, though everyone who recognizes the name immediately responds with unbridled enthusiasm. This comes up in...

I love any kind of advocacy for safer, more humane streets, so it was a real joy to get to guest on the wonderful The War on Cars podcast. Doug Gordon went deep, really pushing into the connections and surprising resonances between what makes...

Duleshwar Tandi, better known these days as Rapper Dule Rocker, is one of the most successful and influential rappers to have ever come out of the Kalahandi district in Odisha, where my family is from. I jumped into his catalog of videos this weekend...

A while back, when I wrote out in plain words that we have a politically dominant death cult ruling America right now, I worried about the risks of saying my opinion so straightforwardly. As you might expect, I did get a good number of people saying...

These days, I'm a hobbyist web developer. That used to be a common thing people did; it was like having a crafting hobby, but with web pages. Over the last decade or two, though, making a website became either something done by professional...

Ted Lasso, the standout series of Apple's new Apple TV+ streaming service, rightfully earned a place on many people's lists of the most-recommended new shows of 2020. But what's best about it is what makes it so different from most other...

Over the weekend, we had the chance to explore the newly-opened Moynihan Station, the massive new expansion to Penn Station that's been in the works for decades. Though it ostensibly serves as a welcoming and modern new facility for Amtrak and Long...

I was delighted to discover Omar Rizwan's TabFS, a brilliant hack that lets you see your browser tabs as folders and files on your computer, because it's incredibly clever on its own, but also opens a view into how a shift in metaphor  can totally...

In the early days of Twitter, there was a pleasingly low-tech tradition called "follow friday" (which people later denoted with the #FF hashtag), wherein people listed other accounts that they suggested you might follow. It did a good job...

About once a year, I do a little digital reset to help make my online life a little more pleasant. I’m not advocating that anybody do the same as me, but I hope that sharing some of what I do might help inspire you to manage the technology in your...

The slogan, for people who weren’t in Manhattan that day, is “Never Forget”. The people who were not here, who were never here, call it “9/11”. But the people I still check in with, the friends who trudged home covered in ash, never call it that....

Twenty five years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It was undoubtedly a technical leap forward, but its biggest, most lasting impacts are about how it changed popular culture's relationship to technology. For context, when Windows 95 was...

With authoritarianism at our door, the policies that progressives are driving for will be dependent on whether the fundamental institutions of democracy are protected at all. I believe every vote needs to be earned, and every candidate needs to be...

People are wrong on the Internet every day; generally I don’t try to fuss about that too much. But when Sam Lessin, a former VP of Product Management at Facebook, publishes a wildly wrong recommendation about online identity in a credible media...

A significant percentage of conservative culture in America defines “freedom” as death. This is causing a lot more problems right now than even its usual horrible effects. Some explanation, for those who may not have context. Why do we need to have...

I almost can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the work the Electronic Frontier Foundation was doing on behalf of all of us who care about the impact technology has on society and culture. They describe their work as protecting digital...

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to watch the most definitive record of Prince and the Revolution at their commercial peak, on one of the biggest musical tours ever mounted to that point. It's to raise funds for the COVID-19 Solidarity...

Today, for about half an hour in the afternoon, pretty much every app that you might try on your iPhone would likely have crashed upon opening it. It's probably worth understanding why, but more importantly, worth understanding what that reality...

There could be no more fitting remembrance of Prince than Questlove going deep into his catalog and spinning some of Prince's greatest works into a multi-hour DJ set. Unless Quest did that five nights in a row. Which he did! It was an absolutely...

(Warning: this will be upsetting; you will not want to read this if you are already stressed.) [This piece was written in late February 2020, before there was widespread social distancing in place, under the assumption that no such distancing would...

Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren't designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to culture, and aren't run by the giant tech companies. These are a vision of not just what the web...

We don’t even notice it anymore — “link in bio”. It’s a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web link can be found on that user’s profile. Its presence is so subtle, and so pervasive, that...

Congratulations to Function with Anil Dash for being named podcast of the year! In a media landscape absolutely littered with sound-alike tech podcasts rehashing the same tedious iPhone rumors or parroting Facebook's latest defense of abusing your...

I often talk about South Asian people, or how I identify as being an American of South Asian descent. Many folks outside of our communities don’t always know the details of how to understand our identities, so I wanted to share some generally useful...

Even though I watched the medium of podcasting being created since its inception, I'd always resisted a little bit participating myself. I think I just felt more at home in this format, blogging, as that's where I'd found my voice. Well, that might...

[CW: mental illness, self-harm] When my depression was at its worst, it felt almost like a constant, physical pain. Getting away from that crushing weight felt as urgent as pulling my hand away from a hot stove, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even...

There are kids now who are old enough to go fight in wars that were justified back when they still had their umbilical cords attached. For them, the attacks are only history; that's all they ever were. I can sort of understand it. I was born after...

This week marks the 20th anniversary of this blog. I thought the best way to observe the milestone, and to try to pass along some of the benefits I’ve gained from keeping a presence online all these years, would be to share some of the most important...

Playdate, the upcoming indie handheld gaming console from venerable software publisher Panic, is really important. But if you don't know the history of where the little company behind this little device comes from, it might be hard to understand why...

About seven years ago, inspired by Caterina Fake's seminal essay about fear of missing out, I wrote a bit about the Joy of Missing Out, and for a little while, JOMO became a thing. It showed up in those "100 trends to watch this year"...

With Janet Jackson's (woefully belated) acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's well past time for a broader reckoning with her place in popular culture, and especially the way she's challenged narratives in pop music. To me, her...

Prince was an astoundingly prolific artist, releasing nearly 40 albums under his own name(s), and thousands of songs for himself and others. His concerts were legendary, spellbinding from arenas to intimate clubs, flooring audiences around the...

That's...

What if we had another 9/11, and nothing happened? Living in New York City, the one fantasy sport that everybody plays is real estate; we all like to imagine what it would be like to be able to afford to buy a place. And sometime over the last year...

“You can’t say anything anymore! You can’t even make jokes!” There’s a constant complaint from people in positions of power, mostly men, who keep making the ridiculous assertion that they’re not able to speak in public. What they actually mean is...

For the first decade after the attacks, I basically didn’t go anywhere near that part of downtown. A business meeting would take me a few blocks away, and I’d feel that tightness in my chest, that presence, and I’d just keep moving. But this morning,...

Forgive me, for I am about to commit gadget blogging. I've been using an iPhone X since they came out, and almost from the start my battery has charged between two and three time the default speed of most people's phones. All you need is one new...

At this point, there's nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are not things we generally think of as requiring maintenance or upkeep, even though we...

Anything worth doing is worth doing meta. And Tom and Jerry is no exception. I've been trying to learn a bit more about the various eras of the Tom and Jerry cartoon, from the mega-racist Hanna-Barbera originals to the extremely stylized Chuck Jones...

Today's most fun new Glitch app is Record Player, which lets you upload a photo, then uses Google Cloud's Vision API to recognize the image and play it on Spotify. It works really well, but the real fun starts when you upload a selfie or a picture of...

Tech is more important than ever, deeply affecting culture, politics and society. Given all the time we spend with our gadgets and apps, it’s essential to understand the principles that determine how tech affects our lives. Understanding technology...

At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here’s a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it...

I keep having to explain a principle I arrived at a few years ago when I realized the modern conservative movement is grounded almost entirely in a contrived sense of grievance, predicated on a false victimhood of its supporters. (That’s not to say...

A few months ago, I got the wonderful opportunity to talk to Barry Ritholtz, who’s best known as a Bloomberg View columnist and for his excellent “Masters in Business” podcast, but whom I’ve known online for many years. We talked about a topic that’s...

This is a spoiler-filled first set of reactions to Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The ultimate courage of what Rian Johnson has done here, is that he fully embraced what it is to be a director who obviously grew up as true fan of Star Wars, and retconned...

A dozen years ago, the web started to reshape itself around major companies like Google. We can understand the genesis of today’s algorithmic arms race against the tech titans just by looking at a single character. This is all ancient tech history...

In advance of the upcoming release of The Last Jedi, excitement is building for all things Star Wars, so I’m thrilled to share that I got to be a guest on the inestimable Star Wars Minute podcast. The show tackles the world’s most popular franchise...

I struggled for a long time when the nice folks at the Heat Rocks podcast asked me which Prince album I’d want to talk about on their show. Oliver Wang and Morgan Rhodes run an amazing podcast, where every episode is a deep-dive into a classic...

I’ve been fortunate enough to get to speak at a lot of events over the years, in front of an amazing variety of audiences around the world. But I can honestly say I’ve never been more impressed by the reaction of an audience member than in the panel...

A couple of times a week, I end up walking by the World Trade Center, either the new train station at the site, or one of the new malls that’s sprung up flanking the memorial. It’s a normal part of my day now, not a tentative and fraught moment that...

Printers: They don’t work. Here’s my wishlist for one that might. If you’ve followed my work for any time, you know I’m fond of pointing out that printers don’t work. This is because printers don’t work. But what if they did? We're 30+ years into...

Apple spent $5 billion on a beautiful new office, Apple Park. So it’s amazing they’re about to make an extremely costly, avoidable mistake: putting their coders in an open-plan layout. I work at Fog Creek Software, where our cofounder and former CEO...

It’s always great to reconnect with old friends, and that especially holds true for old Internet friends. That must be why it was such a delight to spend some time chatting with Ana Marie Cox, as a guest on “With Friends Like These“. (And, as we...

Developer relations and tech evangelism is one of those fields that just doesn’t get enough respect. Having done the work for years myself, I think it’s a wildly under-examined field and very few businesses do enough to properly invest in this...

This was so fun! I got another chance to host the Stack Overflow podcast, and this time did it in fine style with Jess Lee and Ben Halpern of the Practical Dev joining in for the festivities. Do give it a...

I was delighted to get to talk to Ben Greenman for an episode of “Dig If You Will The Podcast,” his series in honor of his book “Dig If You Will The Picture”. We go deep into Prince’s influence on transforming the music industry, and if you like it,...

In one generation, the Internet went from opening up new free markets to creating a series of Fake Markets that exploit society, without most media or politicians even noticing. 1. The open internet markets American culture loves to use the ideal of...

With the recent availability of nearly all of Prince’s catalog on the most popular streaming services, it’s a great time to (re?)discover the breadth of Prince’s incredible body of work. The full scale of Prince’s music is probably too much for any...

Until the Citibike bikeshare program launched here in New York City, I’d ridden a bike perhaps once in the prior twenty years. Since it launched, I ride almost daily. Because of the massive improvements in quality of life in the city as walkability...

I was delighted to get to speak with Debbie Millman for her venerable podcast, “Design Matters”. If you have an hour to spare, please do check out the conversation — we touched on a ton of topics that are near and dear to my...

Back in November, I got to sit down with the amazing Krista Tippett for a lengthy interview in front of an incredibly warm crowd in Easton, MD. Now, that interview has been edited down and is available as the latest episode of Krista’s hugely popular...

Jack asked us for ideas on how to fix Twitter. A coherent plan for fixing Twitter would make millions of people happier, and pick up a billion dollars in market cap along the way. C’mon, it’ll be great! Listen, it’s almost 2017, so it’s absurd to...

Okay, here’s the story: I’m the new CEO of Fog Creek Software! And we have an awesome new tool called Glitch that just launched today, and you should go try it out and build the app of your dreams in a few minutes. Want to know more? Okay, there’s...

There are going to be endless think-pieces and armchair analyses about why America elected Donald Trump as its next President. But you already know why. Don’t waste a single moment listening to the hand-wringing of the pundit class about Why This...

In the past, popular movements have forced major industries to confront their need for ethical reform. But today‘s media, policymakers and activists don’t yet seem prepared to fix the tech sector’s problems. So how will reform happen? First things...

OMG I can’t believe it! I got to be on my very favorite podcast, BuzzFeed’s “Another Round“. I can verify that Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu are every bit as amazing in real life as they seem to be when you listen to the show. We talked about race...

I’m skeptical about “teach the kids to code!” as a panacea for all of society’s ills. Yet today, I’m at the White House to participate in a summit on Computer Science for All. Why would a skeptic still think it’s important to make computer science...

We’ve been saying “never forget” for so long that we don’t even know why we’re saying it. At JFK airport, panic over… nothing. On the other side of the country, at LAX, panic over… nothing. As it turns out, if you tell people to be afraid all the...

The label’s become too big to be useful, and tech could suffer for it. Quick: What do an auto leasing provider, a condiment company and the producers of a serious TV drama have in common? If your answer is “almost nothing”, then you’re right. If your...

More than a decade ago, the earliest era of blogging provided a set of separate but related technologies that helped the nascent form thrive. Today, most have faded away and been forgotten, but new incarnations of these features could still be...

A technology community driven by values, not just profits. I’ve been part of the New York City tech scene for more than 15 years, from back when it was “Silicon Alley” trying to be an imitation of the West Coast, to its more recent iteration as a...

Red Book, Yellow Book, Green Book Stay within the lines. The Red Book There’s a specification that Phillips published in 1981, for optical digital encoding of audio. They teamed up with Sony to create the standard, and by the following year hardware...

Five years ago today I witnessed the most transcendent moment of my life. I don’t have a faith or a religion, so I’m often reluctant to describe things as “transcendent”; I don’t want to speak to an experience that’s not my own. But 5 years ago...

Today, P.M. Dawn exists as a faded memory for most music fans, if they’re remembered at all. But Attrell Cordes made songs like nothing that came before. Beautiful, sweeping melodies paired with lyrics of regret, remorse, heartache and profound loss....

When Prince’s first greatest hits collection was released, Prince made private comments as a guide for the liner notes. Later briefly posted on his website thedawn.com in 1996, Prince’s comments have been lost for the last 20 years, but now provide a...

I’ve been struggling to find words to express how I feel in the week since Prince died. He’s obviously the artist that’s had the most impact on my life, and was in many ways the lens through which I processed the rest of pop culture and artistic...

For my birthday a while back, some of you may remember I asked you all to contribute to a project to build wells to bring clean water to a village in our family's home state of Orissa. I have some incredible news to share. The project you all made...

There are lots of conversations that I have over and over, one-at-a-time on social media like Twitter that I wish was captured more definitively. Fortunately, I got the chance to do just that when I was asked to be on Product Hunt Live, the Q&A...

Hooray, The Force Awakens was great. Let me quickly gather some spoiler filled notes of reaction, now that it’s been a day or so since I watched it. (Do check out Jason Kottke’s also-spoilerrific 15 thoughts about Star Wars: The Force Awakens,...

Doing my fair share for my son means I have to start carrying my weight in other areas at home. Growing up as an Indian-American son, in a family-oriented culture, I considered it an inarguable truth that I would have kids when I grew up. So when I...

After talking to a friend about how Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” is so romantic if you just focus on the strings, bass and vocals, I was inspired to mix down the tracks to feature just those elements. anildash · A little less rocking with...

Last week I went and visited the memorial reflecting pools for the first time. I had been to the top of the new One World Trade Center, but had deliberately avoided ever visiting (or actually seeing in person) the space where the old towers had been....

In short: Tomorrow’s my birthday. I’m asking you to help me support the Lower Eastside Girls Club, and I’ll match whatever you donate through this secure form until midnight on September 5th. The Neighborhood Around the start of each new year, I...

Sometimes I get an idea in my head and I just can’t let it go. For a few months, I’ve heard this nagging sound in the back of my mind, asking me to revisit Amadeus, one of my favorite films ever. Because who among us hasn’t heard Jeremih intone,...

Everybody’s got advice on what Twitter needs to do at its current crossroads. The answer might lie in revisiting the moment they first broke geeks’ hearts. I took it as a bad sign that Will.I.Am was hanging around backstage at a conference for...

Presidential candidate Piyush “Bobby” Jindal has said he’ll take questions over social media today. I’ve got some questions, but let’s start first with some background. As is probably obvious, I disagree with most of Jindal’s policies. I genuinely...

What it’s like to have the social network of a celebrity, without actually being famous I’ve got more Twitter followers than you. I’ve got more Twitter followers than Ted Cruz, and I’m only a little bit behind Björk. If my followers were a state,...

I was incredibly honored to asked by the team at Cultivated Wit to be a judge for the latest Comedy Hack Day. (Thus becoming the first-ever returning judge!) I got to join Michael Ian Black, Aparna Nancherla, and Christina Warren as a judge of an...

Tomorrow I’m speaking at the 99U Conference, which I’m really looking forward to. But one of the reasons I’m already convinced it’s going to be a special event is because of one particular accommodation that Sean Blanda and his team made in the days...

I’m a normal guy. I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t smoke cigarettes. I don’t do any illegal drugs. I don’t drink coffee. I never graduated from college. I’ve never been arrested. I don’t regularly watch any TV shows. I don’t subscribe to any print...

If you’ve ever had someone say something nice about a thing you made, you know how great it feels. It’s a combination of validation, and respect, and recognition, and it’s truly wonderful. The only thing better is when someone offers kind words about...

Here’s a lesson in how software development works. Say you’d like to port a popular arcade game to your home video console. You can give a guy like Tod Frye four months to do a good-enough version of Pac-Man. It’ll sell 7 million copies, even though...

I’m not prone to making grand New Year’s resolutions, but my friend Jessamyn West asked me to think a bit about what changes I’d make to my online activity, and I was glad to jot down some brief notes. You should check it out, for all the thoughtful...

Toward the end of every year, as people are thinking of making donations to charities either as an act of goodwill, or to help reduce their tax burden, or both, I try to work with my online networks to help out causes I believe in. And every year,...

Even though I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about being a dad, the truth is that on any given day what keeps me up at night is the things I’m getting wrong. I know every parent makes mistakes, and logically I am able to keep that...

There’s an oddness to working on a project that most people don’t (yet) understand. And the last year (or years!) of working on ThinkUp has definitely been permeated with that oddness. As fiercely proud as I am of the work, as absurdly convinced I am...

Today I went to MSNBC to tape an appearance on Maria Teresa Kumar’s new “Changing America”, part of the Shift lineup of shows that the network is trying out. It was pretty fun, and I think I came off okay, talking about how tech helps people...

Hot on the heels of Vanity Fair referencing my dad-ness on Twitter comes this Daily Dot piece examining Dad Twitter. I loved this part: If that sounds too cheesy, it’s on purpose. Displaying sincerity can feel like a radical act. To say you...

Every single day we’re hearing about the failings of big tech companies and what they’re doing to the web. The ethical failings, the transgressions against privacy, the rampant and shameless exclusion of most people from the opportunities that tech...

What a delight to be interviewed by Bijan Stephens for Vanity Fair, especially as so much of the focus was on me as a dad and a person, rather than just the usual tech stuff. In person, he projects an air of warm authority—more benevolent history...

Though I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, I haven’t lived there for years. So why should anybody in the state listen to me about who to vote for as their governor? Because, this time, I can personally attest to the character of the best man for...

There’s been precious little documentation of the real cultural impact that the social web has had, particularly in its earliest years. So it’s exciting when people in academia who are researching those topics share their findings. I was sent a set...

Graham Crackers were created to stifle the libido. Marshmallows are a sickly-sweet, cloying blob that, when properly heated, becomes a sort of confectionery napalm, a substance suitable at first for administering serious burns and then cooling into...

In my my latest piece, I wrote about an issue that’s been bugging me for a long time: Asian American men in tech don’t do enough to speak up about inclusion in our industry. Honestly, I think our sexism and our racism against fellow people of color...

We all know tech is excluding most people from participating. But one group is actually over represented. And we’ve been conspicuously silent. The major tech companies finally gave in and published their statistics confirming the stark reality that...

Much of my presence on social media, especially on Twitter, is predicated on the foilbes of parenthood. “Dad Tweets” are a venerable staple of the medium, as fundamental as “mommy blogs” are to blogging. But beyond the reductive and dismissive names...

It’s always nice when an idea has a little bit of staying power. A few weeks ago, Yahoo Health featured a piece about 8 Ways to Embrace JOMO, a reference to the “Joy of Missing Out that I wrote about a few years ago, after being inspired by Caterina...

This summer marked 15 years since I first started blogging here, and I’m happier than ever that I’ve chosen to live so much of my life in this place, with all of you. Nearly everything has changed for me since I began this blog, from major milestones...

They say the best way to see if you really understand something is to try to explain it to another person. I’ll never really understand what happened to my beloved city thirteen years ago today, of course, but I’ve had in mind that my young son is...

We don’t do nearly enough to examine what it means when we perform common actions on our social networks. These aren’t just guttural, reflexive responses! They are actions with meaning, choices that signify something emotional and expressive, just as...

0:00 — 0:10 In the summer of 1983, Wendy Melvoin was just 19 years old. She’d flown halfway across the country from Los Angeles for her first professional gig as a guitar player, joining her girlfriend Lisa Coleman in the band where Lisa had been...

After at least 15 years of debating whether I should spend money on this, I recently took the plunge and acquired one of my most-desired Prince collectibles. Added to my collection: 3.5" floppy given to press when Prince changed his name....

I’ve been trying to do more things that are unfamiliar or slightly out of my comfort zone lately. Here’s a quick roundup: I got to participate in Rhizome’s venerated Seven on Seven conference, where I teamed up with Kevin McCoy to create monegraph....

One of my recurrent ruminations of the last decade or so is a bit of reflection on my relationship with religion. To be clear: I don’t have one. I know there are no gods, that the supernatural does not exist, and that we should not base morality on...

My wife, in addition to being wise and kind, is generally made of sterner stuff than I am. This serves us both well, but the contrast does serve to elucidate some important concepts from time to time. Living as we do in New York City, subway rides...

All printers are 3D printers. Every device is wearable. All technology is mobile technology. And of course, this remains true: We're 30+ years into the PC revolution, and 3 things still never work: Voice chat, projectors & printers.—...

I forgot to mention it back in January when it happened, but I got to write my first piece for Businessweek, and there’s good news: It’s completely made up! I collaborated with my friends Paul Ford and Rusty Foster to imagine what the Consumer...

I had the chance to interview Steve Case for Social Media Week the other day, and though it was a brief conversation, I was really pleased with how it went. Steve’s earliest work on Quantum Link, a predecessor to what would someday become AOL, was...

We have very nice lawyers! The team over at Wilmer Hale have been very helpful to us, and it’s been nothing but a pleasant experience for us. As is typically the case for lawyers, we need to pay them from time to time. Recently, they had helped us...

I wrote a bit about why I only retweet women. As an exercise, let’s guess what stupid things I’ll hear in response! If we check off all these items, then we’ve won Internet Sexism Bingo. And by “won”, I mean “lost”. “You should just retweet the best...

[11:05pm] Well, that’s a wrap. It’s hard for me to say how that ranked as a New Girl episode, but it seemed the narrative of the show may have been subordinated to getting Prince some good lines. That being said, the little man certainly acquitted...

Upworthy is barely over two years old, and it’s among the top 50 most visited sites in the United States. But its perception among the self-involved media discussion class is entirely defined by its headlines. Those headlines typically reference a...

I’ve seen a lot of hand-wringing from techies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley saying “Why are we so hated?” now that there’s been a more vocal contingent of people being critical of their lack of civic responsibility. Is it true that corruption...

Here's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (sampled in @Beyonce's "Flawless") offering the truth: we should all be feminists. http://t.co/uZekGPQEcL— anildash (@anildash) December 13, 2013 Here's documentation for PST, the format...

Here's @jbouie on how conservative desire to keep doing business in South Africa would have failed to undo Apartheid: http://t.co/HOkHYQM9kN— anildash (@anildash) December 11, 2013 Here's the rarest thing: A tech conference talk...

Here's evidence of Microsoft returning to its "Import, Embrace & Extend" roots in consumer apps, with Outlook: http://t.co/PZv3wuTdo3— anildash (@anildash) December 12, 2013 Here's an amazing fellowship opportunity, helping...

Here's @pomeranian99's "Smarter Than You Think", offering perspective on tech while justifying our time spent online: http://t.co/R9Fkb1wJY5— anildash (@anildash) December 10, 2013 Here's [@sfj](https://twitter.com/sfj)'s...

Here's "What I'm Reading on Medium", a @medium collection that's exactly what it sounds like. You may want to follow! http://t.co/9D7VbNGPIT— anildash (@anildash) December 9, 2013 Here's Random Beyoncé. It offers a random...

Here's a fun registry of derby names that lets you see if your roller derby name is unique: http://t.co/ZU0TAxNN4O— anildash (@anildash) December 6, 2013 Here's a charming Super Mario-style map of the NYC subway (prints available):...

Here's an extraordinary first-person from [@BurningNorth](https://twitter.com/BurningNorth) about seeing 3D for the first time, thanks to Nintendo: [http://t.co/8dBN1oLD9u](http://t.co/8dBN1oLD9u)— anildash (@anildash) December 5, 2013 Here's...

Here's an incredible record of the Minneapolis sound's birth: [http://t.co/yyj1wpwhfF](http://t.co/yyj1wpwhfF) Get it for [@andrecymone](https://twitter.com/andrecymone) & [@flytetymejam](https://twitter.com/flytetymejam)'s tracks alone.—...

Here's a time lapse from the International Space Station, which becomes transcendent when a comet shows up at 2:00: [http://t.co/274FQerX37](http://t.co/274FQerX37)— anildash (@anildash) December 3, 2013 Here's the standard which defines UI...

We’ll spend three years of our lives with our thumbs on our phones. What will we have to show for it? I keep bumping up against this statistic about how much time we spend online, and how much time we spend on our smartphones and tablets. Depending...

[This piece was originally written for CNN on the occasion of Twitter’s IPO.] The Internet is buzzing with news of Twitter’s initial public offering on Thursday, inspiring enough enthusiasm from investors to push the company to a $23 billion...

I spend so much time writing, and thinking, about technology and tech companies. And so much of it’s critical. I point the finger at how the apps and sites we build aren’t meaningful, how the systems and institutions that support them aren’t...

This year’s XOXO festival exceeded its predecessor in every way. It was bigger, smarter, more challenging, more engaging and easily among the best conferences or events I’ve ever participated in. There were highlights throughout the two days I was...

I’m sick to death of this whole stupid topic, and fighting off a brutal chest cold, so I’m going to ask your forbearance on this piece; It’ll be a little less even-handed and detailed than I usually try to be, and if my language is ambiguous, I hope...

For a dozen years, I’ve been trying to document where I am relative to where I was, but this year I’m tired. I’m finding the weaponized grievances and the commercialized grief to be increasingly trying. I thought in 2001 that some beautiful things...

Today is New York City’s mayoral primary, where the two major parties select which candidate will represent the party. Due to my being on the board of the NY Tech Meetup, I got to be part of a small group that interviewed almost all of the major...

First, some disclaimers: I’m writing this as I sit a few feet away from Medium’s NYC team. (I even asked them for tech support while writing this!) Ev Williams, founder of Medium, is an old friend of mine, whom I became a fan of as I was the first...

I’ve had the good fortune to get to speak in public hundreds of times, about any manner of subjects. But I’ve never, never had the moments following one of my talks bring me to tears. Until yesterday. I was asked to go onstage at a conference full of...

[For context: This piece was written two years before the Apple Watch was released, when rumors began to ramp up.] A brief timeline of Apple iWatch’s entrance to the market. September 10, 2013: As key members of the tech industry and trade press...

There’s been a delightful debate the last few days about how to accommodate the increasing number of people who want the experience of watching movies in public theaters to fit in with the way they live the rest of their lives: Connected to others,...

I’m definitely one of those guys you’d think of as a tech nerd. I spend all day jumping on and off different social networks, I’ve got tons of followers on Twitter, and I’ve been blogging here for almost a decade and a half. But when it comes to...

There’s a great, deep story by Austin Carr in Fast Company today giving a broad overview of where Foursquare is headed, as a product and as a company. I was quoted a few times in the piece, and spent a good bit of time talking to Austin, and I...

In my years working in technology, I have learned a few things. These lessons have become oft-repeated refrains when speaking to people, so I thought I’d collect them so I have a link to send folks when needed. Given enough time, any object which...

Paul Graham on Unions: I wouldn’t quite call the high-paying union job a myth, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it. The era of labor unions seems to have been the same kind of aberration, just spread over a longer period,...

2013's web bests include Digg, Flickr, RSS readers + new blogging tools from @ev & @davewiner. Wore the pants so long they're back in style!— anildash (@anildash) June 29, 2013 One of the things I expected least to see in 2013 was...

One of the things I love most is meeting new people who are outside of the usual circles that I travel in, who can teach me about things that I’d never learn about otherwise. To that end, I devote as much time as is possible in a busy schedule to...

Hello, Americans who work in the technology industry! Did you know comprehensive immigration reform is coming? This is a thing that is more important than the used game policy on the XBox. And you’re a good person who cares about the world, so let’s...

I read my friend Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong To Us straight through; On its surface, this is a book that tells a riveting true (not inspired-by-true, but true) story of two young lovers and the fantastic, farcical way in which they pulled off...

Seven years ago, my wife Alaina Browne and I were living happily in San Francisco when she went off to NYC to visit with our friends and attend a party. By the time she flew back, we were on a path that not only led to our return to New York City,...

I got the chance to revisit some of the themes of the Web We Lost in the broader context of how we confront our mortality and impermanence in the digital realm on WNYC a few weeks ago. I’m pleased with how the conversation came out, and if you’ve got...

Mark Zuckerberg built himself a political action committee called FWD.us, and they’re diving headfirst into trying to change immigration policy as their first priority. They seem to have good goals, and they’ve already adopted some extremely...

I lament the end of the personal CMS market; I was happy to back Ghost on Kickstarter today for the same reason that I back pretty much any effort at making blogging software — I think these tools matter. I find it interesting, and telling, that...

Though it’s currently in vogue to threaten the President with ricin, the fashion when I was a younger man was to intimidate newspapers with anthrax. During those heady days I happened to work at a newspaper, and as always the terrifying eventually...

When I wrote about the web we lost a few months ago, I thought the idea that we’d strayed from some of the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of the social web’s early days would be of note to a few old-timers like me, and that most folks would...

Having had the good fortune to work with a broad range of entrepreneurs and get a front-row seat to the foundations of their success, I thought it’d be good to share 10 key tips that I’ve found work 100% of the time to increase your odds of startup...

One of my favorite aspects of the infrastructure of the web is that the way we refer to web browsers in a technical context: User Agents. Divorced from its geeky context, the simple phrase seems to be laden with social, even political,...

Every single day, almost every mainstream news source in America offers live updates throughout the day on a few metrics which have almost no meaning for most Americans. Whether it’s a radio broadcast, a local TV station going to commercials, or the...

Update: After this post was published, I had a chance to talk about Twitter verification at a live show of the Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Project, with Hari and Ashok Kondabolu. It turned out pretty well. Twitter verification is an interesting...

Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Bill Gates as part of a small group, in a discussion focused around the release of his annual letter and the progress that has been made against the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. (You can...

One of the weirdest things about the tech industry is that, despite its reverence for the Cult of the Coder, pretty much the only way a programmer or engineer gets to be senior management or in charge of a company as its CEO is by founding it. The...

In today’s Wall Street Journal there’s a detailed look at how New York City’s tech industry is looking to influence politics in the city. I’m happy to be quoted in the story, but wanted to offer more context about some of my comments. When I ran for...

Today, my friends at Branch announced that their fun and pretty little conversation platform is now open to the world, available for you to bring your friends in and talk about what matters to you. (I’m an advisor, and became one because I liked the...

The era of User Generated Discontent began about a decade ago, when a critical mass of people started using social apps on the web often enough that they felt a bit proprietary over the user interface and design of those services. Inevitably, that...

Last week, we announced the new beta release of ThinkUp (if you’re a geek or developer, try it out!) and one of the reasons I was most excited to talk about the new release is because it has a whole new user experience which exemplifies a belief...

Every great career in rhythm and blues leads only to heaven or hell. The path to hell is obvious: From Sam Cooke gunned down to James Brown leading a multi-state police chase to Sly Stone strung out on crack and living in a van to Whitney Houston’s...

(First, thanks/apologies to Andy Baio for listening to my musings on a mullet-style app strategy and coining “Mullet-platform”. It’s horrible and wonderful.) So, here’s the theory: The web is good at driving big audiences of engaged users, and...

We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. I’ve been truly gratified to watch the response to The Web We Lost over the last few days; It’s become one of the most popular things I’ve ever written and has...

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you’ll give it a...

Late on Wednesday, just as Americans were taking off for the Thanksgiving holiday, Facebook announced its intention to change the feedback process for the policies which govern use of its service. For the last few years, as I’d mentioned in Wired a...

Even as I was asking the Tea Party to occupy the White House’s petition website a year ago, I didn’t actually think it would happen. But people are smarter, and better, and bigger than we ever imagine. That is of course, not how I’m supposed to...

I don’t usually agree to participate in corporate promo videos, but Microsoft asked me to talk broadly about why writing software is still inspiring to me after three decades of doing it, and I was happy to see them use it at their Build conference....

Anil: Just getting ready to liveblog this event. My first Apple liveblog ever. Pretty excited.10/23/2012 4:56:26 PM Anil: Tim Cook begins by saying that Apple sold out of iPhone 5. But we all know the truth, which is that Apple sold...

When I used to fly a lot, people would ask me why I was such a big fan of Virgin America. Some of it is the usual stuff — they have wifi and power outlets, and travel to the cities I visit most often. But the crux of why I like their brand taught me...

Much of the conversation about the shortage of technology talent in the United States focuses on how we can encourage more young people to go to college to become Computer Science graduates. Those programs are admirable and should be encouraged, but...

Most of the technology world, especially the traditional venture funding infrastructure, is justifiably proud of the extreme efficiency of modern internet startups. It is a triumph for Craigslist to serve hundreds of millions of users with only a few...

There are lots of different ways to measure how friendly a company is toward developers, and whether a tech company complies with the values that its developer community cares about. I’m a big believer in what I earlier called “radical institutional...

Today marks the launch of The Internet Association, a laudable effort from a number of prominent Internet technology companies to address our industry’s historic lack of engagement with the policy world by creating a lobbying group with a coherent...

The classic criticism that thoughtless Apple haters use against the company is that it makes products that are pretty but dumb. Usually those criticisms are by people who don’t understand the value of a comprehensible user experience, frustrated by...

Yancey Strickler is co-founder of Kickstarter, the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. The Details Yancey Strickler Projects: Kickstarter XOXOing: Crowdfunding Portland has the most Kickstarter projects by capita of any place in...

Maggie Vail and Jesse Von Doom are the executive directors and cofounders of CASH Music, an open-source toolkit for helping independent musicians support themselves. The Details Maggie Vail Jesse Von Doom Project: CASH Music XOXOing: Music Start by...

Josh Reich is the CEO and co-founder of Simple, which was created to radically improve the experience of consumer banking. The Details Josh Reich Company: Simple XOXOing: Banking You shouldn’t let your fear of not knowing how things work, or of...

Jen Bekman is the founder and CEO of 20×200, a marketplace helping artists make a living by turning everyone into an art collector. The Details Jen Bekman Company: 20×200 XOXOing: Art and Collecting Jen had truly believed that art is for everyone,...

Jamie Wilkinson is co-founder of VHX, a new streaming video platform helping filmmakers bypass the studio system to distribute DRM-free films directly to fans. The Details Jamie Wilkinson Company: VHX XOXOing: Video Distribution Wants to start by...

Evan Ratliff is a Wired journalist who became a startup founder, creating The Atavist to help longform writers profit from their own work instead of selling it to magazines. The Details Evan Ratliff Company: The Atavist XOXOing: Journalism and Indie...

Chris Poole is founder of two of the Internet’s most creative communities, the notorious 4chan, and Canvas, its playful image remixing cousin. The Details Chris Poole Projects: 4chan and Canvas XOXOing: Community and Images Chris has been working on...

Chad Dickerson is the CEO and former CTO of Etsy, the world’s largest marketplace of handmade art and vintage finds. The Details Chad Dickerson Company: Etsy XOXOing: Crafting and Commerce First up: Etsy acquires the city of Portland The first item...

Adam Savage is an obsessive model maker, passionate defender of maker culture, and the co-host of Mythbusters and Tested. The Details Adam Savage Projects: Mythbusters and Tested XOXOing: Science and Making Adam comes on stage to a title: “I’m a...

Ron Carmel is the co-founder of 2D Boy (which created World of Goo), and partner at Indie Fund. He’s being interviewed by Jamin Warren, founder of Kill Screen magazine. The Details Ron Carmel Projects: World of Goo Company: Indie Fund XOXOing: Indie...

Richard Stevens has been making Diesel Sweeties for 12 years, pioneering webcomics, experimenting with newspaper syndication, merchandising,crowdfunding and bacon. The Details R. Stevens Project: Diesel Sweeties XOXOing: Comics and...

Matt Haughey’s the founder of MetaFilter, one of the web’s longest-running and most respected web communities, and its popular Q&A section, Ask MetaFilter. The Details Matt Haughey Projects: MetaFilter XOXOing: Community and Q&A Matt started...

Swirsky and Pajot are the directors of the Sundance-award winning documentary tracking the agony of indie game development. Interviewed by filmmaker Jason Scott. The Details James Swirsky Lisanne Pajot Project: Indie Game: The Movie XOXOing: Fim...

Julia Nunes started recording ukulele covers in her dorm room for her friends at home eventually led to 50 million YouTube views, four self-published albums, and a performance on Conan O’Brien. Today she talks about how she accidentally become a...

So, we’re going old school: I’m going to live-blog the XOXO conference! But not like “Hey I’m a writer for The Verge obsessing over an Apple keynote!” or “I’m just going to tweet the two funniest lines from this talk!” but rather, like we used to do...

The Details Emily Winfield Martin is the top seller of handmade art on Etsy, selling her dolls and illustrations and helping her fulfill her dream of creating children’s books. Emily Winfield Martin Projects: Black Apple blog XOXOing: Indie Art,...

Studio Neat’s first product was the Glif, an iPhone kickstand. And their second success was the Cosmonaut, a stylus for iPhone. These were followed by Frameographer (iPhone app) and a book called “I Will Be Exhilarating”. The Details Dan Provost Tom...

Dan Harmon is the Emmy-winning writer, former executive producer of Community, co-founder of Channel 101, and executive producer of Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa. The Details Dan Harmon Projects: Community and Channel 101 XOXOing: Television and...

Bre Pettis is the co-founder and CEO of Makerbot, the first company to bring 3D printers to the home, and Thingiverse, the online community for sharing digital designs for real-life objects. The Details Bre Pettis Projects: MakerBot and...

Yesterday, my son and I were coming back home to New York City, driving past the familiar skyline and its newest additions. Like a lot of toddlers, my boy’s obsessed with all kinds of vehicles, so I wasn’t surprised when he pointed at a flight that...

Oh, there’s been lots of chatter on the Internet this week! Where all did our conversations show up? Well, I’ll tell you. Pegged to the release of Jessica Valenti’s new book Why Have Kids, I (somewhat inexplicably!) participated in an NY Daily News...

Give $37 to build one village its well. Let’s go! » When I was a kid, I used to go and visit my cousins, just like you probably did. We’d play pickup games of soccer, go fishing without actually catching any fish, and generally just run around and...

I was very happy to see this morning that Fred Wilson had shared his thoughts on inclusivity, building off of my earlier post You Can’t Start the Revolution From a Country Club. Fred gets to the heart of the matter: I have learned the power of...

I sure do like talking to people! Here’s some recent conversations: MIT Tech Review offered up A Twitter Tweak or a Revolution in Online Discourse? as a look at Branch. (Where, full disclosure, I’ve graduated from unofficial advisor to...

Oh, hello there! I didn’t see you come in. Well, as long as you’re here, let’s look at some links around the web that I’ve found to be related to what we’ve been talking about here. My August column for Wired, talking about Microsoft’s return to its...

The current fashion amongst alpha geeks is to reinvent many of the building blocks of the social web. Given that I’ve been obsessed with that particular intersection of technology and culture for a dozen years, I should be unequivocal in my...

A few years ago, I wrote about the Law of Fail: Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their...

Lots of nice responses to my plea to stop publishing web pages yesterday! Here’s some highlights: Dave Winer said I should credit him for a lot of the ideas in the post. I’m eager to grant his point, so please do know: Dave articulated a lot of the...

Most users on the web spend most of their time in apps. The most popular of those apps, like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Tumblr and others, are primarily focused on a single, simple stream that offers a river of news which users can easily scroll...

The other night, we had a wonderful dinner made by chef Tien Ho, who’s best known as the founding chef of Má Pêche (I got to join Ed Levine when he had the meal that inspired him to write on Serious Eats that Tien was then “the best chef in New York...

My brilliant friend Caterina Fake wrote about the Fear of Missing Out last year, and the FOMO meme took instant hold amongst those of us who love the digital life. We’re keenly aware that our constant connection to those who are doing things that are...

I know I usually try to be a thoughtful tech writer, but sometimes, holy shit you guys. Twitter, because of their API, actually was a real-time protocol to connect various services in a novel way. I had debates with my other tech-nerd friends about...

Right now, there’s no App Store for Amazon EC2. Today’s just-announced “Google Compute Engine” isn’t plugged in to Google Play, the Android Music and app store. Microsoft seems to be moving toward unifying the various Windows and Zune and XBox stores...

Congrats to Matt Mullenweg on ten years of blogging. I say it half-jokingly every time someone I know observes the decade anniversary of their blogging, but there really are key lessons about this medium that I didn’t figure out until I’d been doing...

Today a number of folks are talking about the importance of public transit data as Apple tries to shift from Google’s historic integration of public transit data in its maps product to a new world where each individual transit provider would create...

One of the great struggles in trying to challenge racist aspects of culture is that we’ve moved from overt, obvious, overbearing racist practices to things that are much more nuanced, and which are often the result of bad habits or ignorance from...

This month’s Wired magazine includes a milestone I’m incredibly excited about: My first published print column! You can read Safe In Its Shell, my exploration of the long history of introducing software lockdown mechanisms to mainstream computer...

Update: I just got off the phone with Popchips founder Keith Belling, who was sincere and contrite as he offered a thoughtful, apologetic response that indicates he understood much of what I was trying to say here. I’m cautiously optimistic to see...

If there were one lesson I’d want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I’ve said before, know your shit. Know the discipline you’re in, know the history of those who’ve done your kind of...

Update: The students did it! The re-vote from the board yielded a unanimous vote in favor of forming the Coexist club. I’m sincerely thankful to the students, to their advisor Christina Baker, and to Superintendent Bruce Deveney for their leadership...

This is a long-ass post. In summary: Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren’t in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app. But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has...

Despite his obviously profound impact on popular culture, Prince has generally not been the subject of nearly as much academic study as his peers such as Michael Jackson, his influences like James Brown, or even contemporary hip hop acts from Biggie...

Back in 2009, I founded Expert Labs based on the idea that technology could help all of us better engage with our government and encourage policy makers to listen to us. The idea was, frankly, a bit nebulous and hard to explain, but the ambition and...

On Sunday, I interviewed Nick Denton at SXSW about Gawker Media, commenting culture on the web, and a good bit of the history of professional blogging. In advance of the conversation, I began a conversation with Elizabeth Spiers, Choire Sicha,...

First, a bit of background: Blogger, Google’s venerable and pioneering blogging service was created in 1999 by a small team at Pyra Labs, as an offshoot of the project management platform they’d originally set out to make. As one of the earliest...

The idea of “public space” used to be pretty simple; There were places that we all agreed would be maintained by, and for, the public good. But the past few decades have offered up a valuable, if troubling, experiment with the nature of public space...

I’m an idealist. I want all governments to work in an ideal, uncorrupted state. But I’d settle for the governments which I live under to work in a way that were at least a bit more responsive and transparent. But part of the reason that doesn’t...

Apropos of nothing, I’ve become somewhat obsessed of late with the evolution of Eddie Murphy’s career and persona. Some relevant links: An absolutely exceptional interview from 1990 by Spike Lee, from the issue of Spin that Spike guest edited (!) in...

Considering how much conservatives and right-wing political personalities in the United States claim to hate the liberal media, it’s remarkable how much money they’ve been able to funnel into the coffers of the liberal media institutions they...

This week, many of the web’s most popular sites shuttered their doors in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the pair of bills that had been winding their way through congress with the stated intent of fighting piracy and the unfortunate side effect of...

A few nice conversations around the web, either in response to or inspired by what I’ve been talking about here: My favorite TechCrunch post in a long time is Jon Evans’ Scheming Intentions, which outlines a simple way that native mobile apps could...

About two years ago, Fred Wilson and I were talking about which startups we found interesting and I mentioned offhandedly that Foursquare was far and away the one that I thought had the most potential to be a huge, meaningful business. I’m sure Fred...

I’ve been infatuated with 3D printing for a few years now; the rise of (NYC’s own!) MakerBot and other startups offering simple ways to create physical objects as easily as we create paper output from our computers is extraordinarily exciting. I have...

Twitter’s Bootstrap framework for creating web sites and apps is the culmination of half a decade’s work by the web design community in creating CSS resets, grid systems and toolkits for easily building flexible, adaptable websites. While Bootstrap...

I think we’ve had more debates in the past few weeks for the Republican candidates so far than are typically held in the entirety of an election season, but the questions have generally been completely obvious, yielding only the usual expected...

Well, it seems like my post on how Facebook is gaslighting the web struck a nerve with a lot of folks. I have to give first priority to publishing the responses I’ve gotten directly from Facebook employees, to be fair to their perspective. Louis...

Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the...

The latest launch I’m ecstatic to share with you all: My friends at Readability (whom I advise) announced their amazing new platform! Though it’s best known as a simple way to clean up the formatting of an article that you’re reading on the web,...

Today, ThinkUp is out of beta and available for free. If you have a presence on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ and know how to run a PHP/MySQL app on a web server (or on EC2), you should install it and get it started now. ThinkUp will collect all of...

Last week, I was thrilled to see the launch of Mixel. If you aren’t familiar with it, go grab the iPad app, and while it downloads, take a look at this video explaining how it works. Because I’ve been lucky enough to see Mixel evolve over the last...

The conventional wisdom is that the American people are too cynical, too jaded, and too burnt out on politics to ever engage with the actual governance of our country by getting involved in discussions of policy. I don’t believe that’s true; I think...

Andy Rooney died last night. I find myself crestfallen about this because I’d spent the last few years trying, off and on, to get in touch with him for the chance to thank him for his influence on my work. I’d even hoped to interview him for this...

For a few months, those of us who care passionately about the New York City tech community have been debating the City’s Applied Sciences NYC plan, which will drive the creation of a world-class research university here in NYC. Since a significant...

The World Maker Faire opens in Queens this weekend, in the second annual New York City event for the formidable faire. That was perfect timing for having a conversation with Dale Dougherty, the father of the movement, about why Making is bigger than...

I took this photo on a cool spring day twenty years ago, on the day I fell in love for the first time that would last. I’d been to New York City a number of times before then, but at fifteen years old I took this photo on my first trip to the city...

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a piece called if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen, about how your thoughts, ideas and conversations need a place to live permanently over time if they’re going to inspire a useful discourse. And while...

I tried to solve the problem by leaving Silicon Valley, and writing software I believe in, and doing the best I can. For me it’s never been primarily about money. I like money, up to a point — but I’m really in it for the wonderful things you can do...

Ten years ago, my friend Andre had been experimenting with an instant messenger bot that sent out news headlines; Up late on a Saturday night I got a message that stopped me cold: A link to MetaFilter with the simple headline Singer Aaliyah Killed in...

For the past several days, Apple’s stock has been rising high enough that the company has flitted between being the first and second most valuable company in the world. Regardless of the final value of the stock on any given day, it is without a...

A few months ago, I had the chance to speak at the Good Experience Live conference. Gel’s been one of my favorite events for years; I’ve attended most Gels since the first one, and being asked to speak was quite an honor. Though I had quite a few...

Hmm, lots of interesting responses to If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault, and even more interesting conversation about the topic of commenting culture in general. A few highlights from the last few days: My wonderful friend Caterina...

We’re twenty years in to this world wide web thing. Today, I myself celebrate twelve years of writing this blog. And yet those of us who love this medium, who’ve had our lives changed by the possibility of publishing our words to the world without...

A few months ago, I introduced a blogroll on my site, making me probably the first person in more than half a decade to get excited about a blogroll. But my exuberance is based on the quality of the people listed there: I wholeheartedly endorse their...

“If you can make it here…“, Jamie Beck, 2011 It’s been 84 years since talkies began their march towards dominance over silent film. But while 1.3 billion people in the U.S. bought a ticket for a motion picture with sound last year, I’d estimate that...

A year ago, I wrote about the launch of Gourmet Live by Condé Nast. It was a fascinating project for many reasons, ranging from the fact it was bringing back a brand name that lots of people missed, to the tech innovations the team came up with. (For...

By request, a bit of explanation of how and why I favorite things on the internet. (Or favor them. Or like them. Whatever.) First, where do I favorite? On Twitter, certainly: I love lots of tweets! On Facebook! That’s mostly for liking things outside...

It’s really gratifying to get to ruminate on things here on my blog and see echoes of those ideas the great work that other people do. Some recent bits of gratification: After talking about the open data from Health and Human Services as a “Health...

In the months since my son was born, I’ve struggled mightily with resisting the urge to unleash the mommyblogger that’s been lurking in my heart lo these many years. But one recent insight seemed to cross the bar of “would this still be interesting...

When I co-founded Activate last year, one of my goals was that, as much as possible, we’d share what we learned about helping established companies with their strategies. I know there are plenty of old-school consulting companies that publish big,...

I’ve been waiting a year for someone to write about this, but my laziness has not yet paid off, so here are a few things that we all know about everybody’s favorite Cupertino fruit company: Apple has client app software on hundreds of millions of...

This morning, I was extraordinarily excited to get to witness Mayor Bloomberg and our city’s new Chief Digital Office Rachel Sterne unveil New York City’s “Road Map for the Digital City”. It’s an extraordinary document, and as someone who loves the...

In a remarkably fast evolution from what-if rumination on a blog to cutting-edge news dissemination, Alex Kerin’s idea last year of how to use Twitter to share sparkline infographics on Twitter was used by the Wall Street Journal to share...

I know lots of people use LinkedIn and like it. It seems more like a sort of obligation for me, but I know lots of nice people who work there, so I thought I’d collect some of my frustrations with the service and turn them intro constructive...

I love entrepreneurship, and I love tech startups, but sometimes I’m struck by the lack of perspective that many tech entrepreneurs have about creating a startup. One of the most common things that entrepreneurs in the tech sector lose sight of is...

Two years ago, I said that the executive branch of the U.S. federal government was the most interesting tech startup of 2009. That optimism started to bear fruit just a few months later, with one of my favorite examples being what I called “The...

Thirty-two years ago today, I noticed that things were odd at our pre-school. The teachers had drawn the blinds closed in a few rooms and at least one of the other kids had had his mom pick him up in a big wood-sided station wagon before the day was...

While I’ve always liked doing a lot of my notes and writing with pen and ink, I’ve never been particularly well-versed in the latest innovations and trends in the handwriting world. But! I know this is exactly the sort of endeavor that attracts...

About a year and a half ago, I was disappointed with one of the key choices Apple had made, given that they’re often described as one of the most admired companies in the world. I wrote a piece called “Secrecy Does Not Scale“, to try to describe the...

This weekend here in NYC is Transportation Camp. While I can’t make it out to what’s already sounding like it’s been an amazing event, I thought the moment marked a nice time to look back at one of the successes we’ve seen around open transportation...

Please meet Malcolm Browne Dash. He’s my son, born February 9th weighing in at 7 pounds, 2 ounces. The days (and yes, the nights) over this last week or so have been a blur, but one thing that’s crystal clear, beside his abiding cuteness, is that...

A few months ago, I wrote about fat pages, the unbearable burden of clutter that often makes reading on the web so much less pleasant than it ought to be. It ended with a sincere wish: So, if these smart folks are right, and lots of people value a...

One of the first questions venture capital investors ask people who make tech products and tech startups is if the entrepreneurs behind them are just trying to have a “lifestyle business”. It’s a euphemistic term, usually used with a slightly...

Today is Community Moderator Appreciation Day, a well-deserved moment of recognition for people who make the web more humane, more thoughtful, more helpful and more useful. This is a bottomless topic for me, but perhaps the best way to observe it is...

Summary: The White House is looking to build a web community to get its questions answered, sort of their own Quora, and they’re trying to do it the right way. They’re asking those who would participate to help shape how the community itself works....

Great news for the web today, some of the smartest folks I know are doing what they do best: Making the web better. Take Paul Ford’s thoughts on “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?“, the driving inspiration behind much of what happens on the modern web. It was...

Clive Thompson’s newest Wired piece argues that the flow of short-form messages as we see on Twitter and Facebook is encouraging longer meditations in other media. I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for a while in terms of the impact that it...

Noticing a pattern here? Paul Kedrosky, Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail: Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to...

Since a few people told me they found my notes on cloudtop applications useful when I posted them a few months ago, I thought I’d share some more notes in the same spirit. Part of my immediate motivation was when my friend Andre wrote up some notes...

Thank you to those of you who supported my bid for a board seat in the New York Tech Meetup election. Being considered amongst such talented and accomplished peers is an honor, and being elected from among them is even more so, especially alongside...

Update: Voting is now open. I’d appreciate your support. Update #2: There’s video of my platform speech at this month’s tech meetup, if you want to see and hear me articulate the ideas below. This is a bit outside of my usual realm, but I decided...

I love blogs. Nick Denton wrote over on Lifehacker about the pending redesign of Gawker’s blogs, with a lot of great insights into the leading edge of web publishing today. As with any thoughtful, provocative writing of such length, it inspired some...

Providing more evidence that blogging is something you can get better at the longer you do it, my friend Rafe Colburn put out a brilliant post the other day outlining a third kind of software freedom. What Apple offers in exchange for giving up...

Recently, I’ve had the chance to talk to a lot of talented people who are working on new projects or new startups, most of which aren’t really companies yet, but all of which are interesting to various degrees. It’s quite a privilege, to be trusted...

I travel often, and until relatively recently I was doing over 100,000 miles a year. I’ve cut back a lot because my jobs have changed and I felt bad about my carbon footprint, but the bottom line is I’ve spent a lot of quality time with the TSA. And...

Bob Metcalfe’s most famous pronouncement is known these days as Metcalfe’s Law, the idea that the value of a network increases with the scale of its number of members. Metcalfe formulated this concept in the context of telecommunications networks,...

I’m quoted in today’s New York Times, talking about how politicians in this year’s election have had to confront their pasts, as shared through social networks: “I think all of us know that politicians would have to confront the Facebook skeletons...

Lots of nice writing out there that either replies to or references some recent posts here. Highlights: Dictatorship Versus Democracy in app store politics at Fast Company, by the always-genius Gina Trapani. A clear contrast between Mozilla and...

Here are some articles that have recently gotten attention amongst media obsessives. They are all fundamentally flawed: A list of the Top 25 newspapers on Twitter from Journalistics An expanded list of 200 U.S. newspapers, sorted by their Twitter...

Apple took the not-very-surprising step of announcing an App Store for Mac OS X, an idea I was ruminating about earlier today in looking at all the app stores available today. So, now that we know that it exists, how do people who are concerned about...

Apple’s App Store for iOS dominates people’s perceptions whenever you mention the phrase “App Store”. But it’s actually just one member of a much larger set of “app stores”, most of which don’t use that description, but all of which are used to...

From the list of “things I thought I’d never see”, Karl Pearson-Cater (he and I were colleagues about a decade ago) posted a great job listing at MinnPost, which lists the following requirement: You know the difference between an “em-dash” and an...

Today, in a Wired interview about Instapaper, Marco Arment offered up: “People love information,” Arment said. “Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we...

As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web: In a follow-up to Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm ruminated a bit about magazine...

There’s an odd tendency in web culture to see all features as obvious, even inevitable. While most of the artifacts of our computing experience have been invented recently, in living memory, we treat them as if they existed centuries ago and that the...

For more than a decade, an intellectually bankrupt habit of maligning new media has reared its head in traditional media outlets, perpetuating a false impression of technology being bad for society. Worse, this tendency masks the actual social ills...

In my blog here, I’m mostly a textual dude. I’ve made a few little video clips or animated .gifs over the years, but basically, I’m a writer. But today, today! We’re going all futuristic streaming internet video with it. If you like it, then maybe...

Malcolm Gladwell gets started with “The revolution will not be tweeted” in this week’s New Yorker, condemning social media’s ability to enact real cultural change with an argument he sums up early in the piece: The evangelists of social media don’t...

Some great responses to, and extensions of, the things I’ve been writing about lately In response to Forking Is A Feature, Rafe Colburn offers up The cultural implications of forking, rightly pointing out, “Linus Torvalds didn’t set out to change...

The short version: Gourmet Live, the new iPad app that reimagines Gourmet as a sort of massively multiplayer magazine, is live. I’ve been working on this for the past six months, and I’m enormously proud of it, so if you’ve got an iPad, you should go...

I stopped working at Six Apart over a year ago. At the time, I didn’t blog about it because the departure was completely amicable and I knew I wasn’t sure what I would be doing next, so I figured I’d step back and watch the company for the first time...

The new Twitter is here! The new Twitter is here! Besides sowing discontent in our household by giving me access to the new user interface before my wife’s account has been upgraded, the big new feature of the update to venerable old Twitter.com is a...

One interesting pattern I’ve noticed popping up around my favorite new apps these days is that they follow what I’d call a “cloudtop” design. I thought I’d share my own notes on this pattern primarily so that people I’m talking to know what I’m...

There’s a lengthy, excellent profile of Mark Zuckerberg, and by proxy Facebook, in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, written by Jose Antonio Vargas. In it, I’m quoted saying about Mark, “If you are twenty-six years old, you’ve been a golden child,...

This year, as every year, I pause for a personal ritual of observing where I am today compared to where I was, and where we all were, on this day in 2001. I’m a New Yorker, who lived in the city for years before the attacks, but never quite...

While Linus Torvalds is best known as the creator of Linux, it’s one of his more geeky creations, and the social implications of its design, that may well end up being his greatest legacy. Because Linus has, in just a few short years, changed the...

There are some links I just keep finding myself sending around to friends and coworkers. Hmm, isn’t that what a blog is for? From back in April, a look at the service guidelines for staff at Momofuku offshoot M� P�che. Though the Eater commenters...

There’s been a recent re-emergence of the perennial tech industry conversation about how the venture capital industry can stop excluding women from both joining VC firms and from having their businesses funded by VCs. Fred Wilson covered some...

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and among many observances was an event at the White House that was co-sponsored by the FCC and the Department of Commerce. There’s a pretty good...

In improvisational theater and comedy, one of the first rules of participation is allowing co-creation. Basically, instead of saying “No, wait!” you respond to your collaborators with “Yes, and…” to continue the conversation and start to create...

Been busy running around doing a bunch of fun stuff lately; Here’s some videos with highlights! The Personal Democracy Forum invited me to talk about what we’ve been learning at Expert labs, which I summarized in a talk called “Startup.gov” which...

Michael Arrington argues, over at TechCrunch, that the startup community should ignore the current administration’s entreaties for feedback on tech policy, and instead shoo policy makers away and hope for this best. This advice is naive, misguided...

Over the past two and a half decades, the Weather Channel built itself into a $3.5 billion company on the strength of information that’s largely available for free from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But starting today, if I had...

When there’s no time for original content, we link! These are the places I’ve popped up lately, or things that caught my eye: We published our initial results from the Grand Challenges initiative over on the Expert Labs blog, including a full data...

By unusual coincidence, this week I had a number of different folks ask me to sign NDAs about the new projects they’re working on. It’s great that we’re in such a fertile phase for the tech industry that lots of people have new ideas, and I’m very...

Last week, Twitter announced its new advertising system, called promoted tweets. I was at Twitter’s Chirp conference as a speaker, so I got an up-close look at the reaction to the big news, along with the (frankly, more interesting to me)...

The White House tweeted that they want feedback on the Grand Challenges in science and technology that face our country. That’s not so new. But today, if you reply to the White House’s tweet to share your ideas, the White House will actually see your...

Just a few weeks ago I made a list of some places that I’m speaking or appearing in the coming weeks and months, and here’s an update on a few of those. I hope folks will come up and say hi, or find time for a conversation, if you plan on being at...

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a wonderful idea that was started to help us celebrate our heroes in technology and science, and to identify female role models. I’m using the day instead to talk about how the women I know (or don’t know yet) in the tech...

Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke federal law, did it in plain sight of the world’s leaders and traditional media, and yet we all barely noticed? What if political leaders didn’t even see it as a political...

Even more fun news! Today, I’m thrilled to announce the other big project I’ve been working on: Activate. It’s a new consultancy, founded by Michael Wolf (you know him not just as one of the most established names in tech/media consulting, but also...

A few months ago, I started as director of “Expert Labs”:http://expertlabs.org/, a new independent non-profit effort with the goal of improving government by letting policy makers tap into the collective wisdom of the public. We’re part of the...

I’m doing a number of presentations and public appearances over the next several weeks, here’s a quick chronological overview if you’d like to meet up. The AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego, this week from Feb 18-20. The American Association for the...

As I write this, the Twittersphere is going through its annual love/hate paroxysms about TED. Every year, the conference seems even more an event perfectly calibrated to inflame the bloggerati: Inarguably great presentations combined with...

I’m going to be offline for a little while (some would say that last rant of mine was a sign I should have gone offline a bit sooner) so I thought I’d leave you with some good sites to check out that you may not have been enjoying. Dan C’s Lost...

I’m not a Democrat; I don’t much care about the scorekeeping of who has more seats in any given chamber of Congress. But I do think there are things that need fixing in this country, and one of the most important is acknowledging when things are...

Just a quick roundup of some recent conversations I’ve been having around the web: Fast Company interviewed me about applying the lessons of Web 2.0 to government. I’m always happy when I can mention my love of New York City and pop music while also...

A few weeks ago when I started writing about what it’s like to be on Twitter’s suggested user list and the fact that nobody has a million followers on Twitter, I thought it might be a good opportunity to try to collect some useful data since I’d been...

I don’t believe in life insurance. When I die, I want it to be a bad day for everybody. – Brad L. Graham, February 2002 My friend Brad L. Graham died unexpectedly last week, at only 41. It’s hard to sum up someone so loved in a few words, but I...

Last week, I wrote a bit about what it’s like to be on Twitter’s suggested user list. The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to share a bit of what I’ve learned, as well some of the more interesting responses. First, to...

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, I’ll have gained another follower or two on Twitter. Within an hour, I’ll have added more followers than 99% of Twitter users ever have. On a typical day, I’ll have averaged 100 new followers every...

Update: We’ve got some results already! Joseph Scott at Automattic mentions in the comments that he’s added RSD support for the Twitter API to WordPress.com. I should also make clear that I am very confident that we’ll be building apps on top of this...

A visualization of the ascent of many of the world’s youngest countries showing their independence from colonial powers (British, Portuguese, French, Spanish) from 1800 to 2009. France keeps its yoke on a stunning number of nations until...

I’m here at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC today, my first big tech industry conference in a long time, where I’m also excitedly getting ready for my keynote tomorrow. But one of the things I’m most proud of is that has something of a valedictory feel to...

I love the Internet. I love lots of things that are on the Internet. I have less love for things that want to undermine the Internet. Tim O’Reilly, The War for the Web: If you’ve followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I...

Humans create the web, but we’ve largely abdicated the act of organizing web content to software. That could change. Twitter this week made its new Lists feature broadly available. As they’ve been described, Lists, allow you to enumerate a...

Update: Since this post got a lot more readers than I expected, it’s become clear to me that the title was unintentionally vague. I thought it’s amazing that a technology I still think of as fairly advanced, virtualizing operating systems on the...

Most of my career has been dedicated to communications, either in making tools for enabling it, or in trying to practice the art myself. My friends tend to be people of conscience, so they often question why I waste my time on activities that could...

Last week, I found this picture of a group dinner at Guero’s restaurant in Austin, TX, taken during South by Southwest in 2002. At the time, most of us at the table knew each other primarily through the web and through the then-nascent blogging...

There have been another spate of interesting conversations around the tech industry about what goals a tech company should have, and how they should achieve those goals. Right now, most venture capital organizations and the majority of trade press...

Here are some interesting recent blog posts and articles, mostly by friends or acquaintances of mine, all of which add up to an interesting narrative. Spencer Ante in BusinessWeek documents Mint’s sale to Intuit: Mint.com owes much of its success...

One year ago, I wrote a remembrance, as I do every year, of where I’m at compared to where I was on this day in 2001. As a New Yorker, it’s a personal ritual, one that I share publicly but do more for myself than for anyone else. It was startling to...

Today brings two announcements of great import to music fans, but they’re most notable for who’s not involved: The major record labels. First, The Beatles are announcing a slew of new launches to reboot the band for the digital era, including a...

About seven years ago, Matt Haughey, Paul Bausch and Meg Hourihan ran a very cool early blogging community called Blogroots, which acted as watercooler for conversations about the evolution of the then-nascent medium. I’d found some links to the site...

Michael Arrington. Dave Winer. Tim O’Reilly. Jason Calacanis. Add a few names of your own. Within the navel-gazing little corner of the tech world that I inhabit, the mere mention of these names are among the most evocative things you can say. As...

I’ve been putting a lot of speculative ideas out lately; It’s nice to see some healthy (and respectful) criticism from people who are skeptical about what I’m saying. Gautham Nagesh followed up on my earlier post and fairly criticized the recent...

Phew! Seems like there are a ton of people talking about the topics we’ve all been discussing here lately. Here’s some highlights: Startup.gov After I posited that the U.S. executive branch is the most interesting startup of 2009, there have been...

I love seeing people start new companies, especially in the tech world. But I’ve probably gotten a little bit jaded about new startups, especially when the story seems to be more about who’s funding the effort than about the product itself. To me the...

I know I just did one of these roundup posts yesterday, but there are a whole bunch of new conversations branching off of the topics I’ve been blogging about here. You might find some of these interesting. Big Think posted a series of video...

More great responses to some recent posts to recap, along with an interview I did a few weeks ago that seems to be pretty timely. eWeek’s Clint Boulton offered a lengthy look at my post about The Web Way vs. The Wave Way. I think the story does a...

I’ve had the privilege of being quoted or mentioned in a lot of newspapers and magazines over the years, but as an minor-league word nerd, this one ranks as among the most gratifying: This week’s “On Language” column in the Sunday New York Times...

Google Wave is an impressive set of technologies, the kind of stunningly slick application that literally makes developers stand up and cheer. I’ve played with the Google Wave test sandbox a bit, and while it’s definitely too complex to live up to...

I’ve really been enjoying the response to my recent blog posts — here are some more thoughtful replies. Rafe Colburn, one of my favorite bloggers for a decade now, followed up my Apple and secrecy post with “Apple vs. my preconceived notions“: In...

From my Facebook Usernames post on June 10: July 31, 2009: MySpace announces MyAddress, a feature for providing more control over the URL where your MySpace profile appears. Instead of constraining users to a few choices as Facebook does, MySpace...

Apple is justifiably revered in the worlds of technology and culture for creating one of the most powerful brands in the world based on the combination of some key elements: Great user experience and design, and an extraordinary secrecy punctuated by...

A few more recent links/responses to posts I’ve written, collected mostly for my own future reference: Mediabistro published video excerpts of a panel I was on earlier this year, talking about publishing, blogging, ebooks and The Future of It All....

If you liked my post on Google’s Microsoft Moment last week, you may well enjoy Fred Vogelstein’s detailed piece in this month’s Wired. I think no small part of the reason so many people enjoyed my post and responded to it was that I deliberately...

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like...

While I’m still hard at work at responding to all the requests that have been made, I had to take a moment to mark the tenth anniversary of this blog today. I could ramble at length about the many ways in which writing this site has enriched my...

Everyone claims to be at the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell: And yet, this venue has no mayor! THE BLOGOSPHERE IS FACT-CHECKING YOUR ASS, Das Racist! As you might expect, Foursquare shows some delightful results if you check the venue “On A...

The two best quotes from Ina Fried’s interview with Bill Gates today: On advanced science: “That’s right. We’re going to make the cows that don’t fart. You name it, we’ve got it under control.” On Google and his deep understanding of FUD: “[T]he...

I’ve been told all my recent blogging has been too long and time-consuming to read. Instead, I’ll offer some quick links to the archives: TL;DR, from 2006. toread is tobehuman, from...

There have been a lot of great conversations around and about some of my recent posts; Here are some highlights. My post about Google’s Microsoft Moment seems to have really struck a nerve. First amongst the responses, from my perspective, is...

I’m not sure Google’s new Chrome OS announcement is that big a deal, or that the eventual product that gets released will actually have that much impact, but it’s a useful milestone in marking Google’s evolution towards becoming an older company with...

In two weeks, I’ll be marking the 10 year anniversary of blogging on dashes.com. I’m celebrating by making a simple request: Tell me what you’d like to see me blog about. I can’t guarantee I’ll get to every request that’s made, but I am going to try...

When I saw Malcolm Gladwell doggedly dissecting Chris Anderson’s upcoming “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (see Chris’ response here) my first reaction was: Brilliant! Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired, and Malcolm Gladwell is a top...

Though he was arguably the most popular solo artist of all time, one of the great joys of being a serious Michael Jackson fan is that some of his best work is remarkably obscure, even after he had already achieved legendary status. For example, after...

This was probably the one clip of Michael Jackson I wish everybody had...

Starting last week, New York Magazine asked me to participate in a roundtable conversation with NYMag’s book critic Sam Anderson, Improv Everywhere‘s Charlie Todd, the New York Times‘ Virginia Heffernan and David Rees, creator of Get Your War On. In...

Jay Smooth, “Please stop calling everyone and their mother ‘The First Rapper’“: U-Roy may be one of rap’s predecessors, and among the influences that laid the foundation for rap, but he did not invent it…any more than Jocko Henderson, Gil Scott...

FAIL is over. Fail is dead. Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative efforts in our culture. “Fail!” is the cry of someone who doesn’t create, doesn’t...

The whole worldA small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address. Since its announcement yesterday, there’s been...

Yesterday and early this morning, while talking about our impending move to a new apartment a few blocks away in a much bigger building (and no longer on the ground floor), my wife and I talked about how being in a larger complex essentially acts as...

Last week’s issue of The New Yorker attracted a lot of attention for its cover art, which was created on an iPhone by artist Jorge Colombo. From the New York Times to gadget blogs to design sites, the work certainly got a lot of attention. But while...

For about ten years, Slate has had an intermittent series of articles that explain how to pronounce names of people who are in the news. As someone whose (first) name is frequently mispronounced, I can appreciate the effort. (For the record: I...

Another new version of Windows is nearly upon us, as Microsoft will release Windows 7 later this year. Vista was greeted with probably a few too many jeers, which in the tech industry means Windows 7 will probably be greeted with a few too many...

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you’ve been missing out. But fear not! I take care of my loyal blog readers as well, by offering you the highlights of the interesting links I’ve been sharing there: “I find it bonkers, by the way!” That’s Rick...

I have some things to share with you. Alice Marwick‘s extraordinary keynote speech on internet celebrity from last year’s ROFLCon. It was the highlight of the event, imbued with both humor and a conscience. Mike Pusateri: “I am American, so I make...

Here’s the idea: We can fix the false impression that the newest gadgets are the only interesting ones by simply promoting the fact that we’re getting a lot out of our existing products. I am lucky — I get to talk to some of the smartest geeks in...

A lot of folks seemed to like the Little Red Riding Hood video I linked to the other day, so I thought I’d reach way back into the archives (anybody still hanging around who was reading this site in 2000?) and dig out an old favorite. Behold, “Video...

For the first two weeks in February, I joined my family in a trip to India. Though I was born here in the U.S., we used to go back to visit family in India pretty regularly when I was a kid. But then I got older, was always busy, and before I knew...

Worth noting: Both independent bloggers on the web and the Associated Press are in the news this week for asking for appropriate credit for their work when it’s excerpted for fair use by online news aggregators. But the web natives frame their...

John Norquist, President of the Congress for New Urbanism had an insightful observation in his recent interview with Streetsblog, where he simultaneously debunked a common myth about the effectiveness of expanding highways to fight traffic congestion...

There’s a principle in game design that’s referred to variously as rubber band or elastic artificial intelligence. While descriptions of the concept refer to it as “cheating”, and discussions of the technique can sometimes devolve into a litany of...

About a decade ago, the web development industry made a decisive shift towards support for web standards. Though the effort encompassed many related efforts around HTML, CSS, the DOM and related technologies, perhaps the signature work of the...

Children’s stories should clearly communicate their messages. Unambiguous,...

I’m a fan of The-Dream, the producer-turned-singer who was born Terius Nash and is responsible for pop gems ranging from Rihanna’s “Umbrella” to Mariah’s “Touch My Body”. His solo albums have been genuinely entertaining and well-produced, a fact that...

My friend Nick is good at answering the questions I didn’t even know I wanted to ask. For example, how many electrons per song on an iPod? At approximately 4 minutes per song (Apple’s average), we can play through 150 songs in 10 hours (far less...

Those of you who liked my post the other day about not missing anything while I was offline might also enjoy a conversation I had with CBC Radio’s show Spark, part of which will be on the air today. Canadians can hear it on CBC Radio One at 11:30...

I have to admit, I was a little bit gobsmacked when I saw that our little nerd world is becoming so mainstream that Jimmy Fallon had a gadget blogger featured on his show the other night — and it wasn’t even for an iPhone launch! Now, I believe Mr....

While listicles (articles that are simply lists, as cataloged on great sites like Listicles) are often the laziest form of journalism, they can also be among the most delightful. Something about the “I’m just phoning this in” nature of this form of...

Whoa Is (Not) Me is a site that’s a little over a year old, dedicated to defending the career and reputation of Keanu Reeves. It is distinguished from other Keanu fansites by a number of traits, including that it is “possibly the first Keanu fansite...

When launching the new version of Amazon’s book device the Kindle, Jeff Bezos offered up the vision that the company has for the device: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” It’s a message...

I was away traveling for the past few weeks, and upon my return, I asked my Twitter followers a simple question: "I’ve been completely offline for all of Feburary (no internet, TV, news) — what one thing should I read up on? @ msg me your...

For the past few years, my tax dollars (and if you’re American, yours too) have been spent to detain dozens of men at Guantanamo Bay with a primary link used as evidence against them being the fact that they possessed a Casio F91W watch. This...

On and On by Janet Jackson It's literally a song about cruising down the road with the top down. Dolphin by Prince It's about reincarnating as a dolphin, which is what I do on the road. Rock Star by N.E.R.D. I remember when I first got this album,...

Imagine you’d just spent millions of dollars creating cutting-edge special effects technology, and millions more to market a re-release of a beloved movie. And then you stumble into a review meeting, and the image that confronts you on the giant,...

This one’s been kicking around in my head for a while, and maybe you can all help me understand it. With any contemporary social networking site, I can control who has access to the things I share, and I can update or change or revoke the...

[T]he burger is omnipotent and irresistible. It can never be weakened. It can never be slowed down. It can never stop its ever-increasing growth in popularity. It’s the single most powerful force in the food universe…. The hamburger is a way that...

It’s been demonstrated over and over again, but businesses refuse to learn the lesson: Homogeneity is its own punishment in the world of business. From the Washington Post today: [T]he experience of the past year suggests that we desperately need to...

A few weeks ago, I asked the people who follow my Twitter account to describe the difference between lemons and limes. My immediate prompt was because I was trying to explain that some languages use the same word for both citrus fruits, and others...

Most people in my social circle have varying degrees of disdain towards Starbucks as a force for cultural homogenization, particularly as the company is perceived as competing with the local coffee shops that they hold so dear. I don’t share this...

There is, of course, no such thing as a good mashup. They exist because they must, because instrumental tracks and acapellas float freely across the web, because Acid and Garage Band are ubiquitous. Yet. Sometimes we find one that says something...

Please (re-)visit Dan Cook’s seminal Nintendo’s Genre Innovation Strategy essay from 2005. It’s chock-full of his signature revelatory insights, in this case inspired by the excitement and skepticism surrounding the announcement of the controller for...

If you’d like to open up the package for your licensed copy of Microsoft Windows Vista, you only need to follow these three helpfully-illustrated steps. “The Windows Vista box opens with a swing-out section that holds your DVD and manuals. The box...

In a blog post that I wrote for work today, I had occasion to use an interrobang as part of a title. Hooray! A chance to exercise some pointless effort in pursuit of typographical correctness. But chasing down that obscure character led me to...

One of my recurring fascinations is people creating works of art using common productivity software. Office Tools of Expression as a review of this medium that I wrote last year, and Excel Pile offered an overview back in 2004. Today, the idea of...

In the middle of this year, in observation of his retirement from Microsoft, I wrote Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever, one of my most popular posts and one that I’ve had a number of people personally mention to me that they appreciated. So,...

People who are into journalism and newspapers and the web and the death of print have been all a-twitter over the NY Times story today about the triCityNews, a little alt-weekly in Monmouth County, New Jersey. I spent a good bit of time in Monmouth...

Thanks to a nice reminder from Ginevra, and a motivational post by Ta-Nehisi Coates, I got around to gathering up some videos I've been meaning to share. Obviously, Barack Obama's made some fairly explicit references to Sam Cooke's "A Change is...

I regularly use about a dozen different social web services, with dozens more that I have accounts on. Historically, I’ve used one of a very small number of photos of myself as my avatar or user icon on these websites. The other evening, I spent...

A few weeks ago, as a surprise gift for our anniversary, my wife got us a night’s stay at the Revolving Hotel Room, part of theanyspacewhatever exhibition (see video) at the Guggenheim. Created by Carsten Höller, the room is a remarkable art...

Major labels function with the assumption that 90 percent of artists they sign are going to fail — that should have been a red flag for everybody. I mean that’s a bizarre business model in any arena. But particularly in the cultural arena, the idea...

“Gollywaddles!” Solicitor General Gregory G. Garre (no seriously, his initials are “GGG”!) aspires to the title of Most Ridiculous Person In The World today with his impressive and absurd display of intellectual dishonesty, as quoted in the New York...

Three years and one day ago, I got married. And then shortly after that, I wrote a post about getting married, which has become one of the most popular things I’ve ever written. If I have to be known for something, I’ll definitely take that as a good...

Sarah Palin has been unsurprising in her criticisms of Barack Obama’s credentials and policies, fulfilling the traditional role of the vice presidential candidate being the most aggressive and pointed rhetorical attacker in a campaign. But a closer...

I’ve long been a fan of playing the dozens, as is to be expected from anyone who loves language. Last night, in a fit of my usual insanity, I thought it’d be fun to throw out some “Yo mama” snaps themed around this year’s election on my Twitter...

If the words I write in these blog posts are my acts of speech, then the trail of actions I leave around the web must be the body language that accompanies them. So I made a page to capture what I’m doing around the web. If you read my blog in HTML...

We saw Mary J. Blige. It was like a 2-hour motivation speech interrupted by some fantastic ass-shaking songs. I laughed, I cried, I want to see it...

I think one of the biggest reasons many great writers go into journalism is for the chance to sneak little wisecracks in, with the hope their editors will indulge. I took the opportunity to read a printed copy of the New York Times the other day, and...

As always, I am trying to be everywhere at once. Here’s where I’ve succeeded: Dan Costa at PC Magazine offers a look at the rise of micro social networks. I get a nod there, but it’s more satisfying to see the idea itself take off. That’s an idea...

One of the most frequent questions I get when I talk to people who are unfamiliar with social media on the web is, “Who writes all these blogs or Wikipedia? Who has the time?” The answer, at least in this case, is me. People who are skeptical about...

Right now I am here, but soon I may be somewhere near you! Let’s see where I’ve been lately, and where I’m going to be: Across the internets, Choire asked a ridiculous question of mine to Wendy and Lisa when he interviewed them for the LA Times....

Each year, I try to write a memorial post on the anniversary, to remind myself, and as a record of where I am compared to where I was that day. As I read back over them, what I see nearly ever year is that I wanted to cling to the sadness of the day,...

Last Friday was my birthday. Hooray! I have a fantastic wife, so she treated me to a pig-butchering class at The Brooklyn Kitchen. I like meat, and I like being educated about what I eat and respecting the animals I consume. So Tom Mylan was a...

Spin Magazine’s piece covering the rise and fall, and perhaps second rise of D’Angelo has been lingering in my mind for weeks. As you might expect, I was a fan of D’Angelo’s from the start. And that’s true even though I was clowning him when he got...

Today, in a surprisingly botched announcement, Google announced Chrome, their upcoming open source web browser. The subject of a Google browser is something I’ve opined on a few times over the years, but Jason Kottke’s compiled an even more...

My friend Mat Honan amused and beguiled you a few months ago with Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle. As is the course of such things, he got a book deal for his efforts, despite having been responsible for the onslaught of unfunny ripoffs of the site...

Last month marked the ninth anniversary of me starting this blog, more or less continuously updating since then. As I begin my tenth year here on dashes.com, I’ve made a few changes around the site. First and foremost, there’s a new look to the blog....

I forgot to mention one point when I was blathering about lists earlier this week: The easiest way to get on them is by asserting, truthfully or not, that you don’t want to be on them. Behold, my incredible mancrushworthiness, from an entire list of...

I’ve been a fan of The KLF since I was a teenager, and just last week was reminded of one of their most amazing stunts. This is just the first of a five-part video showing the entire “Burn a Million Quid” documentary, and I think you don’t get to see...

Hey, NowPublic made a list of the 50 most influential web people in New York, and I’m on it at number six. So, thanks to the folks who made the list, and I appreciate the recognition. However, every time a similar list comes out, I have a number of...

Sometimes if you do something very difficult, and you do it really well, the end result is that your achievement becomes completely invisible. I mentioned a year and a half ago that I like Twitter. That was a little bit less common a position to...

Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft’s success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per...

Today Newtalk, a site dedicated to substantive political discussions, hosted a conversation asking “Is it possible to fix government?“. In his response to host Philip Howard, NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg reveals that it’s his first time responding to...

When the Space Shuttle Discovery glided home a few days ago, one of the electronic components which made it possible was the humble Intel 8086 processor. Some of the chips powering support systems for the shuttle were purchased from a motley variety...

One of the most satisfying and fun things I’ve ever seen in my job was the sight of my friend and coworker Michael Sippey onstage with Steve Jobs and the Apple crew, showing off TypePad for iPhone. In our line of business, Apple keynotes are just...

Dedicated readers will recall me obsessing over and over-analyzingAuto-Tune in pop music earlier this year. It is, then, my pleasure to report that, thanks to the inestimable Sasha Frere-Jones, Auto-Tune analysis has gone legit. Behold, no less an...

Trapani ventured that if the internet had been around when she was a teenager she might have felt less isolated: “I kind of wish I had the access to the internet that teenagers have today.” She got a gleam in her eyes when she started to talk about...

I started blogging when I was 25, and it was a much smaller blogosphere back in 2000. I was able to make my mistakes in oversharing, overexposure, and unmitigated egotism in a smaller pond, without the entire New York media world and Jimmy Kimmel...

Because my name and my big ole’ head are sitting on top of this page, it’s probably not making the self-indulgence any worse to collect a few links to some recent places I’ve popped up online: Gawker recommendedmy Twitter account as one to follow...

If you haven’t been following my Twitter account, you’re missing all the fun! In between going aggro on teakettles, taking an unseemly joy in crude wordplay, and in general trying to channel my incessant nattering into an attempt at being...

Peggy Whitson is a 48-year-old biochemist who fell from space and landed in the steppes of Kazakhstan. The eight people who greeted her didn’t quite understand that they had encountered a spaceship gone astray, and asked about the origins of her...

These are the things I saw yesterday that I thought were interesting, entertaining, and inspiring. First, Erika Hall, Copy as Interface. (See more on the Mule blog.) Copy As Interface | Erika Hall | Web 2.0 Expo from Erika Hall Mena Trott,...

While New Yorkers don’t mind correcting you, they also want to help you. In the subway or on the sidewalk, when someone asks a passerby for directions, other people, overhearing, may hover nearby, disappointed that they were not the ones asked, and...

Five years ago, I said I work for Six Apart. At the time, that sort of thing was a big deal, not because of me, but because so few of us who loved blogging could get a job doing what we loved. Since then, amazingly, it’s become downright common to...

Continuing from yesterday’s look at the soundtrack to the creation of Lotus Notes, we can look more at the physical space where it was created. For contrast, I also throught I’d start looking at some of the responses I’d gotten from Jeff Bezos about...

Early in my efforts to document the creative environment where great technology projects happen, I reached out to Ray Ozzie. Ray is of course a software industry legend, today the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, in addition to having been the...

In the world of business, and especially the world of technology, we have some archetypical stories of entrepreneurs in the garage, working to create new products and new companies. But too many of those stories seem to neglect the creative...

The way the Métro started its life strongly influenced signage in the stations. In the early days, a number of commercial companies ran the different Métro lines. This is one of the reasons why the inscriptions varied enormously, from enamel signage...

Almost five years ago, I got involved in a project that would eventually become Atom, a pair of matching standards functioning as a syndication format and a publishing protocol. Though its contentious genesis was in the world of blogging and feeds,...

Having been blogging for a few years, I’ve developed a few annual traditions. This one’s a favorite: Warning you off of lame April Fool’s jokes on the web. Every year, I get called a curmudgeon, or lambasted for having no sense of humor. And every...

An application that appears cluttered or illogical is harder to understand and use. Aesthetic integrity is not a measure of how beautifully your application is decorated. It’s a measure of how well the appearance of your application integrates with...

People are anchored to prices, usually the first price they encounter for a specific item. This holds true even when the first price they encounter is negative meaning that something can be perceived as a punishment or a reward depending on how it...

Lupe Ontiveros (born September 17, 1942) is an American film and television actress. Ontiveros has acted in numerous films and television shows, most often playing a maid or, more recently, an all-knowing grandmother; the actress estimates she has...

The big reason to make jokes is because they’re the best way to get a quick read on the collective mind of the group you’re talking to. The volume of the laugh is important, but so is the lag time. You can tell immediately if they’re on your side,...

I want you to place the text of this blog post on your own site. But I don’t want you to do it just by copying and pasting it into your own blogging tool. I think there might be a different way to do it. Now, I probably obsess over embedded objects...

I love it when technologists write about the human side of the geekery, and Giles Bowkett’s post about Rubyfrom a few months ago, which I just got sent a link to this week, captures some beautiful truths that exist in both code and in...

After all of the fun with the Snoop Dogg video a little while back, I figured I’d include some videos that are a bit closer to home, both from this past weekend’s SXSW interactive festival. First, Rocketboom captured the Battledecks competition,...

Blogging’s been light because this part of March is the heart of the conference season for me, usually stretching for a few exhausting weeks on the road. My new goal this year was to take it a little easier, pace myself better, get more sleep and...

I’d forgotten to mention it yesterday, but as a number of people have asked, I had a nice little quote in the New York Times yesterday, talking about Wal-Mart (and large companies in general) embracing blogging. Though it unfortunately is pretty...

I’ve had friends ask why I have advertising on my site; After all, it’s not like I’m gonna pay the rent with the kind of traffic that a Snoop Dogg fansite drives. Usually, I explain that I just like to understand how that stuff works, to keep up to...

How often do you get to meet someone who’s outstanding in this field while they’re out, standing in this field? Well, good news: KICK! is back. KICK! is the kickball game I started as a meet-and-greet for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival,...

From this New York Times story on proper use of a semicolon in subway signage: David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only...

Now, I could have gone another week on Snoop’s “Sensual Seduction”, but I was a little under the weather, and as I understand it there is a rest of the world? Whatever. But here are some of the other key ideas we could have explored: Like...

As I had guessed, I’ve already had someone threaten to unsubscribe from my blog due to the publication of this week’s Snoop Dogg research. But I’ve had twice as many people say that they loved it, so I won’t let this blatant bullying censor this...

Beginning with our exploration of Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction”, we wandered into the history of vocoders, talkboxes, and the most nefarious of voice manipulation technologies, Auto-Tune. But it’s hard to express just how delightful horrible it...

One of the things that makes Snoop’s “Sensual Seduction” video so compelling is his outstanding use of vocal effects. Let’s take a closer look, shall we? In the video, Snoop makes liberal use of a breath tube on his keytar, an obvious homage to the...

Now that his single Sensual Seduction (a.k.a. Sexual Eruption) is in the Top 10, it’s official: Snoop Dogg can see the future. First, let’s pause to watch the best video in the history of anything, ever. (The song is about four minutes long, so...

One of the most useful words that I’ve been fixated on for a while is “retcon”. A portmanteaublend of “retroactive continuity”, retcon comes from the world of comics and represents the idea of “correcting” past facts to represent a new desired...

In an excellent post about Meg Whitman’s retirement, David Galbraith succinctly summarizes the most important thing about eBay’s potential: Ebay is all about Green, the biggest angle any company can have, currently, and yet it has ignored this. As...

The other day, I’d been reminded about some of the most striking statistics I’d seen last year, which were from the NYPD crime stats for 9th Precinct, where I live. (That link is to a PDF with stats for last week.) Each precinct in the city files...

Okay, these are just fun — a series of custom-designed Mario levels that let the little plumber make his way through a whole level without the player ever having to touch a controller. A triumph of cleverly-placed blocks! Find many, many more at this...

There are a million reasons to post the video for Cameo's "Word Up", but today I am sharing this with you because it features LeVar Burton Gettin' Funky! Cameo – Word Up LeVar is looking like a long-lost member of the Time, and you don't...

Christopher Hitchens, whose belligerence is barely tolerable even though he’s almost always right, covers the Iowa caucus scam ably in Slate: It’s only when you read an honest reporter like [the Washington Post‘s] Dan Balz that you appreciate the...

One of my biggest passions, personally and professionally, is the concept of persuasion. Whether it’s in the form of logical arguments or emotional appeals, I’m fascinated by its workings. Appropriately, then, I enjoyed this year’s Edge World...

Theory of mind is that thing that a two-year-old lacks, which makes her think that covering her eyes means you can’t see her. It’s the thing a chimpanzee has, which makes him hide a banana behind his back, only taking bites when the other chimps...

Today’s Blog of the Year Picks: Ask the Wizard and Fortuitous. Between these two blogs, there have barely been twenty posts this year. Yet either one alone could be the best small-business (or small tech business) site of the year. Dick Costolo,...

Today’s Blog of the Year Picks: Some Bits: Nelson’s Weblog and RC3.org. These two are just for me, some real old-school-blogging nerd picks. Some Bits: Nelson’s Weblog is the work of Nelson Minar. Formerly of Google (where he helped pioneer their...

Today’s Blog of the Year Pick: Serious Eats. I love food, but I could never quite put my finger on what was wrong with the food blogs I’d tried to read until Serious Eats came along. As it turns out, I like cooking and I like learning about...

Today’s Blog of the Year Pick: Ill Doctrine. Put simply, Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine is the best video blog on the web. (At least the best one that’s in English.) As you’d expect from the founder of hiphopmusic.com, Ill Doc starts from a base of...

This week, I’ll be highlighting the sites that I think stood out this year. July marked the 8th anniversary of my blog, and over these past eight and a half years, my appreciation of what it takes to run a successful blog has really grown and...

What It Is: ZipCar is a car sharing service, which lets you rent (or share, if you prefer) a variety of cars by the hour for a low fee that includes everything — even gas. ZipCar recently acquired Flexcar, so they’ve got cars in a good number of...

What It Is: LimoLiner is an executive-class bus service from New York to Boston (or vice versa) that gets you from the center of one city to the other in about 4 and a half hours, for less than a hundred bucks. If you count getting to the airport...

What It Is:Virgin America, the latest (and greatest) low-cost, low-hassle air carrier in the United States. It’s an American corporation, though of course it shares its branding and company attitude with Virgin Atlantic. The Experience: It’s hard...

What It Is: Mozy is an online backup service that runs in the background on your computer, continously backing up your files to Mozy’s servers. It works on Windows and Macs, and you can restore your files either by browsing to them through Mozy...

This week I figured I’d try something a little bit different. I’m not usually one for product reviews, except for talking about different websites from time to time. But lately, I’ve been fortunate enough to find a bunch of really good experiences...

What It Is: The Clear card is designed for frequent travelers, to let you skip the line at airport security (You still have to go through security, of course) in exchange for a fee. This one I was fascinated by as soon as I heard about it. I fly a...

It looks like I wasn’t the only one having a Gawker reckoning; A remarkable post revealed that both Emily Gould and Choire Sicha are leaving the site. (Thanks to Rex for the link.) That post impressively uses Carla Blumenkranz’s words about Gawker to...

[P]erhaps the two best examples of how [religion-based food] bans have resulted in delicious and fascinating food are Jain cooking, with its ban on anything that remotely involves taking life, like root vegetables (little critters might get killed...

I like to drink tea, either from my neighborhood tea shop or from what I brew at home, a nice cup of Darjeeling. “Darjeeling Tea” means more than you might think. According to the Tea Board Of India – “Darjeeling Tea” means: tea which has been...

From lolcats to goatse to the Zidane headbutt, I’ve been at least tenuously linked to some of the web’s most notable and notorious memes. Naturally, when I heard about ROFLCon, a conference being organized at Harvard to celebrate online memes and...

From Paul Ford’s “$5 Chocolate Bar“: Brooklyn has squandered the treasures she brought with her when she burst out of her father’s brain. She’s thinking, they took the fire from Prometheus and made ‘smores. And then–just a flicker out of the Gowanus...

Many of my nerd friends are all excited about Portal, Valve’s brilliant reworking of Narbacular Drop. I’ve only played about five minutes of the game myself, but have had a lot of thoughts about it, so at the urging of some friends, here’s a couple...

Google’s changed a lot in the past few years, going from underselling their efforts to shamelessly promoting themselves as leaders, even when it’s leadership over initiatives that are still very tenuous or nascent. The best example to me was looking...

A few brief thoughts upon the announcement of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader: Given that even my most skeptical friends have literally been desperate for ebooks for years now, there’s definitely demand for such a device — the question is whether all...

WordWeb, a dictionary and thesaurus program for Windows, has a startling and interesting clause in its licensing terms: You may use the program free of charge indefinitely only if You take at most 4 flights (2 return flights) in any 12 month...

Phew! A warm welcome to my regular readers, now that I’ve had the misfortune of being visited by the worst of the rest of the web’s audience. I should have known that writing anything even mildly critical of Apple, or anything that appeared to be a...

Although I’ve been accused sometimes of reflexive contrariness, the truth is I’m just pretty consistent in my assessments of technology, with little regard for the perceptions of the companies or people who provide those technologies. The best case...

The Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge that I wrote about a few weeks ago is almost over, and that means you only have a few days to help support the Notes for Class Challenge, an effort to help fund music education programs that have been proposed by...

I added this thing to my site (the HTML version, which most of you never see) a while back, and it’s gotten some interesting responses. I’ll reproduce it here in a post for your convenience. del.icio.us Profile Digg Profile Dopplr Profile Facebook...

I’ve been doing a good bit of speaking lately, and have some more coming up, so let me share it with you if you’re interested. I was flattered to have my post about Gawker quoted in passing by Jim Romenesko while talking about Vanessa Grigoriadis....

Tom Patterson, of the U.S. National Park Service, wrote a great paper five years ago on improved realism in NPS maps. There’s some very insightful analysis that was useful even to a layman like me. He covers a variety of techniques that increase...

Put these in your browser, and shake well. Facebook apps are not a long tail. So says Chris Anderson, who oughtta know. The tougher question is: Since the recent changes to app distribution on Facebook’s platform, will there ever be another popular...

I’ve had the chance to follow Gawker Media since before it launched, really, and so it’s been interesting to see a couple of items pop up recently about the direction of some of its titles and practices. The big story, of course, is New York...

I’ve seen a number of people make reference to Facebook’s application platform without knowing a lot of background about some historical examples that might be useful to learn from. So, since I remember a good bit of info about these things, I...

In his post this weekend, Rex Sorgatz points out that “mainstream media is hard”. It’s a truth I know firsthand — I used to work both in the music industry and at a newspaper, and still get the chance to work directly with the people at the largest...

We’re really close to funding music education in Cassell Elementary School in Chicago — you should contribute a couple of bucks! As MetBlogs Chicago kindly mentioned, I am gonna match 10% of whatever you give. I promise I’ll get back to blogging...

I’ve gotten a lot of really good questions (and some fantastically generous donations!) about the Donors Choose blogger challenge I wrote about yesterday, but by far the most common is “what should I do?” There are a lot of options, so let me make it...

I’ve been a big fan of Donors Choose for some time. It’s a charity my readers may well have heard of, which helps students in public schools by letting regular folks like us directly fund the requests that teachers make for classroom essentials. I’m...

A.J. Jacobs, master of the year-long book stunt, spent a year trying to live by all the rules dictated in the Bible. As stunts go, it’s not that interesting to me (“Hey, I grew a beard!”), but one of the lessons he mentioned learning in this Newsweek...

I get a little self-conscious about the fact that I’m so earnest on my blog sometimes, since I’m kind of a smart-ass in person. But I figure I’ll never regret putting myself out there, even if it’s stuff that I’d mock myself for, if somebody else...

I try not to ramble on too much about my work, except for a little “I love the people I work with!” post every few months, but I did want to point out one satisfying bit that I was enjoying today. You see, when you work with a team that makes great...

I’ve been wanting a portable magazine reader device for ages (everyone focuses on ebooks, but my attention span is too short) so I have to point out Texterity’s magazines for the iPhone, especially because so many magazines that I like are already...

From eWeek’s “Upcoming” section, which I’d praised a few weeks ago, comes this interview with Java creator James Gosling. The key quote, for me: Of Google, Gosling said: “I guess part of me has almost a moral problem with, ‘What do you mean the...

Ranjit has made his robots play Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”, and in the comments reveals that apparently he can just throw any MIDI file at them and have it rendered in this unique theremin-and-clanking-noises arrangement....

Alan Leeds, one of my heroes and our greatest record of the living history of funk music, offers a warm remembrance of Bobby Byrd after Byrd’s passing last week. Well worth a read, especially to understand that every great sidekick had the potential...

The New York Times is removing the payment barrier from its TimesSelect content. Hooray! I pundified* incorrectly about this two years ago when they launched TimesSelect — go look and marvel at my foolishness! Update:Andre points out that this is...

It’s the first year that the anniversary didn’t hang over everything I do. I’m still aware of it, I’ll always be aware of it, but time and distance and some amount of willful disbelief have dimmed the sharpness of the remembrance. On the afternoon of...

One of the things I love most about my job is that sense of discovery you get from working with people that are chock-full of good ideas. One great example is Brad Choate’s 100+ iPhone Feature suggestions. I don’t have an iPhone, but I love the sense...

From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has a delightful family tree of Indo-European languages, though I was kinda miffed at the omission of my parents’ native...

A Brief Message seems interesting: Essays about design, in 200 words or less. Khoi explains some of the thinking, and the idea of a new design for each update reminds me in a nice way of the late, lamented...

Speaking of Timberlake, that brings us inevitably to Timbaland. After the fawning over Rick Rubin in the New York Times, it’s amazing that there hasn’t been a similarly high-profile profile of the best producer working in pop music today. Until then,...

We know that PowerPoint can be a tool of productivity, and hopefully everyone’s embraced the idea that constraints are conducive to creativity. The next natural step, then, is Pecha Kucha, introducing the constraint of PowerPoint presentations that...

We just finished watching HBO’s broadcast of Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex tour, which I (unsurprisingly) quite enjoyed. It seems like he’s done a good bit since his last tour to incorporate his strong live band and his rapidly improving chops on...

I’d intended to post a correction to this NY Times story’s recounting of the history of blog book tours, but was pleased to see that my friend, and intermittent blogger, Jason Kottke has already done the legwork. For my part, here’s Greg Knauss’ post...

Maybe I’m just a pushover, but I felt like there was something very charming and sweet about this video of a school project that I found on YouTube. It’s a restaging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that takes place on the bridge of the Enterprise...

One of my favorite posts that I’ve ever written was Excel Pile, about people’s propensity for using Office tools like Microsoft Excel to track mundane parts of their lives, or even as tools of artistic expression. From that post three years...

I found Nelson Minar’s thoughtful look at Larry Craig’s arrest to be very moving because of its deeply empathetic perspective. I find one of the things that frustrates me most about the public media sphere is the profound lack of empathy for people....

What makes lolcats appealing is that it’s simultaneously obscure and accessible. It’s an inside joke told in an online lingua franca, but with a bit of effort anyone can become an insider. “An in-joke used to be constrained by geography and who you...

I like PC Magazine, and I’ve been reading it for pretty much my whole life, but I still can’t help but think that the homepage for opinion columns contains two different Editors-in-Chief’s “goodbye” articles. I’m the kind of nerd who still enjoys...

Mitch Wagner has a provocative, comprehensive, and entertaining look at the recent conversations about Apple and the enterprise over at InformationWeek entitled “Does Apple Have A Moral Obligation To Serve The Enterprise Market?” Though some part of...

Rule #1 in nerd blogging: jwz said it first. If you enjoyed The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition last week, you’ll want to read Jamie Zawinski’s essay that was so burned into my subconscious that I forgot it influenced me. If you want to...

I’ve found some nice responses to conversations I’ve had recently that are probably worth checking out. First, and most importantly, Soundwave: The Touch, the story behind Soundwave’s omission from the recent Transformers movie. Thanks to Nima...

My fellow nerds, the moment we’ve waited more than two decades for has apparently arrived. Soundwave has arrived. He really transforms. And he really plays...

I try to keep my social network as open as possible. Here’s the thing — I’m not talking about web applications that mimic real-world behaviors. I mean the real world. The people I befriend, collaborate with, and share ideas with are not constrained...

Before I crash for the night, I’d be remiss if I didn’t congratulate my incredibly talented and passionate coworkers and thank our unbelievable community. Movable Type 4 is out the door. I think it’s the best product launch I’ve ever been involved...

The Premise: Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of...

I moved back to New York City at the end of last year because of my wife’s work, and despite my love for my coworkers and the work they do. But the decision was made really easy by the fact that I was spending too much time with other people in the...

Daniel Lyons, author of the heretofore-anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog, which comments extensively on companies in the technology industry, was also the author of Forbes’ November 2005 cover story “Attack of the Blogs”, a 3000-word screed vilifying...

In the New Yorker, Bruce Wagner tries to live my life: The performance began at two in the morning and took place in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was amazing. I was so close to Prince that I was injured during the six-and-a-half-hour...

Ryan Freitas, whose culinary wisdom I can personally vouch for, just shared some insights into his idea that designers can learn a lot from the discipline of a well-run kitchen. The article in Ambidextrous magazine (download the three-page PDF, it...

An interesting infographic trend: Square blocks of color are now being used to represent percentage-based statistics instead of the traditional pie chart. Some recent examples are shown here. The chart on the left is from a NY Times story on atheism...

I don’t know if it’s just that I went to lousy public schools, or that the xenophobic maniacs who resent the common ideals of humanity were successful in their efforts to shield kids from good ideas, but somehow I’d missed ever learning about or...

If you’re in NYC, you should join me, and my friends from Serious Eats, A Hamburger Today, and Gothamist for the Burger Bash at Water Taxi Beach tomorrow. It’s going to be a pile of delicious burgers, accompanied by some good beer (first keg is free,...

Behold, It’s (K)not Wood. I hestiate to make such a bold prediction, but it just may be the best blog dedicated to fake wood and woodgrain that you’ll see today. I daresay it’s the one you’ve been pining for. It wood knot leave you...

If you’ve been on the Internet at all in the past, oh, ten years, you’ll have seen the ad for Classmates.com that features an improbable matrimonial matchup of a bookish young woman and a dreamy young man. “They Got Married??!!!” screams the...

I often lament the lack of perspective in tech reporting, so it’s always a delight to find a story that typifies what I’d hope technology reporting could be like: Smart, informed, and with a good sense of history. Take Caroline McCarthy’s look at the...

Since everyone’s sending it to me, I’ll post the prescient Onion video from last week. The highlight, for me, is two minutes into the clip. Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet...

Armin Wagner’s created a brilliant collection entitled Crates and Barrels, cataloguing the ubiquity of these containers in video game culture. Though they’re obviously favorites in 3D games for their simplicity (hey, that’s a cube, and that’s a...

In 1992, Brian Springer spent over 500 hours capturing direct satellite feeds of the video clips that powered both news broadcasts and that year’s presidential campaigns. By manually monitoring the video feeds and recording selected highlights, he...

Nedroid recently got challenged to draw 200 Bad Comics. You can see the results for yourself, and to paraphrase Run-DMC these aren’t bad meaning “bad”, but bad meaning...

Had enough of Powers of 10? Then check out Universcale, a site that’s a promo for Nikon, but also features some compelling and wonderful illustrations of the scale of things in our universe, from nanoscale to truly incomprehensibly...

Kevin Werbach, internet gadfly and all-around nice guy, wrote a student Note in the Harvard Law Review entitled Looking It Up: The Supreme Court’s Use of Dictionaries in Statutory and Constitutional Interpretation. Since then, Eugene Volokh’s...

The International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) winners for 2007 have been posted on BusinessWeek’s site. There are all of the usual slideshows and essays that you’d expect, but perhaps the coolest tool is the interactive table of winners from 2000...

In the New York Times, Jon Pareles gets it exactly right: Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not. “Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it,” his...

Dunstan Orchard is a really nice, talented (and attractive!) man who is a terrific designer. But he has no sense of taste....

Former New Yorker Joshua Schachter’s captured his New York Essentials, the short list of places you can’t afford to miss when visiting NYC. Every single one of the places he lists is a restaurant; He correctly asserts that if you only have a short...

Rives is a charming spoken-word artist whom I had the chance to befriend before I spoke at Taste3 this year. He’s got a true gift for speaking to an audience, as you can tell in this clip from TED Talks about the conspiracy that takes place at 4AM....

Two of the posts I’m most proud of having written last year are Making Something Meaningful and How do we judge our tools?. It looks like the sentiment behind those posts is catching on. Nick Bradbury on Conserving your limited attention: “When I...

From the “OMG!” files, a humpback whale giving a piggyback (?) ride to a dolphin. I am just patting myself on the back for avoiding any “blowhole”...

Over at HipHopMusic.com, which Jay Smooth has relaunched as a group blog, Brandon Soderberg offers When They Reminisce Over Mixtapes. The same industry that makes millions from “Now That’s What I Call Cherry-Picking Hit Singles! Vol 42” tries to...

Pentagram, the designers of the website, signage, marketing materials, and stationery for the new New York Times building, have a fascinating blog post about the intricacies of the sign that they’ve created for the new Times Square skyscraper. The...

Reflecting on toread is tobehuman: Dave Coustan says, “I use [this is good] to mark things I find particularly excellent.” Me too. Heh. And Ed Kohler asks about toread and howto, “Both tags do something other than describing the information...

John Scalzi shares a gem and kicks off a predictably stupid comment thread, based on an overheard coversation: “The problem with using the Web as a model for what’s really going on is that on the Web, Ron Paul is a presidential front runner and...

Did I say twothree’s a trend? I forgot to mention the guy who started it all, both this month and in the last century, too: Michael Sippey’s blogging again, for reals this time. The design is better than yours and there’s even some thinking behind...

Accidental Blogger capturesDiscover magazine’s list of The 7 Most Wondrous Moments in Science. The entire post is worth a read, but the featured list is: Otto Lowei: discovering the chemical transmission of nerve impulses René Descartes: developing...

Andre Torrez: “My little experiment in tossing links out of the main blog didn’t work out so hot. I like linking things, but I don’t like the lazy feeling of stuff just showing up here at some point in the day.” Rafe Colburn: “I still haven’t struck...

From Mike’s Cruftbox, Bud Light + Clamato = Chelada, a recent and spectacularly gross bit of research from Cruft Labs. Meanwhile, Skot’s Izzle Pfaff offers Preparade, a reminiscence of a class reunion which features, you guessed it, beers cut with...

Didja like the series of posts on How to Visit New York City? Then you might want to check these out: Mark Dominus has a lengthy, well-considered view of New York Tourism, centered around the maxim that I “…may be a little misleading when he says...

Formidable geeks Aaron Swartz and Brewster Kahle have led a team of nerds to create Open Library, which purports to be the start of a library of every book in the world. There’s a demo and a vision statement, in the form of a book, naturally. And...

In technology, one of the best ideas to emerge from the world of social software is the ability to tag other people’s works and creations for our own reference. There are some interesting behaviors that come from having a free-form text description...

Before it was called Firefox, or Firebird, Mozilla’s lightweight browser was known as Phoenix. An appropriate name, given than it rose from the ashes of Netscape. Read/WriteWeb has a nice retrospective pegged to the fourth anniversary of the creation...

I’ve been holding off on updates about lolcats and related memes for a while because it’s easy to get burned out and probably as boring for you as it is for me. But there are still some interesting parts to it. As I alluded to in Inadvertent Lazymeme...

As I’ve been sharing my opinions about how to visit New York this week, I’ve been lucky enough to get some great responses from other people on the web, and to find some terrific resources for visitors to check out. So far my own series on how to...

Okay, this is the one that’s going to get me in the most trouble: A list of the famous tourist attractions that you can safely skip when you come to New York City. After covering the basics and the must-sees, it only stands to reason that there’s...

South Asians with blood disorders only have a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding compatible marrow donors, in part due to the fact that less than 1% of those registered in the National Marrow Donor Program are of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladesh, or Sri...

I get asked by a lot of people for tips on what to do when visiting New York City, and though I’m hardly an expert on NYC tourism, I thought I’d take the time to write up a lot of the tips and information that I share with family and friends when...

After yesterday’s look at the basics of visting New York City, it’s time to move on to some more ambitious, and more contentious, topics. I’m going to start with my short list of the sights you simply must see if you get to the city. Knowing already...

I was very flattered and a little bit surprised to be interviewed by Claire Zulkey for her site. I’m a fair bit geekier than most of her regular interviewees, but it was still a lot of fun and I talked about parts of my day job and what goes into it...

Bottled water in America is generally less healthy than tap water, extraordinarily more expensive, and far more destructive to the environment. It’s something I started blogging about years ago, and thanks to an an exceptional package of stories in...

Michael Blim summarizes the news from the Supreme Court over on 3quarksdaily; I wish this had gotten the coverage that the iPhone did, or even that people were camping out on the streets lining up for justice. Blim provides us with the amazing sight...

Back in 2001, I got laid off from a job right around the same time as Sam Brown, the creator of Exploding Dog. Over the course of that year, as I looked for work and worked to remake a lot of my life, Sam spent much of his time creating illustrations...

As much as we like to blame the RIAA for all the evils of the recording industry, leave it to my man Prince to bring out the best in the execs over in the U.K. And mind you, these are music retailers, not even the people who, despite their...

Corey Spring has broken the details of a story that no one in traditional journalism had figured out yet. Wrestler Chris Benoit’s murder-suicide seemed to have been predicted by edits to his Wikipedia profile which mentioned the death of his...

There’s no better link-bait than science fiction where you’re one of the characters. See Kevin Fanning’s “How Everything Turned Out” in The Morning News. Old-school readers will warmly remember Kevin’s cover of the Bee Gee’s “How Deep Is Your Love”,...

There’s been a (mostly boring) conversation going between some blogs over the past few days regarding the line between editorial and advertising. Largely, this is a case of the same silly-meme-into-faux-fact path that I tried to document yesterday....

The gist: A lighthearted unscientific poll that was created as a PR ploy for a tech company is quickly evolving into a “real” news story, being treated as fact by mainstream press. That evolution from marketing effort to established fact can have...

Following up on Indian Mango Alert Level: Orangish-Green and A Matter of National Security, some data points: The national flag of India has stripes of orange and green on a white background, The orange (“deep saffron”) represents renunciation, and...

As I was reveling in earlier, Indian mangoes are coming to the United States. As I mentioned in my last post, Indian mangoes had essentially been off-limits ever since the invention of jet airplanes would have made it feasible for them to be...

Indian mangoes have arrived in the U.S. for the first time, and for me, my family, and my friends, this is a big freaking deal. I’ve got a lot to say about the subject, but if you weren’t familiar with the fact that this is the first time in history...

This one’s sublime: “What’s your favorite kitchen sound?” This one’s the truth, finally. The most eloquent dismissal of User Generated Discontent (or in this case, nominal competitor-generated discontent) yet written: It does, however, drive me nuts...

I’m happy for my friends at FeedBurner, who’ve finally announced their acquisition by the Big G. I do have to confess that this marks the point where I’m officially uncomfortable with the centralized gravitational attraction for brains going on at...

So, now that all the non-DRMed songs from the iTunes store will have your name embedded in them after download, how long until every illegally downloaded song’s ID3 tags have “mbainwol@riaa.org” in the...

Sadly, MichaelJacksonForSale.com does not actually let you purchase the King of Pop for your very own. However, it does have lots of interesting memorabilia, and it accepts PayPal, which isn’t real money and so it’s basically like you can get any of...

If you have the particularly first-world American problem of trying to find your way Europe, and then, say needing a place to stay while in Paris, don’t worry: My friends in the blogosphere have got you covered. Here’s some good advice from people...

Ten years ago, then-Microsoft fontographer Vincent Connare launched the Comic Sans Cafe. During 1994 I noticed that a large number of cartoon/comic style software titles were under development at Microsoft. As Microsoft Creative Writer had a need...

One of the nice things about independent web entrepreneurs is that they (we?) can draw contrasts against those who are giant publicly-traded faceless corporations, either pointedly or with tongue in cheek. Some of the best recent items in this...

Following up on Cats, Comics and Closure, Meowchat and PetSpeak (which, surprisingly, came up during a panel on race and class on Friday), and of course Cats can has grammar, I’ve rediscovered the bizarre things that happen after a couple hundred...

I’m at the Personal Democracy Forum here in New York City today, and considering how many technology-related events I go to, I’m surprised that this one already seems to have piqued my interest. If you’re at the event, drop me a line, and stop by the...

Last year, when I wrote Draw the Map, Draw the World about the New York City subway map and Massimo Vignelli, one of the signature designers in the map’s history, I was surprised how many people were interested in the topic. There’s been some great...

When Matt Haughey first described his new site Fortuitous, which just launched two weeks ago, I was particularly excited because this is a new blog that’s actually downright necessary. You see, while there’s lots of “Ten Steps for Making Another...

More people know how to crack the encryption on HD-DVD disks than own HD-DVD...

As it turns out, there’s more to say about kitty pidgin, and thanks to all of those who’ve emailed and commented with additional links. First, a great example of prior art for the commercial use of lolcats is Twitter’s various errormessages. That’s...

Pidgin, formerly GAIM, is the best instant messaging client available; It works with all common IM networks, supports extensions and customizations through plugins, has smart and simple default settings, runs on all common desktop platforms, and is a...

Wow, you kids really like overanalysis of imaginary pet languages, huh? The best thing about writing Cats Can Has Grammar has been the responses. Mat sent me a link to this SF Chronicle story on MeowChat, the online language adopted by cat fanciers...

If you spend any time at all observing net culture, then you’ll have been unable to miss the recent explosion in popularity of lolcats. This relatively recent phenomenon is the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and...

Though I’ve been familiar with the terms for years, I wasn’t sure of the exact differences between a pidgin and a creole. So: A creole is the combination of one or more languages into a new, stable language. A mashup of languages, if you will. A...

I found some really interesting responses to the launch of Google Web History that are all well worth visiting. CNET’s Margaret Kane has a roundup of news on their news blog. Mark Blair’s SMOblog (which stands for “Social Media Optimization”, a term...

Many years ago, when the web was a simpler place, one of the scariest monsters conjured up to describe the privacy threats that lurked on the Internet was the DoubleClick cookie, used for tying your ad-viewing behavior on the web to your real-world...

Following up on the conversation about accountability, january one discusses the dark side of blogging from the perspective of the knitting blog community. This was particularly instructive for me because I’ve been wrongly using the knitting blogs...

Ask and you shall receive. Armin Vit delivers one of his inimitable logo critiques for the new MSNBC branding effort. I do have to say I support the use of Gotham in almost all circumstances, but I still think something looks goofy about the way it’s...

Five years ago, I got my first death threat for something I wrote on my blog. The same week, some of those readers called my boss and tried to get me fired. A number of others publicly asserted that I supported terrorism. All because they felt that’s...

Are you in New York for the PodCamp NYC conference? Well, I’ll be there representing Six Apart and if you’re podcasting with Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal or Vox, then we should meet up. There are an astounding twelve simultaneous sessions...

A little while ago, my friend Michael Sippey, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing the other day, sent me a link to the new Google Voice Local Search. Now, this new services seems like a good product, and I know I’m supposed to say “Wow, cool!...

Hmm, MSNBC gets a brand-new logo, presumably as part of the new “spectrum” campaign they’re doing, and yet Brand New has no review of it! The shame! It looks like SS+K (whose site is shamefully under construction in a very 1998 way), has been leading...

A couple of months ago, I got to talk to Lynne about business blogging for Fast Company’s podcasts series. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, though the lasting lesson you might take away from the conversation is that I talk really fast....

Infographics and Peanut Butter week at dashes.com continues, this time with a terrific set of pie charts from Craig Robinson. You might know Craig as creator of Flip Flop Flyin’, whom we’ve loved for ages as creator of minipops. He’s done something...

Details offers a lengthy and fairly credible interview with Justin Timberlake: Timberlake is not a kiss-ass. Selling more than 13 million records has earned him a lot of rope, and he knows that. He relishes battles with his label, Jive, about...

“The PB&J diagram has to be the most important food related item I have ever seen on the web.” Today’s National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, and the Serious Eats team covers the story in inimitable style. Complete with, yes, indispensable...

Sasha Frere-Jones bears witness to Prince’s ageless funk in this week’s New Yorker. As much as I admire Prince’s gifts, it’s Sasha’s job I...

Because it’s still relevant, and people enjoyed it so much last year, I call your attention to Your April Fool’s Joke Sucks, from a year ago. Let’s revisit: I’m trying to help you raise the bar. Thus, a list of things which do not actually constitue...

One of the reasons I admire my friend Mena is that she is remarkably prescient. I think it’s worth revisiting these posts that she wrote a year and a half ago. Her first post was a transcript of a speech she delivered, with the core concept that we...

I’ve found some interesting articles around the web recently that mention me or my blog, and while I don’t try to be comprehensive in linking to everything that mentions my name, I thought these were compelling enough on their own to be worth...

So, we talked about Gershwin’s work in inspiring the Rhythm Changes, but his signature work is, of course, Rhapsody in Blue. One of my favorite recent finds is the original recording of Rhapsody in Blue, as preserved by the Internet Archive. From the...

Nate Harrison’s 2004 documentary Can I Get an Amen? on the “Amen Break”, uncovers the story behind one of the seminal breaks of the electronica/jungle/drum-n-bass scenes. Though I’d argue that James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” break is even more...

This is one of those “how to market a product effectively” examples that’s been kicking around in my brain for a while, I thought I’d share it. About half a decade ago, Microsoft implemented a technology called Volume Shadow Copy, which maintains old...

The exact thing you are looking for is out there on the Internet, if you just know where to look. So here are some hints. Making the connection between Girl Talk and DJ Drama, Congressman Mike Doyle (Pittsburgh represent!) breaks down remix culture...

I’ve been amused for weeks by 37signals marketing for their upcoming micro-CRM app Highrise because of the example contacts they’ve been using. Every single screenshot has a list of contacts including the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, Apple’s...

It’s not the funniest joke in the world, but I’m very proud to have a tradition on my blog that is in its 8th annual incarnation, so here goes again: It’s the Panda joke! A panda walks into a restaurant, sits down, and orders a sandwich. He eats the...

Always trust the guys at The Smoking Gun to ferret out the good stuff. “Thanks CBS for turning my son GAY.” This, of course, is the substance of one of the complaints filed to the FCC about Prince’s Superbowl...

Do you want links? Because I’ll give you some damn links, I’m not afraid of you! I’m not afraid of NOBODY! Reyhan Harmanci on the third wave of academic study of hip hop: Dominant, a UC Berkeley alumnus who actually attended the much-publicized...

I would just like to say thank you to all of you for supporting my site for almost 8 years now. This is an unbelievable...

When I first heard that Kevin Shay was working on a novel, it struck me as a little bit unfair. I know Kevin from his work with Movable Type; as we said on the MT blog, he’s been one of the most creative plugin developers around for years. But to be...

I grew up in Pennsylvania, where they still observe the fake holiday “Flag Day”. That’s even lower than Arbor Day. So I’m quite pleased that someone is observing National Pig Day — this is the kind of event I can really sink my teeth...

I was very flattered last week that GeekSugar post an interview with me and my wife Alaina that they did a few weeks ago. It’s strange enough to be asked to do interviews, and while we’ve both done a bit of public speaking and press, I don’t think...

A few months ago, I spent a lot of time trying to show the tech community I belong to that diversity is essential to our survival. Not just to the Web 2.0 world being healthy and thriving, but as a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, my diatribe...

Do you want to learn about the future of web applications? If so, when choosing an event, you might want to make sure it’s one that cares about including speakers based on merit, instead of based on arbitrary gender qualifications. I judge merit to...

This weekend, I’m making my first trip to Vancouver (and my first trip to Canada in over 3 years) to speak at the Northern Voice 2007 blogging conference. I’m really excited to get to meet a lot of new people, as well as finally getting to meet a...

Here’s some examples of how graphic artists are trying to save people’s lives. Prince Pickles is the manga-style cartoon character who represents Japanese Self-Defense Forces troops deployed in Iraq. Sure, he’s cute, but some cartoon characters used...

One of the goals a lot of people have when they become entrepreneurs is to have “fuck you” money: Enough personal wealth to be able to say “fuck you” to whomever you want. As is probably evident from my little love note to Twitter, I’m enjoying Ev...

There’s no shortage of animosity towards the mainstream record industry from its customer base, but the RIAA’s thug mentality’s become brutally obvious of late. The major labels have relied on DJ mixtapes to scout new talent and promote the most...

Sure, Microsoft Word is fine for kids who want to write papers for school, but serious professionals should be very worried about using this dangerous tool! Just a few weeks ago, I found out about this poor Des Moines woman fired for Wording at...

I hate the abbreviation “MSM”. It’s almost always used by those who are lacking in perspective. We’re all either too lazy to actually differentiate between the technologies and types of media, or just don’t know much about media beyond our emotional...

I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying the conversation inspired by Marshall Kirkpatrick’s TechCrunch post about tech companies hiring well-known bloggers to help get the word out. I usually try to be pretty disciplined when I respond to things on the...

Rip, Mix, and Burn? It’s not new. Contrafact is what they called sampling before there was sampling. You take the chords from a song that the whole band knows, and play your new song on top of it. Familiar but new, and you don’t have to pay...

The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect. It’s easy to be cynical about new sites, especially when one is trying to maintain some healthy skepticism. But sometimes you have to let that critical...

Okay, these are the links you should be reading on the Internet today. A smart diagram is the new clever writing: LeisureArts charts out my favorite snowclone. I covered similar topics before in The Story of America and Do you love words? The...

A couple Clay Shirky links for you today, one of which I just linked to, one of which I should have linked to last week, and all worth reading. In Defense of Ready, Fire Aim, a piece Clay wrote for the Harvard Business Review’s list of breakthrough...

Background: Yahoo’s launched an interesting and innovative new service, Pipes, which lets users with a relatively low degree of technological expertise combine structured sources of web data such as feeds. In this way, it’s possible for non-experts...

Since I’ve already been described as a Microsoft apologist, despite creating delightful little films to mock their products, I might as well point out something I think was overlooked in the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007: A great...

I talk a lot about set theory when explaining things to people. (“Who reads my blog? Imagine the intersection of the set of funk music fans and Microsoft Office geeks.”) So I delight when I see an especially useful Venn diagram. Here’s a few recent...

Most everybody who knows me well knows that I’ve been a fan of Prince for pretty much my entire life. So when casual fans or non-fans hear that Prince is playing the halftime show at the Superbowl this year, they ask me, “What’s up with that guy?” or...

How could I still give a damn about blogs, about the web, after all day, every day for eight years or so? Well, how could I not? Let me show you what it looks like to work with the most talented, most passionate people in the world. That video is...

Last night, I had the chance to attend the WNBC New York City Bloggers’ Summit. I’ve got a lot of different opinions on the event, some positive and some more critical, mostly based on my comparisons to similar events that have been held by local TV...

I’ve seen a lot of weird, very belated, hand-wringing about Flickr requiring early adopter users to sign in with their Yahoo accounts. This is prompted, I understand, by those users having gotten an email letting them know about the required...

Gen has captured the cost of monoculture with his excellent look at the unfortunate result of some technology choices made in South Korea years ago: This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft...

Here are the things to look at on the Internet today. India’s President, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, asks Yahoo Answers, “What should we do to free our planet from terrorism?” The answers cover the gamut you’d expect, but this is the most surprising stunt...

This morning, I had the opportunity to speak to the Northern California Grantmakers’ meeting, which was a fantastic chance for me to speak to a group of people who really help make society better. Among the many warm, intelligent people I met this...

Last time, a rumination on video quality. Today, a look at [Ze Frank going Hollywood](http://www.observer.com/printpage.asp?iid=14010&ic=The Transom "New York Observer"), courtesy of the NY Observer. The nut graf, to me, is buried...

Wait, remember when I said that Zolt Levay has the coolest job in the world, making images from Hubble data? Scratch that, now Mike Massee at XCOR Aerospace has the coolest job in the world: Taking awesome photos of methane rocket engines! Best of...

Because this came up at work today, I’ll repost a link to Pop Culture Addict’s look at Grimace, the terrifying/cuddly McDonald’s mascot-blob. The key point here? Grimace used to have four arms. Four arms cradling dozens of milkshakes. Milkshakes that...

Mike at Techdirt (that’s the popular tech news blog which actually deserves its popularity) mentions that Sony is now rewriting history, trying to take credit for the success and popularity of the DVD format. I almost admire the chutzpah — when...

Picture Terry Semel holding a little lion cub up in the air with both arms extended. What’s that? It’s the Circle of Life! Well, maybe Circle of Life 2.0? Okay, enough Lion King — maybe it’s just Justin Timberlake again: “What Goes Around… Comes...

The folks at Cranky Geeks have just put up a new episode of the show, though it was actually taped a while ago and was the first episode I ever participated in. We taped the episode before Google bought YouTube, and the bright-eyed speculation about...

I found Frank Hilario’s rant entitled Microsoft’s Mr Bill Gates And The Boy Who Cried Worp to be largely incoherent, but from what I could deduce, he thinks my assessment of Microsoft Office 2007 is off-base. Actually, he says: If you can’t beat...

A few years ago, I wrote a post called Portalization which showed a Yahoo homepage screenshot with certain services grayed-out, as an indicator of which corresponding tools Google offered. It was a look at how Google’s feature set had expanded with...

From Ron Liecty’s rumination on developer evangelism on Nokia’s site, “Microsoft apologist Anil Dash, in ComputerWorld’s Jan 9th article, said Microsoft’s openness contrasts with traditionally secretive companies such as Apple Computer Inc. or Google...

These are the things you ought to look at today: Real Empires Ship. I could link to Paul Ford’s Ftrain every day and never tire of it. The Romans would have loved Steve Jobs. I can easily see him in a turtleneck in the middle of an ampitheater,...

My iTunes library, of about 12,000 songs consisting of 60GB of data, got corrupted today. The MP3 files themselves are okay, but all of the metadata is blown away — playlists, play counts, ratings, and all my little tweaks to song and album...

Those who know me know that I’m pretty much inept at any kind of artistic endeavor. Which makes it all the more amusing that I’ve recently had the chance to pretend to be a real artist a bit lately. First, the AIGA Collaborate/Celebrate Holiday...

One of my favorite parts of my job is getting to write posts for some of our dozens of company-run blogs. I’m particularly pleased with two that went up today: Step Away From Your Computer: As a lot of people have noted, Vox isn’t just blogging,...

Sure, everybody’s linking to Ironic Sans’ (admittedly entertaining) Celebrity Patents, since Waxy pointed them out, but did you know Prince actually has a real patent? Patent D349127 is for a portable electronic keyboard musical instrument. But...

Every four to six months, Stewart Butterfield updates his website, whether the Internet is ready or not. This time, Sylloge ruminates on John Adams’ thoughts on education through the generations. The quote was a nice present to find on Christmas...

Another great Wall Street Journal online debate: Is ‘Web 2.0’ Another Bubble? David Hornik and Todd Dagres’ excellent back-and-forth was unfortunately overshadowed by the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, but it’s well worth the...

I wanted you to read this thread on Stripper Web (you know, the community site for strippers?) where the women share stories of farting on their customers. As Harold pointed out, the amazing thing is not merely the stories themselves, but that...

There’s a fascinating conversation taking place across a couple of blogs, which Steven’s post on leaving Brooklyn alterted me to. Douglas Rushkoff was mugged on Christmas Eve, and his wife Barbara blogged at length about her feelings at the time. (In...

Adults take note: You may wish to not open the box around your children if they may be frightened by a box with a decapitated horse inside. …I probably did take my new found freedom a little too far. Anyway, thank God for Victoria’s Secrets’ new...

It’s almost like all I do is talk about blogging all day. Debbie Weil hosts the Corporate Blogging show on VoiceAmerica’s business channel, and the other day we recorded a pretty interesting hour-long conversation. From Debbie’s description of the...

After seeing the lists made by a numberoffriends, I thought it’d be fun to post my own record of the cities I visited in 2006. I believe the canonical rules state that only cities where I spent the night count, and cities that were visited on more...

I’d explained how to kill a personality a few weeks ago. Perhaps I was too pessimistic when I said, “[W]hat I see right now is the depressing reality that everybody can be completely reasonable, and the end result is that nobody is allowed to show...

In case it isn’t obvious enough by now, contemporary newspapers should be thinking of information presentation in the context of applications, not just as documents. Or, to re-use an idea I first wrote about five years ago, sometimes journalism is...

A good friend of mine asked for some tips the other day on dealing with minor depression. I’d mentioned managing mental illness a few years ago on my blog, and was happy that talking about that sort of stuff could be of use to someone I care...

A little over a year ago, I wore a funny t-shirt while posing for a photo that was published in an article in the New York Times. The shirt‘s a reference to a popular (and rather offensive) internet meme, and the reaction was immediate and...

I’ve been told that sometimes I seem frustrated or cynical lately about new web things or Web 2.0 hype, and that’s probably because I have been. I grew up with technology and with loving software, and part of the reason why I loved it was because it...

Just to be a little bit contrary, I’m gonna share some thoughts on products and services and companies I actually like but that I have some skeptical (cynical?) questions about. Consider this a disclaimer: Just because I’m asking a question doesn’t...

So, I’m in the New York Times today, as part of the story called Loosing Google’s Lock on the Past. I’m not a huge fan of how the story turned out, mostly because my quotes are almost incoherent. What I was trying to say is that the expectation for a...

I talk to a lot of consultants, freelancers, and small businesses who do web work, and I used to be a freelancer myself, so sometimes I get asked for advice on how to price one’s goods and services. I think I came up with my best suggestion today,...

When "The W" came out, I got to see all 9 members of the Wu-Tang Clan on stage at one time. Even that night, I knew we’d never see them all together again. And unfortunately, that turned out to be the case. Rest in peace, Russell...

About 250 years ago, Josiah Wedwood invented the concept of the celebrity endorsement. A scant two and a half centuries later, his clever marketing strategy has reached its ominous and terrifying nadir. If I understand correctly, the worst idea in...

The basic details: Justin took to the stage at 1:30am after the end of the VMAs, where he won 2 moonmen. Performance lasted one and a half hours, and onstage guest performers included Timbaland, Pharrell, Black Eyed Peas, and John Mayer sat in on...

It’s been about 10 years, where’s the Best of Method Man collection? You could fill a strong 2-disc set or one bangin’ solid CD of tunes with Meth’s tracks, even without getting into all his duets, guest appearances, and wu-tang stuff. It’s damned...

Just wanted to leave myself a placeholder about the exceptional Gel Conference I attended today. Haven’t had a chance to write up my notes yet, (I’m so used to having wifi at conferences that I don’t even know how to take notes for myself without...

One of the recurrent ideas that surfaces in science fiction and in the predictions of futurists is an always-on record of a person’s life. Typically, it’s presented as the stuff of a dystopian nightmare future, where the record is falsified and you...

So, yeah, everybody’s gonna be buzzing about Google buying Pyra, but my take is that it’s not really that great a fit. Of course, Google bought Deja, which is the closest parallel as far as their acquisitions go. But Deja archived everything in...

File Under: Win Some, Lose Some. So, as of today, I’m lookin’ for a gig in the NYC area. Lemme know if you hear of any cool or interesting jobs. My basic background is on the about...

Since I’ve already started to get a good number of people emailing and asking questions in regards to the Media Matters segment on weblogs, I thought I should take some time to give some background about me, this website, and weblogs in...

When Jason asked "Why are Safari and Sherlock two different applications?" it made me realize that what I want is a desktop application, similar to Andre’s Konstructor, that understands SOAP as well as XML-RPC and can query a WSDL file to...

So, I’m gonna be on this TV show in a week or so. (It’s on PBS, so air times vary, you’d have to click the "check local listings" to find out when it’s on in your area.) The segment on weblogs has quotes from a couple of us, including...

I mentioned earlier that the best way to protect your privacy is to control your identity. But, while proactive publishing of one’s identity is a necessary step, one of the other aspects to controlling identity online that’s going to become...

Another benefit you accrue by publishing your creations with more open licenses like the ones at Creative Commons is that when you get unanticipated surges in traffic due to being linked by a high-bandwidth site, savvy readers can know in advance...

Every time there’s a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek’s recent Google fawning, the issue of privacy in a presence of a pervasive and permanent record rears its ugly head. People who aren’t...

I’d been studying Segway’s cross-country legislative efforts with interest even in advance of John Borland’s excellent CNET story, since they’ve managed to get laws changed in approximately 60% of the country already, with a total lobbying budget of...

I just got back from a two and a half hour show where Prince led a band consisting of, at various times, George Clinton, Maceo Parker, Larry Graham, ?uestlove of the Roots, Musiq, Alicia Keys, Candy Dulfer, Doug E. Fresh, and Renato Neto, a terrific...

I saw Maceo Parker last night, and he was funky as all get out. Granted, he wasn’t as ass-kicking as the first time I saw him, but that may have been due at least partially to the exasperatingly unfunky crowd. Still, I’d recommend checking him out if...

There’s still so much more that I can’t deal with… I just came back in from outside, and I popped up the window with my webcam to check if it works now. And I didn’t recognize myself because I have a face mask on. We all do, the smoke has gotten a...

Fight the hoaxes: Give people real information. If you thought I was livid about spam from friends and co-workers before, you can probably imagine my response to those worthless morons sending around faux-Nostradamus quotes now. Now is not the time...

I’m back at work. It took longer for me to get here to the East Village from the Upper East Side than it did for my co-worker to get to Manhattan from Philadelphia by Amtrak this morning. The smell is still here this far downtown, an acrid odor of...

I wish so badly that I had someone to hold on to right...

So I guess today will be the day when everything changed… I have had so many of the same conversations over and over. I want so badly to think of something else, but I just can’t get past this. There has just been such an unrelenting parade of bad...

Thank you so much to all of you who have messaged, emailed and called. (Or tried to.) I am physically fine, as are all my family members and immediate friends. I’ve been watching the footage all morning, I can’t believe I watched the World Trade...

So right, it’s scary: Over at WebWord, contemplate Google 2.0, the Google client. This meshes very nicely with some of the thoughts I’ve had recently about a universal information command line, network-aware and customizable. More on that...

So I’m still pretty shell-shocked. I got tired of the incessant TV buzz, and said “enough of this, I have to go out and get some fresh air, clear my head.” I walked by my closet on the way out (keep in mind, a small Manhattan studio apartment) and...

I’ve got nothing new to say, I just wanted to hear from...

Go right now and see They Rule. I have an idea similar to this that I wanted to execute, but this will tide me over nicely. This is a database with a pretty Flash interface that shows the incestuous networks of relationships that join the small...

I saw Wu-Tang Clan last night, and it was predictably entertaining, even though I’m not a huge fan. But the reason I think it will turn out to be quite memorable is because O.D.B. was there. Expectedly, he was largely incoherent, confusing, and quite...

So far the whole Y2K End-of-the-World Armageddon Spectacular has been somewhat underwhelming, but I’ve already gotten to hear rampant urban legends (of unknown veracity) about the NYPD stockpiling bodybags and Madison Square Garden’s basement being...

From urban75, a wonderfully done photo essay. I especially love the tone of the...

An interestingly eventful day yesterday, as winter used to bring 6 inches of snow to the area, but we woke to 6 inches of mud. Sadly, I was too occupied with moving our car to higher ground and was unable to get any photos of the surreal event. I...

Just got back from CamCon, (a.k.a. the Camvention) where I had the good fortune to meet the nice people behind (to name but a few) Monstro.com, MemePool, Calamondin, lexiconoclast, peterme.com, Mr. Barrett, and, of course, Camworld. A fun bunch, much...

I’m sure everyone is going to link to Time‘s Person of the Century piece on Einstein, but let me add my own link. And of course, my two cents. I think it’s a good choice, perhaps obvious, but that’s not their fault. The only quibble I have is that so...

Excerpted from the Washington Post: “Full-service brokers are not the [Yiddish vulgarism deleted] we’ve been made out to be” is NAIP President Thomas O’Keefe’s plaintive explanation. The article is about stock brokers complaining that they’ve been...

Oh, I must amend my earlier criticisms of cellular/PCS phones… it turns out there actually is a use for them: They’re nice to use when you have to call someone you love to tell them you’ve seen the first snowflakes of the...

Why do I hate professional athletes for the most part? Let’s ask the Atlanta Braves’ John Rocker: “The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners,” he went on. “You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody...

Thanks to Jen, Frambuster. Combined with snopes.com, I might just set up a rule to autorespond to all forwards with this...

From ZDNet: Microsoft to include Hindi in Win2000 Microsoft Corp.’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows 2000 software platform, due to be launched in February, will be able to carry programming applications in Hindi and eventually in other Indian languages,...

Could this be Mahir...

Violet is a neat little ecom site that I’m surprised hasn’t done a bigger push this holiday season. I particularly liked their gift suggester, called "Inspiration" : We’ve got it three different ways: logical, emotional and personal....

I like what Annie writes. I know that self-oriented writing by an undergrad is supposed to be unbearably precious and inane, but she’s very talented, and funny too. Of course, it helps that the first writing of hers I read was this, part of an...

From a few weeks ago on mrbarrett.com there was a link to this amazing piece, which I would consider a must-read for anyone who lives in the New York area. Speaking of which, Bird on a Wire‘s blog map will let you find other NYC weblogs, although I...

Courtesy of welcome to the nubbin: I love the ritual of peeling an orange. the smell, the stickiness, the taste. and I just discovered that the inner skin of orange pieces is really nice to touch. it feels a lot like people skin. like the inside of...

I got a message today from my friend Glenn, who is part of the team responsible for the Library of Congress website, and it made me think of what a formidable task it would be to try to make a web interface to all that information. Especially on a...

From Getting It: Now one of cell-phonedom’s most annoying novelty rings has been sampled for an anti-cell phone CD released last week by dance act Solid Gold Chartbusters. “I Wanna 1-2-1 With You” is a steal from the catchphrase of one of the UK’s...

An actual product from FTD: The FTD� Fiery Funeral Tribute. I suppose it’s appropriate for...

Shouldn’t the progress bars be resizable in modern operating systems? I was at a client and wanted to see how far along a certain task was, but I was across the room and couldn’t resize the damn thing to be visible down the hall. They added drop...

Seems almost redundant for any blog to link to CamWorld, but I just had to concur with the following: As a true design geek, I’m in love with packaging. If there were ever a store that sold nothing but different kinds of boxes, envelopes, and...

Oh, and I’m using the new Blogger 2.0 now for updates, at least for the time being. I’ve always been quite enamored of the tool, but the new version is just too compelling for me not to use. Besides, I’m feeling somewhat geek-inadequate since I’m...

On a much lighter note, anyone who’s lived in, or spent appreciable time in, New York City, is familiar with the vagaries of alternate side of the street parking rules. However, it’s damned near impossible to find out about these regulations...

Maybe I’m just making assumptions, but my first thought was that this boy was part of the ICQ team. Does anyone know? My condolences,...

So while you (or the Americans among you, at least) are giving thanks today, here’s a little something to think about before you hop in the car tomorrow morning. Not to preach, or...

So naturally I am back at the parents’ homestead in Pennsylvania, and I found it interesting that the local mall had something that I’ve not seen anywhere else, not even in oh-so-progressive Manhattan or user-friendly California: reserved parking for...

Just another reason to like Brill’s Content is this excellent package on the Mega-Media companies. It’s terrifying to read, but an excellent example of what journalism should be. Bonus: Just another example of why David Duchovny is cool was the...

Coincidence? Right after Columbine, the WB cancelled their episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of parallels in the high school violence theme. Now, shortly after the explosion at a Michigan senior citizen’s home, NBC shows an episode of ER...

And, to answer the "Where the hell are you?" emails, I should be back online (with cable modem no less– yippee!) in one more week. See you...

On an unrelated note, I’m going to begin soliciting epinions on different items, not so that I have topics to write about, but so that other people can get paid for me reading their reviews. You see, the many unanticipated needs that pop up when...

Lots of ideas these last few days, of course, as I’m in the process of moving and have neither phone line nor cable modem and, hence, no way to update this page… Today begins "Shameless Search Engine Pandering", a new feature which is meant...

Well, for me the moving process begins today, as I return to my most favorite city, New York, New York. I’m sure you don’t care too much, but it will affect this page in that the tumultuous state of phone/Internet connections will force updates to be...

Excuse me while I toot my own horn, or You heard it here first! As I mentioned on 4 October, Hershey’s is having trouble with its SAP implementation, causing a shortage of chocolate during the busy Halloween season. Today, ZDNet has an article to the...

File this under "So scary it must be true". Banana Republic‘s flagship store in Manhattan opened the other day (yesterday, I think) and they offer two new services from the store concierge that make me excited and terrified,...

I don’t know how recent the addition is, but I’ve noticed in the past few weeks that increasing numbers of UPS trucks have drop slots on the side for people to put delivery envelopes directly into the truck. My first reaction was to flash back to...

Success! If you’ll kindly look back to 11 September, you’ll see that we had sent a message to Shaun Reilly, proprietor of ReillyBurger.com to congratulate him on his culinary achievements. The message we sent was as follows: Mr. Reilly, Upon...

So the updates to this page have been erratic due to all the extra effort I have to put in for my upcoming move… but, having had the chance to spar with several voice mail/voice menu systems over the past few days has yielded some quick...

Now I tend to be a little suspicious of any "Personality Type" test, despite the uncanny accuracy of Keirsey and Myers-Briggs, but this one seems to be fairly accurate. Wonder how Ulla did...

In the immortal words of Diana Ross, "I’m Coming Out, I Want the World to Know"”. And what exactly is my secret? I am the guy Microsoft makes all the eye candy for. You see, there are a large (and vocal) number of computer users who are...

Perhaps one of the best examples of accomodating user needs is the "Boss Screen", a rather clever and amusing tradition which dates back at least to the beginning of the DOS PC era, although I’m certain earlier examples could be...

Continuing with the theme of finding out what people search for (and, theoretically, how they search…) I’ve found the mother of all search-spy pages, and it’s hosted on a site that I actually used to frequent quite regularly: Search Engine...

I’m wondering why I didn’t know about this before, but it’s really damned cool: The Lycos 50 is a regular column that is written based on the top 50 items that users search for at Lycos. I especially like the "One To Watch" and...

It’s kind of strange to me that one off-hand reference to Hints from Heloise has resulted in a peculiarly large number of visitors from AOL Search looking for the real Heloise website. Now is it just me, or were Heloise and Samantha from Bewitched...

Warning: Repeated viewing of these links may lead to either hysterical laughing, or deep depression once you realize just how sad the results are… either way, please see MetaSpy and WebCrawler Voyeur. Both are pretty neat, showing the results of...

Been following this for a while, but I just can’t get over how funny Alice’s Swoosh Page where she lists dozens of companies using generic swooshes in their logos. I don’t know whether it’s scary or...

Dirty Little Secret: The Internet Sucks. My partner in crime Helen wanted to replace a little black dress she accidentally shrunk. Nothing special, a rayon, knee-length, short-sleeved jumper dress. Such a basic staple of a woman’s wardrobe that it’s...

Regarding the discussion of websites as script pitches from 6 October, please see also Script Sales where we can see how the professionals do...

So I was at Internet World today, which isn’t really my cup of tea. Except that I love free kitsch, and what better way to collect than at a trade show? The disappointing things? Well, that there was only one human-factors-related company in the...

Well, Color Me Badd… a big thank you to all the people who pointed out Netscape has the "start with the last site" feature already. I went into preferences, and sure enough that checkbox looked damned familiar. Stupid me. To do it:...

I was at an industry party tonight (because Internet World is in town) and I heard a PR flack (or is that PR lackey?) describe the site she works for as "Hotmail for Bookmarks". I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that the ‘net industry...

I know Opera already does this, but why don’t Netscape and Explorer automatically start up (optionally, of course) at the last page you visited? Someone write a utility to do this,...

Back at it again… For those who don’t know, I’m from Pennsylvania, with my hometown being about 20 minutes from Hershey,PA, famous as Chocolatetown, USA. As such, I have a sort of hometown pride for Hershey’s chocolate, and I was dismayed to find out...

Nope, not dead. Just on hiatus… stay...

At the risk of becoming Hints from Heloise, is there anyone else who knew that rubbing alcohol could restore windshield wipers to their full squeegeeing powers? I had no...

Well, it’s a doozy, but the W3C has come up with a proposal that I think is killer. XHTML 1.0. In simplest terms, it’s a reformulation of HTML 4.0 (plus a few updates) as expressed in XML 1.0. Got that? Now I know this is old news, since the spec’s...

Egads! While I’m all for similarities and coincidences, it’s freaking me out that peterme is renewing his driver’s license the same day as me. On an another topic, I don’t know how the hell Epinions adds items,...

A nice update on the idea of improving tactile feedback is this related concept from Microsoft Research, a touch-sensitive mouse. The prototype appears to be pretty far along, although they’ve done only small-scale subjective testing. Not that...

Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not much of a TV watcher, but one of my consistent faves since childhood has been 20/20. This, despite my great contempt for Barbara Walters. The reason? Hugh Downs. A class act, he’s been in broadcasting for 60...

The perils of ego-surfing. For the record, this is not me. And I’m glad it...

Only 92 Shopping Days Left! Just a reminder that we’re only weeks, nay days, away from Christmas...

Microsoft Passport Part One and a Half: Continuing the User Experience At the end of yesterday’s exciting episode, User X was waiting, mouse-finger poised, to click on our "Sign In" link… let’s see where the story continues! The sign in...

As promised: Microsoft Passport Part One: User Experience Okay, so after spending waaaay too much time reading all the documentation at the official Passport site, I’ve been able to glean a little info on how the end-user will approach this...

Another downside to the Tulip Bubble mentality saturating the industry is the "Why are they making all the money, I should have thought of that!" reaction I keep having to every innovative, creative new idea that comes along. Case in point:...

Dammit, I just can’t stop starting trends. I half-jokingly put up my "FadMaker" section on the sidebar when Ani signs Arto Lindsay to her label. As part of my ongoing "Circular Reference ’99" tour, flip through my CD collection to...

So for every "rule" of web design, there are of course necessary exceptions. I hate animated GIFs for the most part. I hate pointless uses of bright, distracting color. But I’ll be damned if I don’t like this little picture that the...

p>Hmm… I don’t know if it falls under the "Great minds think alike" catchall, or if it’s merely the increasingly self-referential nature of the web, but nearly every site that’s linked to me the past few days is also of interest to...

Went to the grocery store the other day. (Did I mention I love grocery stores?) The fellow in front of me in the express aisle had three items: A 6-pack of 12-ounce Bud Light Longnecks. Bag of pork rinds frozen White Castle burgers. And a 4-pack of...

Everything that rises must converge. If pressed to recite a short list of some of my favorite pop musicians, that list would undoubtedly include Prince, Ani DiFranco, and Chuck D of Public Enemy. Interesting to me, then, that all three are now free...

As young Anakin Skywalker might say, "Yippee!" I was not once, not twice, but thrice linked yesterday, all by esteemed logs. To follow my progression as a meme, one can see me pop up at PeterMe, and then progress to Eatonweb, whence came a...

Of course The Weather Channel is useful. But I’m discovering increasing numbers of people for whom the channel has some sort of hypnotic, addictive effect. And I can admit that even I am not immune to its charms sometimes. So naturally I was drawn to...

Idea: Once broadband is more widespread, how about some javascript (or maybe a browser add-in) that adds meta-data to the tooltip on a link? Something like the date of the last update and maybe the registrant of the link’s domain when you hover over...

The harsh realities of the capitalist free market. Or, "Art vs. Commerce, Chapter LXXXII". Despite my fondness for independent record stores, (or should I say CD stores?) their penchant for buying and selling used discs results in some...

Prepare to be impressed. There exists among us a man like no other. Sure, we are all exceptional in some way. But truly few are as blessed with a gift as this Boston University senior. I have two words for you: 20,000 Calories. It really does give a...

An interesting experiment in pervasive hyperlinking is taking place at GuruNet. (No relation to guru.com) What they make is a small program, sort of like a browser plug-in, that lets you Alt-click on a word in any Windows application (not just...

More insight courtesy of a fellow commuter: Large, warehouse retail environments are damned unfriendly. While I haven’t fully thought through the implications of this, I am realizing that it’s definitely true. Staples, Home Depot, OfficeMax, BJ’s...

Part II of the link between physical and logical architecture, at least as they relate to accessibility. Each of the principles listed yesterday can be applied to design on the web, at least indirectly. Let’s show some examples of analogous...

Interesting parallels between my area of expertise and the area in which most of my clients work, or Information Architecture vs. Spatial Architecture. I was reading an article on accessibility guidelines for home construction, and it’s interesting...

Whew! After a long Labor Day weekend hiatus from updating this site, I have finally returned. Lots of new ideas, but oh so little time to upload them… First of all, some poetry. A reflection on aging in general, and on my birthday in particular,...

Ask.com ponders the unanswerables. Since being renamed from Ask Jeeves, one of my favorite search sites, ask.com, has taken on what I feel could be an overwhelming responsibility. You see, with a name as broad as "Ask.com", I feel that an...

Little bit of appreciation for good design— despite an underwhelming set of new features, Microsoft‘s Office 2000 has got some damn cool icons. They’re almost childlike in their simplicity, they’re extremely distinct from one another, even at very...

It’s amazing what someone can do with Legos, a magic 8-ball, and too much time on their hands. Another "Only on the Web" moment, courtesy of some clever programming, a webcam, and the motor and control unit from Lego Mindstorms is this bit...

While traveling back to Pennsylvania today, I had occasion to reflect on a recurrent observation of New Jersey that I have every time I go through the state. While I’ve long referred to Jersey as "The Armpit of Our Nation", it occurs to me...

So the big innovation for today is the DHTML pull-down menus at the top of the page. They only work in Explorer, and while I hate browser-specific enhancements, I did them for two reasons. The first reason, of course, was to see if I could. I’m no...

An almost surreal New York Moment: we were at a pizzeria at the corner of York and 79th, and there was a fellow watering his garden outside the shop. Not amazing that there was a gardener, but that the "garden" was the small square of dirt...

Talk about your guilty pleasures… I’m not much of TV person, but if you gotta watch, one might as well watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. From its catchy, fifties-meets-nineties name, to the fact that it has that way over the top music and set...

Well, at long last one of my pet projects went live today, it’s the new Suddell Builders website. Of course, websites are never done and there’s a million things I don’t like about the site, but the only measure I can use is whether it is better than...

Thanks to the design excellence and automotive auspices of the Ford Motor Company, I am in scenic Throop, Pennsylvania. Yes, this town is exactly what one would expect of a location named Throop. Of course, this is not just another bellyaching...

Looks like the apartment hunt is finally bearing some fruit… not just one, but two good candidates today, with the second one being the oh-so-wired Chesapeake Building which is only two blocks from my old place on 92nd. The big news on this new...

Just one of those great "Only on the Web" sites is the Visual Thesaurus from a company called ThinkMap. I’m not much of a fan of Java applets, but this one’s worth the download time, it’s a great brainstorming tool. And one of my classic...

I updated my Quick Links up above today, removing the Silicon Valley weblog from the Merc and adding in DaveNet, which is one of those ancient Internet legends that I don’t check nearly often enough. Thanks to a mention from Jakob Nielsen, I was...

A thought about why the U.S. Congress is so ineffective: It’s an institution which combines the pomposity and bureaucracy of the British Parliament with the contentiousness and slovenly pace of its location in the American South. It’s a wonder they...

A Guide to Gratuities: While I’ve always been a generous tipper, (almost inappropriately so) I have definitely come under the sway of my much more miserly friends, to the point where I now find reasons to take deductions from the tip I was going to...

Happy Birthday,...

Separated at birth? The opening bars of Stevie Wonder’s "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" features vocals being handed off from a male vocal to a female and finally to Stevie himself. Prince’s "1999" features the same technique,...

Seems to me the web is the medium which marks the return of the aside to public discourse. Traditional media, dating back to the dawn of writing and speech, has always had a place reserved (can I say bookmarked?) for interjections from the author or...

A brief trip to Atlantic City reveals that the city is as tacky and depressing and overdone as ever. However, Sands‘ $15 buffet proved formidable enough to fell three grown men. The scariest realization I had while there is that I have spent 3 or 4...

An unsolicited word of advice for all you triskadecaphobes out there, superstitions are for idiots. This concludes today’s...

A semi-rhetorical question today: When is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) going to have to distinguish what constitutes a "new" film? For the purposes of the Academy Awards, the Academy already...

This is a puzzle based on a photo Helen took when she was studying in Greece. While it’s pretty easy to solve, it is fun to work with. Note: This is not a sliding-tile puzzle, you merely click on the pieces if you want to exchange their...

The new Dumb Picture added today is courtesy of The Tacky Postcard Archive, which Helen had discovered for me a while ago. They’ve got all kinds of inspired lunacy, and unlike Blue Mountain Arts, it is deliberate when the electronic postcards are...

The Postal Service authorized online purchase of postage today, which was pretty much expected since they’ve been working on it for more than a year. However, some of the reports I’ve read say they authorized four providers, while others say two. If...

Kind of a nice de facto starting page for website reviews is Creative Good. Nice reviews, the only other site I consistently like is C-Net‘s Builder.comSite...

Returned to Pennsylvania for the weekend to pick up some stuff (my other computer, clothes, etc.) The interesting thing is that not one, but two roadside projects there have websites of their own. I suppose this is that tentative first step towards a...

Well, if one can’t create content, one can always appropriate it. Also by way of atonement for my cheekiness on 27 July, I present to you a speech by JFK Sr. in which he does a fantastic job of refuting those who would vilify the word liberal, a term...

Another day of apartment hunting, followed by some walking & shopping time in the city around 57th Street. I had forgotten what a hellish tourist trap that part of the city is (we had gone to Planet Hollywood for the Captain Crunch Chicken...

From the silly to the sublime… it seems the Internet brings out people’s interest in Meta-Content whether it’s Slate or Brill’s Content in my bookmarks, or any of the other media analyses on the web, everyone wants to explain everything to everyone...

Phew! That was a long entry yesterday… but enough with the term paper on bioengineering. Let’s see if we can find a fun, interesting site, shall we? Or how about merely creepy, as in this voyeuristic oddity, My Dear Diary, which shows once again that...

I’ve been thinking about genetically modified crops, or, as the Europeans call them, GM Products. And, for once, I think that the Europeans are right and we Americans are wrong. Basically, we’ve got crops (typically staples like corn, etc.)...

So the apartment hunt continues. It’s actually kind of fun, figuring out Ad-Speak. I’m pretty good with acronyms and abbreviations, (and you’d be hard-pressed to find a vowel in any of the words in a typical real estate ad in the Times…) but I must...

Little bit of not-quite-wisdom which I have realized is very, very true: We hate most in others that which he have failed to see in ourselves. Or, as I like to say, if it pisses me off, it’s probably something I do...

Today and yesterday I have used the Metropolitan Transit Authority‘s trains to go to work. I have been a big believer in public transportation, as long as I personally didn’t have to use it. However, the experience has been fun and suprisingly...

Okay, sorry about all that silliness yesterday, we now return to serious, useful, and relevant content. Exhibit A: This incredible work of art, courtesy of a young man in New Zealand who apparently has waaay too much free time on his hands. To give...

This just in:Pierre Salinger (John Sr.’s Press Secretary, natch) has just admitted to shooting down the Kennedy-Bessette plane with a well-timed missle launched from Long Island Sound… in other breaking news, John F. Kennedy, Jr. is still...

In honor of my impending move back to New York, here’s something very cool. Called the CyberTimes Navigator, it is the page NY Times reporters use internally as their start page for doing research. (BTW, this might require that annoying NY Times...

The first hazy outlines of a weblog are born here, expect entries to be added both forwards and backwards from here. Until the content’s in place, just satisfy yourself by clicking around some of my favorite links, up at the top, or email me, or poke...

Actually, it’s technically very early on 21st July, 3:45a to be exact. That bastard Prince made us wait 5 hours until he showed up. In my opinion, of course, it was worth it. Others who were present tended to disagree… Also present onstage at Life...