courtesy of digg.com
Fun
You don’t have to think too hard about this category
As if you needed another reason to pee in your pants
Try Ricky Gervais new podcast.
It is HYSTERICAL.
Not kinda funny.
Not sorta funny.
Not dry british humor.
It is priceless.
Episode 1 December 5 2005
In which Ricky, Steve and Karl discuss …
the pros and cons of technological invention, leading on to Karl’s Malthusian concerns and a possible solution. There’s a digression into the extra sensory perception of early hominids. Oh, and some Monkey News of course. Plus strange tales about lethal drinking vessels and stately homes.
I love his original version of The Office. The guy kills me. His partners on the podcast are funny. He plays off them well. The only thing about it that i hated was that it ended.
One of the reasons I just bought my slick iPod video was that he was podcasting. Ricky says this the first in a series of 12 podcasts, so I am not sure of his long term plans, but it is up there on the iTunes most popular.
Check it out here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/rickygervais
Outstanding! – NYPL Battle Over Books Event
So I went to the Battle Over Books event at the New York Public Library. What a great time. Lawrence Lessig was in rare form and the debate over the Google Print project was outstanding. Allan Adler, who held his own during the discussion, even recieved some applause from 5 or 10 people in the room (packed house like the Who Owns Culture event). Special guests included Steven Johnson, who moderated the Who Owns Culture event and Emily, who recently returned from another amazing trip to the Far East.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003200.shtml
But there were two big highlights of the night:
1. I saw Krista P who I used to work with at K2. I haven’t seen her since 2000 when I ran into her at a restaurant while I was working at Deutsch. We caught up a little bit. Krista – my email address is sean at seanbohan.com
2. I got to hang out with Emily, Toby, Ace, David and Salim. I have been developing a reputation as a flake lately thanks to the ridiculous amount of work I am doing. Leaving events early, not showing up for BBQ’s, etc. I haven’t had a chance to hang out with Emily and Toby since the summer, so it was fun to see a good debate and then grab a drink and just talk. Advertising, structured content, identity, credit, context, disaster preparedness, tennis… we were all over the map.
And it was cool to meet Salim, a fellow gnomedexer and the CEO of PubSub (search the future!). He is working on some really cool stuff (very web2.0-y) with a big announcement in the future.
Ace, as usual, is full of advice: “You gotta get out more”.
I hate it when he is right.
Why Martin Sargent needs his own show again
I loved UNSCREWED with Martin Sargent back when TechTV was still about tech, and not Hot Chocolate mods for GTA. Sargent now has his own blog, and is putting together a podcast.
Except there was one little problem – someone stole his Podcast.
There is no question that the thief had only that one piece of pillage in mind, for in order to get to my computer lab, he would have had to pass straight through the gallery and its fine collection of Nabis Movement art (heavy on Ker-Xavier Roussel and Felix Vallotton).
Whoever the thief was also dropped an upper decker in my powder room. Not cool.
Not cool indeed….
click here for Sargent’s reel – it is hysterical.
Gada.Be is LIVE!
Chris Pirillo, from Lockergnome and the greatest tech conference I have ever attended, Gnomedex, has just launched his new meta search engine http://gada.be/
It was borne out of several frustrations. If you’ve ever tried to visit a Web site over a mobile device, you know it’s a pain in the knuckle. The domain had to be simple to key-in from anywhere. gada.be is 4232.2233 on most cell phones and/or PSP. Normally, when you want to find something online, you have to choose a Web site (wait for the page to load) enter the query (wait for the second page to load) then see results from that provider. With “gada.be,” you insert the query *AS* the subdomain!
* http://corpse-bride.gada.be/
Up until now, Chris has had this in BETA, with only select friends and Gnomedexers checking it out (one of the coolest things about gnomdex is how the conversation has continued since the conference). I have been playing with it recently
seanbohan.gada.be
wordpress.gada.be
citizenmedia.gada.be
All it needs now is some RSS-goodness so I can subscribe to my searches! (oops – thats PUBSUB)
We are all Homeland Security (Recovery 2.0)
Tnis is very cool – Jeff Jarvis discusses Recovery 2.0, and event that took place at the Web2.0 conference this past week.
Recovery2.0 is the start of a conversation at how regular folks, powered by internet-based technology and pre-planning could respond to the next Katrina/Ivan/Andrew/9-11.
But, of course, there is no “it.” There is no one system or authority or organization. This is the distributed internet, where people’s best efforts will pop up everywhere. The real goal is, as I described here, to get us to communicate and swarm better around needs, around the best replies, and around making the best better.
Open source, open standards, distributed, resilient, easily connected to existing/emergent/spot-developed systems.
Check out the original blog post here:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/10/09/14/
Key needs and characteristics:
http://www.socialtext.net/recovery2/index.cgi?recovery_2_0_characteristics
Recovery2.0 Wiki
http://recovery2.org/
Cooking as Code
Great interview with Alton Brown from Food Channel’s Good Eats on Brian’s Belly.
Brown’s is my favorits show on Food Network, hands-down (Mon-Fri at 7pm). He has even gotten covered on Slashdot.
“What I do like is adapting vernacular. It is not that I’m a computer geek, it’s that I’m obsessed with different sub-culture vernacular and it just so happens that the computer industry and culture has a lot of great terminologies that they have invented… and so I adapt them. It’s not because I am a part of them, although I think I understand something of that brain box. It’s been said that I think of recipes as open code, and I like that because with open code the opportunity exists for constant deviation, constant evolution, constant revolution… and I’d like to see that in cooking.”
Great interview (and I just subscribed to Brian’s feed). Even Alton Brown has a blog (hit the Rants and Raves section of his site – he still needs to get an RSS feed).
Link to the article here:
Bit Torrent raises $8.75 Million
Thanks to Om Malik for this great story:http://gigaom.com/2005/09/23/bit-torrent-raises-875-million/
At Gnomdex this year a great deal of the conversation was about BitTorrent, and how the best way to legitimize it is to use it legitimately – use it for podcasts, video blog casts, spreading your own content, open source software, sharing legal and Creative Commons work – change the conversation from what it could do (piracy) to what it does do (sharing, transmitting, communicating – you know, like the internet).
Om Malik is reporting that the BitTorrent guys have just lined up financing of $8.75 million dollars. Now while that isnt dotcom money (aaaarrrggghhh!!!) it is still a nice chunka change for developing and rolling out bittorrent to the world. And while the big studios and record companies wouldn’t use the technology, with the right safeguards (like software keys, etc.) media companies could change how they distribute and share content with their users.
More and more we are seeing things like NerdTV, Systm, Rocketboom , Digg, and OurMedia– professional quality ‘programming’ (video or audio, sometimes user generated) distributed through the web. BitTorrent is a natural for this – taking advantage of bandwidth, the distributed aspects of the swarm, blah blah blah.
Can’t wait to see what comes next.
WordsAndPicturesOnline – great
http://www.wordsandpicturesonline.com/
This is a blog/comic strip about a creative team at a big agency (based on real events, client names changed to protect the living and the account guy’s sanity).
They say it is:
Words & Pictures is, to the best of our knowledge, the only comic strip about the adventures of a creative team in a large advertising agency. Too stupid to create avatars that would give us plausible deniability, everything in the comic is 100% true — with the notable exception of anything that would make us look bad or get us sued. That stuff’s made up. New strips are posted every Monday. You can also join our mailing list to stay on the cutting edge of new-strippery.
Very fun… check out the “Dodge Smegma” from Aug 15
OUTFRICKENSTANDING – Netvibes
Marc Canter blogs about the new site Netvibes. It is an example of a Digital Lifestyle Aggregator (similar to what Marc is planning on doing with GoingOn).
Check it out here: http://www.netvibes.com/
This is easily the coolest thing I have seen in a while. Its built in Ajax (like Google’s personalized homepage and Microsoft’s Start.com). The difference is, these guys aren’t a multibillion dollar public company.
This service is free and gives the user the ability :
* to create a personalized page with the content they like.
* to put together data feeds and services from web 2.0 with a very simple interface
* to access your page anytime and from any computer .Key features of Netvibes :
* Browse, modify, and import your RSS feeds with our integrated RSS/ATOM feedreader. You can easily import an OPML file as well.
* Import, download and listen to pod casts without any additional software
* Check your mail on one or many gmail accounts, stick web notes, weather and many more features to come !
You can add feeds, move the elements around on the page (thanks AJAX), bring in your gmail, get the weather, add notes to the page and even hit your page from other machines. The guys who built it, Florent Fremont and Tariq Krim are based in Paris and do Web2.0 apps.
Tres cool. Check it out.