onfocus

If you're looking for a sub-$8 cab that goes well with homemade macaroni & cheese, I recommend Smoking Loon. (We picked some up at Trader Joe's the other day. They always have good inexpensive wine.)

I have a somewhat ethical question related to Trackbacks. But I'll start with an explanation. Several sites allow you to add a Trackback manually if you don't have the feature built into your weblog tool. (eg. BlogFodder, BlogPopuli, LazyWeb.) And there's no authentication or identity management that goes along with these. They're open for anyone and everyone to add a Trackback linking to any post on any site. (It relies on the honor system + moderation + IP Logging [hopefully!] from the site administrators.)

As Trackbacks are used now, there's an extra bit of information that doesn't show up on the page: the implication that it was the author of the remote post that initiated the Trackback. Is it wrong to use one of these open forms to trackback a post that you didn't write?

For example, Mena posted about her panel at SXSW and I'd like to see it under that panel's entry at the SXSW Notes Exchange. And I could add it with the open form. But should I? This example is no big deal, and I don't think Mena would mind too much. But I can think of situations where this would be a problem. I think Trackbacks could be used for all sorts of information aggregation, but the author-implication could restrict its use.

The Alties is in its public voting stage. It's very cool that they're using instant runoff voting. IRV is better than the standard one vote/one choice method of voting, and it's great to see it in action at a fun project like this. [via Derek]

mophos



(From a Sony Ericsson T300.)

Behind the Scenes: Cool 2B Real: Designer: "I know I should feel guilty, but my salary allows me to buy name-brand aluminum furniture." [via Anil] Reading this makes me think someone could pull off a Spinal Tap for the Web generation.

Barbershop was pretty funny without relying on the inherent humor of bodily fluids.

Also, some collaborative filtering for conferences would be nice. It would be interesting to know if there were other people at a conference who happened to attend all of the same panels I did on a certain day. Then it would nice to see which panels those same people were thinking about attending the next day. And then some way to contact them to talk about meeting. Stalking implications aside, I think this would be very cool as long as the users themselves are controlling what information is public.

I'm starting to get excited about SXSW 2003. I've been busy doing some coding for SXSWblog. There's a new photo exchange and notes exchange that's integrated with the site membership. (The notes exchange is also now Trackback-aware, so anyone can post to their weblog and trackback specific conference events.) Working on this has me thinking about other potential conference-related collaborative projects. I'd like to see something along the lines of geourl meets a weblog—tracking geographic locations of attendees through time. Imagine being able to say: I'm here now, I was there, and I'm going there through a web interface. It would be so much easier if everyone had a WiFi-enabled GPS and could "post" spots to their location-blog.

Now this is a good lawsuit: getting rid of commercials in theaters. [via boingboing] Aggressive advertising is just one of the reasons I've pretty much stopped going to big theater chains. Support your independent theaters, they wouldn't do this. And they play better movies. (Though in many places there's no alternative.) Here in Corvallis, the independent choice is Avalon Cinema.

If this sized crowd (not only in New York, but around the world) is protesting in the streets before a war begins, what will happen after bombs are falling? Once the initial surge of patriotism wears off, that is. Also, Rafe has a good analysis of what the protests mean.

In case you haven't heard, Google bought Pyra—the makers of Blogger. (I joined Pyra a few months after Ev and Meg founded it and was there for about two years.) I think this is a good turn of events for everyone who believed and invested in Pyra/Blogger in the early days. (Anyone close to the company has had a bit of a rough ride with ups and downs.) And it feels good personally to see something I believed in and worked hard for enter a new phase with a company like Google. Sometimes I wish I could still be involved with Blogger's development, but life never goes according to plan. We always had fun anthropomorphizing the application—and this feels like Blogger's graduation.

I think reversible.org could add some order to the chaos by using the first two levels of the DMOZ category hierarchy (or a simplified version of it) from the top-level page. It's a very fun idea, and I hope it becomes a well-used resource.