Way Up In the Trees...

This morning I woke up with the Monchichis song stuck in my head, holy shit, how frightening.



For those of you who never saw the show, it's a Japanese import cartoon, I think it was picked up by Hannah-Barbera and blasted directly into the frontal lobes of unsuspecting children...



If you're really curious, here's what was in my head this morning...

http://www.toontracker.com/monchhichis/monchhichis.ram

Griping about Blogs; the Internet is a Series of Tubes

So one of my biggest gripes about the whole blogging thing is that few people do much more than refer to someone else's blog in their post. I know I'm guilty of it. But it becomes this dumbed down process of constant referrals, and perhaps that's all social media really is at its roots. I find myself just constantly seeking out the source material, scanning through blogs looking for the link where they got their info. This generally leads to hopping around (sometimes in circles, the buddy system is great for getting your click-rate up, huh?). It's just fake blogging, flogging...

In spite of my irritation, I do see some value, for instance, had person A not referred me to person B's blog, I never would have found the info that helps me in my day to day job. When person A is constantly referring to person B's blog and getting most of their source material from it however, it's time to cut out the middle man (or coyote, if you will). Fortunately, the better bloggers have enough of their own thoughts and a wide variety of source material... there is a lot of white noise out there though...



Now, to prove my point that I'm not exempt from the process of referrals: In light of the fact that Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was somewhat recently drawn and quartered by bloggers for referring to the internet as a "series of tubes" it's surprising that Yahoo would come out with a new product, called Pipes. Personally, the Stevens comment was the first thing I thought of when I read about this on Anil Dash's blog. The product does look cool, I have to say, and is essentially a way for those of us who don't know how to do any coding make a mash-up of our own with little struggle.

powered by performancing firefox

Endless Days in Paradise

Cool weather has been prevailing for a couple of weeks here finally, I think around the same time that the sun forgot to warm northern climes...
Anyways, cold weather up there and pleasant weather down here means that we get all kinds of visitors, mostly from New York and New Jersey, but today we got a different kind of visitor... hundreds of sharks off of our beaches...
Neuman might disagree but given the choice, I'd rather have the sharks, it's too cold for swimming anyways... and a shark won't try to hit me or run me off the road with their new Lexus.

The Death of Search Engines?

There's some chatter going on in Technorati about the "Death of Search Engine domination, or at least there's a "WTF" on the topic (still trying to gauge this tool, how does this topic count as being "on fire" if it's only received 1 vote so far?).



It's a good question though, I could totally see the social set of tools evolving past the capabilities of the standard search set. Tagging, mashing, blogging, plogging, vlogging, and so on could be developed in to one cohesive tool that could revolutionize not only search, but websites in general... it's happened rapidly on the personal level, businesses have been adopting this for a while now, and now newspapers, generally the most reluctant to adopt new technologies are finally making the transition...

Aqua Teen Terror Force Strikes Boston

Parts of Boston were shut down today due to several suspicious packages being found around the city. At least one was detonated by officials before they figured out that the devices were harmless.

At around 4:00 Eastern the group behind the devices called in taking credit for it... who was it? The Aqua Teen Hunger Force...

Or to be more specific a marketing firm, hired by Turner Broadcasting to do an advertising campaign for the show.

I always thought that Ted Turner was pretty nutty, but wow! A genius too! Or maybe the citizens of Boston are just hyper-paranoid? The rep from Turner claims they were billboards...

Ominous Widgets

Well, I don't know how to interpret this, from my personalized google home page...

Quote of the day.

This popped up in my Quotes of the Day widget on my google homepage:

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
- George Bernard Shaw


Generally I have to say the quotes I get in there are pretty bad, but I liked this one. I guess it took me back to when I was going to school for creative writing (before changing to journalism). The best advice that I got was always, "write from what you know." Of course that kind of statement to a 21-year-old doesn't mean much... haha.