Email's been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and dis...

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 2010...

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 notice...

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 ph...

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 multipl...

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 ord...

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 tr...

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...

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 an...

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...

The Webby Awards have recognized Kevin McCoy and I with their Lifetime Achievement Award this year , for "developing a blockchain powered way for artists...

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 t...

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 inc...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 cul...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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 acc...

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. Fab...

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 inc...

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 h...

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...

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 Facebo...

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...

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 probabl...

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 cultur...

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 li...

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 mo...

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 t...

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...

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 unde...

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 l...

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 B...

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...

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...

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 do...

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 coder...

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 wild...

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 D...

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 politici...

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 conver...

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 int...

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 marke...

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 tr...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 “Sili...

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,...

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....

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 eve...

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 recogniti...

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...

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 p...

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 pri...

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...

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...

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! Th...

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....

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...

All printers are 3D printers. Every device is wearable. All technology is mobile technology. And of course, this remains true: We're 30+ years int...

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...

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....

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 typical...

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’...

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 disc...

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 o...

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...

[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 Thu...

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...

This year’s XOXO festival exceeded its predecessor in every way. It was bigger, smarter, more challenging, more engaging and easily among the best conference...

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...

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...

[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 entranc...

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...

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 colle...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 r...

Mark Zuckerberg built himself a political action committee called FWD.us , and they’re diving headfirst into trying to change immigration policy as their firs...

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...

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 tho...

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 so...

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...

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 gee...

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...

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 progr...

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...

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 quo...

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 friend...

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...

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...

(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.)...

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 ov...

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 tal...

Late on Wednesday, just as Americans were taking off for the Thanksgiving holiday, Facebook announced its intention to change the feedback process for...

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 afte...

Anil: Just getting ready to liveblog this event. My first Apple liveblog ever. Pretty excited. 10/23/2012 4:56:26 PM Anil: Tim Coo...

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 bec...

Most of the technology world, especially the traditional venture funding infrastructure, is justifiably proud of the extreme efficiency of modern internet star...

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...

Today marks the launch of The Internet Association , a laudable effort from a number of prominent Internet technology companies to address our industry’s hist...

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...

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...

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...

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 be...

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 inters...

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 critic...

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 id...

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...

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...

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 sto...

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...

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 explorat...

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 y...

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...

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 ad...

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 t...

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 de...

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 wer...

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 co...

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...

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 th...

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 objec...

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,...

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 respon...

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 tha...

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 know...

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 vid...

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 wil...

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 c...

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...

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 m...

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 t...

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 s...

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’...

“ 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...

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...

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 grat...

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 thei...

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 fav...

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 “Roa...

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...

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 start...

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 f...

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 compa...

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...

Today is Community Moderator Appreciation Day , a well-deserved moment of recognition for people who make the web more humane, more thoughtful, more helpful a...

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....

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...

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...

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 keyw...

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 th...

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 pu...

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 ou...

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,...

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...

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 networ...

Lots of nice writing out there that either replies to or references some recent posts here. Highlights: Dictatorship Versus Democracy in app store politi...

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...

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 store...

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...

Today, in a Wired interview about Instapaper , Marco Arment offered up: “People love information,” Arment said. “Right now in our society, we have an ob...

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 inven...

For more than a decade, an intellectually bankrupt habit of maligning new media has reared its head in traditional media outlets, perpetuating a false impressi...

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!...

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 c...

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 t...

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 acc...

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 sha...

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...

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 joinin...

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 Hous...

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...

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...

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 suc...

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 loo...

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...

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...

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...

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 (...

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...

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 perfect...

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 go...

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 Twitt...

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 s...

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%...

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.co...

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 tomorr...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 th...

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. Spen...

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 con...

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 inh...

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 pos...

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 sto...

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 of...

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 wi...

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 decad...

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...

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...

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,...

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. Y...

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 seem...

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...

Starting last week, New York Magazine asked me to participate in a roundtable conversation with NYMag’s book critic Sam Anderson, Improv Everywhere...

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 lai...

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 c...

The whole world A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames , an exciting new feature that will let you...

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...

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, wh...

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...

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 ou...

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’...

John Norquist, President of the Congress for New Urbanism had an insightful observation in his recent interview with Streetsblog , where he simultaneously d...

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...

About a decade ago, the web development industry made a decisive shift towards support for web standards . Though the effort encompassed many related efforts...

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 “To...

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 approximate...

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 Sp...

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...

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...

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 a...

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...

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...

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 ....

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 th...

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...

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 the...

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...

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...

Today, in a surprisingly botched announcement, Google announced Chrome, their upcoming open source web browser. The subject of a Google browser is something I’...

Sometimes if you do something very difficult, and you do it really well, the end result is that your achievement becomes completely invisible. I mentione...

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....

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,...

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 softw...

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 produ...

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,...

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 o...

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 B...

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 ye...

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...

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 work...

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...

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...

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...

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 leadersh...

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...

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...

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 kno...

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 f...

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...

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...

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 th...

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...

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 a...

We’re really close to funding music education in Cassell Elementary School in Chicago — you should contribute a couple of bucks! As MetBlogs Chicago...

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...

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 sati...

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...

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 Goo...

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 r...

The New York Times is removing the payment barrier from its TimesSelect content. Hooray! I pundified* incorrectly about this two years ago when they laun...

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...

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 natura...

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 intermitt...

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...

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...

Mitch Wagner has a provocative, comprehensive, and entertaining look at the recent conversations about Apple and the enterprise over at InformationWeek entitle...

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...

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 ,...

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 rea...

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....

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...

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 decisio...

Daniel Lyons, author of the heretofore-anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog, which comments extensively on companies in the technology industry, was also the author...

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...

An interesting infographic trend: Square blocks of color are now being used to represent percentage-based statistics instead of the traditional pie chart. Some...

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 matchu...

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...

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: A...

Armin Wagner’s created a brilliant collection entitled Crates and Barrels , cataloguing the ubiquity of these containers in video game culture. Though they’re...

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 t...

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...

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 beh...

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 Kohle...

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...

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 i...

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...

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 Netsca...

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 off...

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 son...

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...

One of the nice things about independent web entrepreneurs is that they (we?) can draw contrasts against those who are giant publicly-traded faceless corporati...

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 alre...

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

Pidgin , formerly GAIM, is the best instant messaging client available; It works with all common IM networks, supports extensions and customizations through p...

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 ne...

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...

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...

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 ....

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 l...

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 tha...

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 de...

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...

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 wo...

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 speak...

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 whomev...

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!...

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 he...

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...

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 D...

Background: Yahoo’s launched an interesting and innovative new service, Pipes, which lets users with a relatively low degree of technological expertise c...

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 someth...

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 O...

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 unde...

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...

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 cre...

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...

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...

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...

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 corr...

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 op...

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 ev...

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 docu...

I’m on Cranky Geeks again tomorrow. Usually I cringe a little seeing myself on these things, but I think this time around we all acquitted ourselves ra...

About a month ago, Fortune ‘s Jeffrey O’Brien interviewed Seagate CEO Bill Watkins , and pulled the conversation’s most memorable quote for the headline: “Le...

Summary: Earlier this year, I said that Office 2007 is the bravest upgrade ever, and the reason was simple: The audacity of introducing a radical new user in...

Well, technically, Zoltan Levay has the coolest job out of this world. Mr. Levay is the Imaging Resource Lead at the Space Telescope Science Institute ‘s O...

Summary: In 2002, Google launched one of their few pay services, Google Answers . The service attracted only 800 responders in the past 4 years, and was sh...

If you were interested in How Matt Haughey beat Google with Ask MetaFilter, you might enjoy some more information about the site. The Chicago Tribune’s S...

When we were unpacking the delightful Nintendo Wii a few weeks ago, I was marvelling at how well-thought-out the process was. Beautiful, pleasant, and of cou...

I don’t know exactly what the significance of this realization is to me, but I thought I’d share. The debate between Robert Scoble and Dave Winer about Micro...

Microsoft has just launched the Zune , which will be one of the most popular digital music players ever made, and could have been considered a wild s...

Hey, how many companies let you make macaca jokes and say whatever stupid thing you want on their official website? Well, my employer does ! Check out the po...

Features that didn’t make the cut for Windows Vista. For those of you who already think I’m too much of a Microsoft fanboy, check out the list. My favorite i...

Windows Vista’s astoundingly long beta period is winding down (they just sent out the “what did you think of the beta?” surveys to testers), which means a whol...

One of the great, definitive abbreviations for the social web is TL;DR. It stands for too long; didn’t read , and epitomizes the short-attention-span crowd, t...

Some say the story of people Googling random phrases is the story of America . Other disagree. So what, then, is the story of America? Captain Kirk’s st...

As part of my continuing quest to create as many posts as possible with as little original content as possible, let’s take another look at my revisitation of...

Sometimes I just can’t resist amusing myself when talking in a public forum. My wife recently got a MacBook, which marks the first time I’ve ever had a Mac in...

A month ago, I began a series of posts outlining some common themes: Any system faces danger when it becomes a monoculture Diversity offers many broad-ra...

On our last episode, we revisited Dan Geer’s analysis of software monoculture . Let’s switch back to true biological monocultures again. Monoculture Consider...

Three years ago, Dan Geer led a team of security experts in authoring a paper about the threat of a software monoculture. The paper, entitled “ CyberInsecurity...

A few weeks ago, I’d noted a Globe and Mail story that described Excel expertise as if it were a new fashion trend. That tickled my fancy, and I think the...

Okay, last Google Office post, honest. A roundup of some of the feedback on my post about Google Apps for Your Domain : Update: Okay, here’s one more link...

As part of all-Office day, I should mention that I’ll be speaking at the Office 2.0 Conference on October 11-12 here in San Francisco. If you know me, yo...

The first version of Google Apps for Your Domain has been released, offering hosted applications that provide free, ad-supported services including email, c...

It’s an all-Office day today. The Globe and Mail embraces the bad pun with “ Stressed? Busy? Excel-erate your life “. Tralee Pearce amusingly asserts that “The...

In describing Google Apps for Your Domain as “Google Office”, I was somewhat deliberately making reference to all the conversations that have happened in the...

This is the third post in a series where I’m pointing out some nice little touches that take up less than a 100×100 pixel square on a screen. Today’s is from t...

This is the second post in a series where I’m pointing out some nice little touches that take up less than a 100×100 pixel square on a screen. Today’s is the...

This is the first post in a series where I’m pointing out some nice little touches that take up less than a 100×100 pixel square on a screen. Today’s is the N...

One of the interesting things about being a serious Windows user is that very little attention is paid to efficient users of Windows, and that we suffer from a...

Some links to celebrate Flash’s 10th anniversary. 10th anniversary of Flash Wired story on Flash turning 10 John Gay’s history of Flash Mike C...

John Dvorak examines incidental online communities , as opposed to explicit social communities like Friendster. There’s some nice praise for MetaFilter in t...

One of the most obscure keyboard shortcuts in Windows, Shift+F8 has magical powers. Thanks to Andre for this completely useless pointer....

I love YouTube, but there’s something you need to understand: YouTube just stomps around, recklessly murdering innocent bystanders. The latest casualties? Jo...

Wikipedia ‘s an amazing achievement, the kind of thing a lot of us use as a case study of what can go right on the web. But it’s an effort that involves a lar...

Some tenets: Contributing to a community, online or offline has value. As long as that value is recognized and rewarded, a community will thrive. Rewar...

…and you put links in your browser, and that’s what makes the web work. Last October, Reason published an interesting look at bloggers’ overreactions a...

A little cursory research shows that Microsoft sells roughly as many licenses for Windows XP Media Center Edition as Apple does for Mac OS X, on a quarter-by-q...

Speaking of memes from a year ago , last year I created a site called ishavingamassage.com. (That’s “Is Having A Massage”, not “I Shaving…”) The domain is a (...

From the comments on one of my recent posts, here’s a perfect example of the challenge of explaining technology. I’d provided a set of links for subscribing...

One of the most interesting subcultures of the technology industry is that of the venture capitalists that fund so much of what’s going on. While the conventio...

Just a little geek note, there’s now a box that will appear the first time you visit my site (it disappears after the first visit) that will let you subscribe...

I tend to like the extra features on most DVDs more than the main feature. With that in mind, here’s a look at the links that made up today’s post which was a...

I’d started reading The Long Tail (You’ve read the blog , now buy the book !) by surprising myself with how excited I was to read the book; After a...

Microsoft’s AdCenter advertising service has a demographic predictor as part of their labs; It’s supposed to indicate what audience can be expected to respon...

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 wi...

Short and sweet, the Ribbon and new UI in Microsoft Office 2007 is** the ballsiest new feature in the history of computer software**. I’ve been using O...

Congrats to Robert Scoble on his new gig, and no disrespect intended to great MS bloggers like Dare Obasanjo and Niall Kennedy, but for my blogging dollar, the...

Hmm, much as I love Valleywag, there’s some factual inaccuracies in the loving tribute posted about me today. It asserts that a Vault.com story says that I w...

If you play Brain Age , you need to help buy Dr. Kawashima some fucking allergy medicine . Am I right? If you’re not playing Brain Age, you need to get a...

One of my recurrent sources of frustration with my fellow geeks is that most are just plain lousy at convincing others to try technologies. It’s only because...

Last month, I wrote a bit about Copy and Paste , the history of technologies like rich content embedding, and how this stuff will evolve in the world of Ajax...

From the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section Silicon Alley’s resurgence , pegged to a tech Meetup where the crowd was discussing new web startups. Yep, Web...

There’s been a lot of conversation lately about reinventing desktop office applications on the web. The first (and sometimes second) versions of all the stalwa...

Spring is coming, and with the return of baseball and the chirping of young birds in the air, a young man’s thoughts turn to… Internet standards. As in years...

Lots of people in both the music/media and technology businesses are obsessed with beating Apple’s work on the iPod and iTunes. With the CES show being this we...

If you enjoyed posts such as Excel Pile , where people detailed their favorite ways of geeking out with Microsoft Excel, you may enjoy such recent discoveries...

Best post I’ve seen today: Ari Paparo talks about the differences between del.icio.us and Blink . Blink was Ari’s startup during the bubble, which raised $13...

Vauhini Vara’s got a great interview with Michael Hart on the Wall Street Journal website today. (Click quick, that link probably expires.) I’ve always fel...

I don’t usually ascribe any kind of emotion to corporations, so I was surprised that visiting the Macromedia homepage this morning made me sad. “Formerly Mac...

Is FTP the worst web services interface ever? I’ve been publishing Froogle product lists (which I guess are now Google Base upload files ) with Movable Type j...

Every dumb joke needs a website, thus the Web 2.0 Checklist , courtesy of Mr. Sippey ....

I’ve been proud to be a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a few years, because I think they do important work that helps benefit all of u...

I’ve been fascinated by the increasing popularity of radio stations that are using automated programming from a very large playlist of songs. Most of these are...

Thanks to Matt for pointing out some wildly irresponsible journalism . I’m always amazed that editors go with these stories (and write these kinds of headline...

Like many great social software applications, Flickr began its life as something else. Flickr was built on a platform for a game called Game Neverending, which...

Or, “Yahoo bought everyone on my buddy list, and all I got was this t-shirt”. Following up on the discussion about Web 2.0 from last week, the only thing a...

A couple years ago, when I was on the other side of the continent from all the Silicon Valley/San Francisco events, I wanted to know what it was like to attend...

Now, I’m as skeptical as the next person in regard to Google’s “Dont Be Evil” mantra, which makes me snicker just because , well, it seems like an awfully low...

Yes, all the talk today about Google and blogs is about the launch of Blog Search , but equally newsworthy to me is the recent post about Dr. Lee on Google’...

The E4X support I’d mentioned in my web trends predictions post has just shipped as part of Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 . Though the the release notes track a litt...

Curious about what technologies and techniques are going to be popular in the coming months and into the next year? Well, our crack team of editors here at das...

Okay, enough talk about ugliness. Let’s try out Google’s new IM service before it launches tomorrow ! Yay for people figuring things out. I’d feel bad for G...

When the site first appeared and all the cool kids were using it, I could forgive the logo. I thought, hmm, ugly and dumb but they’re just starting out and t...

Paul Scrivens has been doing a great job of leveraging his brash personality and formidable talent to make a name for himself, especially in the design world....

The U3 website is one of those hardware industry initiative sites so overdesigned and inscrutable that I can’t tell if it’s promoting the idea of running app...

I found this interesting article on search engine optimization where the author starts out trying to create blogs on a number of American Idol contestants to...

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 (cynica...

From what Chris tells me, you really don’t want to mess with me on AIM Fight . (My screenname is “anildash”, in case you want to tussle.)...

Today’s most interesting mailing list posting : Uninstall Greasemonkey altogether. At this point, I don’t trust having it on my computer at all. I would t...

Whenever I hear about what a great community-edited, user-contributed site Wikipedia is, I think about the unsung site that’s just as much of a success: Urban...

Wow. I’m so lazyweb, I hadn’t even written up the post describing the app i wanted, and someone’s already gone and built it. Jon Aquino made YubNub , his entr...

Dave Morgan of Tacoda provides a detailed overview in MediaPost of how newspapers are getting trounced by online classifieds. The most dramatic change is not...

I’ve been very fortunate thus far in my career, getting to work on really interesting projects with very smart people, getting to meet some of my heroes, havin...

I’ve been on a big “there’s nothing new under the sun” kick lately, so let’s take a look at Infoseek’s sitelist.txt proposal from 1997, and deepleap.xml , f...

I would like to read the story about various Mac websites or periodicals dissing the Pentium in the past and then greeting today’s announcement with excitement...

Brent Simmons has been on an incredible roll recently on his weblog , covering little inconsistencies and frustrations in the Mac OS X interface that have con...

Baseline magazine (which has been one of my favorites almost since its first issue) has a brief piece on companies that are forming software co-ops to help r...

I think individual user scripts for Greasemonkey should be called “ Smart Tags “. Everyone who switched sides on this one since 2001, please raise your h...

Last year, Edward Tufte (information design guru beloved by many web design geeks) introduced Sparklines , a method of displaying dense data as a graphic inli...

I was really depressed by the comments on this post that Robert Scoble made until I read the comment by Mobile Jones , who I think stated the point perfectl...

Because I’ve been following Richard MacManus’ work on defining “Web 2.0” in Wikipedia, I really enjoyed Dan’s rant about the terrible definition that was o...

Maciej is (1) a friend (2) very funny and (3) in agreement with my beliefs, so I couldn’t resist linking to Dabblers and Blowhards , his new essay. But the...

I didn’t even have time to blog my lazyweb request for the idea, and Alan Taylor’s already built it. His del.icio.us comments bookmarklet shows you notes tha...

I’ve always thought that a user agent (the software that decodes a web page so that you can work with it) should be able to do whatever it wants. In the same w...

Four years ago, Jeffrey Zeldman said, " To Hell With Bad Browsers " and ended up changing the web. That’s damned impressive. I’d never really been...

I quite enjoyed using Google Maps to find TypePad members near New York City . Or, you know, dog lovers near Peoria ....

I guess ad space on blogs is worth something. Remember back when Google wouldn’t let bloggers run AdSense on their sites? Now they’re spamming people to convi...

Seems like the concerted effort of the comment spammers to spread FUD about the nofollow initiative is working. Jeremy Zawodny just linked to an anti-nofoll...

Rebecca talks about finding offensive content on a Technorati tag aggregation page. Besides the usual tension between free speech and community standards (to...

I might be revealing my ignorance here, but just as disk-based iPod were, also, generic USB or FireWire storage devices, I understand the new iPod shuffle is a...

I wish I had been old enough in the late 70s to start a company in my garage. My plan would be to make computers until I had gotten a big enough company that w...

One of the most recurrently popular posts I’ve written was on Real Alternative , an application that is infinitely more tolerable than Real’s official player...

Meanwhile, Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired, (no relation) has just launched The Long Tail , the blog that follows his seminal article on the subjec...

Grab your sock puppets, order some bags of dog food to be delivered, and start selling pots and pans to the gold miners: Broadband usage has passed dial-up i...

This one’s just for myself, there’s a leaked version of Royale , a Windows XP theme that Microsoft apparently made for the new version of Media Center. I like...

David says that Google’s angle on snapping up library content is to prevent banner farmers from scanning it all in and wrapping AdSense around it. That may...

Okay, here’s an important feature request that I have, either for someone to code as a stylesheet or (assuming no browser supports the necessary level of CSS t...

The iTunes Music Store now takes PayPal . Now I can start a DropCash campaign to have people buy me music!...

Pretty cool, Google’s got an iterative search implementation that offers suggsested keyword terms as you type. This is really cool, because I’m thinking of h...

As the wags are fond of saying, and Flickr is fond of demonstrating, social networking is a feature , not an application. Thus, Netflix Friends . That’s actu...

I was trying to figure out what innovation was going to come out of the syndication bubble that’s gripping the weblog industry, but now I know ! Dick Costolo...

Many of my friends are technological know-it-alls, and we all tend to ignore default settings and not do the things that software recommends. Part of this is j...

Eight years ago, Tunes.com was offering audio samples for 200,000 songs, as part of its attempt to sell downloadable music over the web. What was Apple doing...

There’s a good ClickZ article on Reconcile Rising SEO Costs With ROI that quotes my SEO contest post in talking about the benefit of good content. Let’s hope...

Looking to surround yourself on election night with a circle of like-minded individuals who won’t challenge your existing political beliefs? Just check out Fun...

Yahoo just bought Bloomba’s creators , Stata Labs. And promptly shut down downloads. While it seems like a nice feature to complement Oddpost in the presumabl...

Longtime actor/comedian/writer Harry Shearer’s done a great job of collecting some classic outsider video/outtakes footage and putting it up on his website, un...

If you want to own a piece of history, you can buy my old laptops that I reviewed on my blog and featured in a story in Business 2.0 ! Okay, it’s just m...

Behold, it’s Microsoft Decathlon ! It was like Epyx’ Summer Games, but crashed more....

I don’t know if it’s related to the topic of community behavior, but it’s also probably worth noting that the best political posts I’ve seen tend to be from bl...

“In the 2004 election cycle the formerly Republican-leaning company’s political contributions have undergone a massive shift to favor Democrats.” An interestin...

Jeff Veen asks, What do these pictures have in common? Ooh! I know! I know!...

The Village Voice’s Best of New York 2004 is up, and it seems like the best one in years. People who haven’t worked in the publishing industry (or haven’t wo...

I hate to contradict Ken Mehlman’s desires, but I think, instead of flooding the web with assertions that a candidate won after the vice presidential debate,...

I can’t believe that Lia’s the first person to ever moblog Clay Shirky’s social software class . Quick! We must coin a phrase containing the word “blog” to de...

Congrats to Ev on finishing his tenure at Google . Ev’s work, and the talent of the people he’s had working with him over the past decade, have both been big...

On beyond the power law, Chris Anderson’s got a fantastic article in Wired about the importance of all the parts of culture that don’t fit in the 1% or 10% s...

As a lifelong supporter of the idea of private space travel, I’m so thrilled to see Burt Rutan claim the Ansari X Prize . Now I have to work on having hundred...

Ever since Multiply bravely explored the threshold at which people would stop being willing to sign up for every goddamn social networking service that pops up...

Sometimes when I see the creativity that my friends display, it makes me wish I had a hammer ....

I don’t use gmail, but if I did, I’d route the Atom feed of new messages to my inbox....

So, starting today, I’ll be on vacation for a week or so. While I’m gone, you might want to check out the Six Apart Professional Network , where I do all of m...

Dan Woods has a poignant lament about the end of life for his application (and labor of love) Watson. The circumstance is unfortunate, but it would be totall...

I’ve been fascinated to watch over the past few weeks as David Allen’s three-year-old book Getting Things Done has surged back into prominence within the gee...

Which Golden Girl Are You?...

If you like reading my weblog, you may wish to Add to Bloglines Add to MyFeedster Add to MyYahoo! Burn this feed in FeedBurner [Subscribe in Kinja](j...

A few months ago, two companies in the search optimization space teamed up to start a contest , based on a challenge to see who could be the first result for...

Microsoft bought Lookout , the small company that makes excellent Outlook search tool. Lookout uses a variation of the highly-regarded Lucene search engine...

One of the things I’ve learned of late is that, despite being a wonderful, generous community of truly warm-hearted people, sometimes the blog world likes noth...

One of the biggest prerequisites for moving to San Francisco is finding an apartment. Given how well it worked last time , I’m asking you, my readers, to he...

I’ll pay $100 to the first person who figures out how to make SubEthaEdit (worst name ever! I still call it Hydra) and OneNote service pack ‘s document-edit...

Well, thanks to the help of an amazingly generous community, I came pretty darn close to getting to the top of the results for the Nigritude Ultramarine se...

Update: The contest is over, and this entry did pretty well but didn’t win the initial prize. So the best purpose this page can serve is to direct you to Th...

The conventional wisdom with a lot of the software industry is that Microsoft can just bundle any reasonably decent application into the Office suite, even i...

Do links detected in messages sent to Gmail accounts affect PageRank? Should they? Does PageRank even matter anymore?...

I took a screenshot of the Yahoo homepage and greyed out the areas that wouldn’t exist if Google duplicated the same layout and filled it with its correspondin...

If you’re in New York City, be sure to swing by the Apple Store in SoHo tonight at 6pm for the New York Bloggers event. I’ll be joined by the nutty Meg Hour...

Most of the people I know are geeks, and some large number of geeks are obsessive to one degree or another. (This can be verified by anyone who’s ever mumbled...

I am Danyel Smith, and I’m on my whirlwind Virtual Book Tour for my first novel, More Like Wrestling . It’s now in paperback. And I’m happy. Hello!...

Though it’s gotten no shortage of mainstream press coverage, the recent two billion dollar detente between Sun and Microsoft had one significant aspect tha...

Many, perhaps most, of the people who read my site have weblogs of their own. So naturally, everyone thinks they know why people blog. But it’s important to re...

Everyone I know complains that they can’t keep up with their email and that responding to it takes too much time. And of course, this is the same justification...

Sure, personal ads are one of the biggest money-makers on the web, with everyone from InterActiveCorp to Friendster being involved in the space, and of course...

A friend of mine had asked for a critique on a (fairly successful) website that he’s largely responsible for, and I had forgotten my offhand comment until it w...

So, Google’s own CEO has stated that Google is a media company , maybe it’s worth observing whether the world’s most successful Internet companies are media c...

No, no, wait… even better than " Chicken Soup for Dummies " is a self-help book aimed at the terminally unfunky, which could be called "Chicken...

I’d like to see a structured web publishing tool that would let me geoencode Wikipedia entries in the same way that many blogs use GeoURL. Then, I’d want to be...

Maybe it’s just the sentimentality that comes from knowing I’ll be away from New York City for a few weeks, but there’s still something undeniably magical abou...

The compulsion to quote and link is too strong…. Being stuck in an airport last night without connectivity, I found myself ripping the pages out of a print mag...

Making the bold leap from merely waiting for Leander Kahney to watch Blogdex as this link rises, I’m actually going to try to make a Journalism Request: As men...

I’ve been arguing for a long time that, for all the hype, weblogs have barely made an impact with regular people in any appreciable way. Most people have still...

Now that we’re in the last few months of the Era of Pop-Ups on the web, I’m kind of curious what the annoying ad format means. I think pop-ups are distinct fro...

Whenever I visit someone’s house and go to the bathroom and see that they have Herbal Essences shampoo in the shower, it makes me want to grab the bottle, wave...

I made a bunch of improvements to my Daily Links , with more on the way. The blog is AtomEnabled , the layout and font size are improved, the explanatory tex...

I think somewhere along the way I had misunderstood the whole social networking software movement. I had been thinking that all of the applications were trying...

What if Microsoft shipped "Linux for Windows"? On Friday, Microsoft released a free download of Windows Services for Unix version 3.5, a signific...

There’s a subtle significance to the fact that almost all new forms of identity and communication are tied to individuals. From email to mobile phones to IM to...

One of the more interesting Windows applications to pop up in the past few months is Real Alternative, which you can check out at this rather disorganized pag...

So we’ve got the Deskbar and the Google Toolbar and they’re great. I’m assuming one of you geniuses can probably fill me in on a larger question, though: Can G...

The current bane of my existence? Spoiler queens. "Don’t tell meeeeee!" they shriek. You know you’ve got one, too, someone who insists that the wor...

I keep returning to the concept that software provides an environment for creativity, and that these tools create a context for the content we create within th...

A relatively recently development in my life has been the fact that I’ve been spending a lot of time on airplanes. I’d travelled a good bit as a kid, going b...

A chance for fabulous cash and prizes! Rich rewards! We’re looking for a new apartment, here in Manhattan between midtown and roughly Canal Street, with one...

I recently renewed my driver’s license, and I of course checked off the organ donor box because I’m a big believer in recycling in general and there just seems...

Given the fact that Macromedia and Microsoft have both listed the changes coming up for working around the Eolas-mandated modifications to Internet Explore...

So the other day I posted my interview with PB , which was fun to do because he’s a super smart guy with lots of good ideas, but I thought it might make sense...

Did you know: books.burri.to mostly does what Paul said the Google Marketplace Manager should do?...

Google’s AdSense program is fantastic, a category killer. A good way to make money, a tasteful way to do ads, and a dramatic new way to turn hobbyist or pers...

We’ve moved this afternoon’s Six Apart/Movable Type/TypePad gathering to Push Cafe , on Third Avenue at 23rd Street. See you there!...

Well, looks like I didn’t choke to death in a pool of my own vomit . That ‘s good news....

Michael Gartenberg really seems to want to throw the book at Jeffrey Lee Parson, the kid who modified the Blaster worm and let it out on the net at large. I...

Perhaps the finest testament to the power of marketing and distribution is the fact that I regularly buy bottled water. In case you don’t know, bottled water...

I’d been playing with a redesign concept a few months ago that I never got around to finishing, so I thought I’d put it up for comments from all of you, and...

It’s a bit of a silly thing to rail against, but the headline of this BBC story makes me livid: "Student died after buying web drugs". What the h...

My recent ranting about fonts notwithstanding, I’m usually seen by the web development community as a Microsoft apologist. I use (and like using) Windows a...

I guess it shows how busy I’ve been, but I forgot to mention that last week marked the fourth anniversary of this here website. Not counting the Daily Links...

Today I saw Hirata-san ‘s new Movable Type book in person for the first time, and I know it’s tacky to say since it’s about our company’s products, but the...

Just a note for those who’ve emailed, I’m travelling this week and busy with other work stuff, so the Daily Links will continue to be light or nonexistent, and...

Amazon has syndication feeds ? So what? The current version inspires a big yawn. I don’t want to subscribe to a category of products, I want to subscribe to m...

Dear Microsoft: What the fuck? Ten years ago, Windows 3.1 was the current version of Windows. I’d been using Windows for the better part of a decade then, an...

Looks like activity around Amazon’s web services is heating up. In the latest issue of their web services newsletter, the following revelation: We are al...

Now that Netscape’s more or less officially dead, it occurs to me that it might be worthwhile for Google to bankroll the Mozilla Foundation , either by donati...

Sometimes I like to read Jon Udell’s weblog . He’s a smart guy with good ideas, and comes up with eloquent ways of expressing them. When I find things that I...

You know, back when AltaVista was a big deal for DEC, I figured it was going to kill Yahoo, since Yahoo only had a directory and AV had full-text indexes of hu...

Okay, seriously folks, you know I love you, but I do not have an in for getting you on the TypePad beta. It’s out of my hands. What I will tell you is that...

Google’s new text-based microad service looks really, really interesting, but why do the Program Policies specifically state "AdWords ads may not appear...

If you’re in New York City and you’ve got time tonight, please do come by and check out the Ecommerce SIG ‘s panel discussion on "Intro to Business Blogs...

At the weblog business conference that I’m at, Liz just said that she and Nick are frequently pitched by media companies that want permanent links on the sideb...

Starting this fall, the College Board’s Advanced Placement exam for Computer Science will shift from its current focus on C++ to use Java as the programming...

If you’ll all forgive me the indulgence for a day, today is my dog’s birthday, so I thought I would share some cuteness with all of you. Here she is at Madison...

I noticed this sign in front of a camera shop here in Manhattan a few weeks ago and remembered to take a picture of it the last time I walked by. "D...

It’s been a few years since I had a dot-com that I really, really liked. Sure, we’ve had Amazon and Google looking out for us these past few years, but it was...

Even though I’ve got a great job now, not everything is perfect about the gig. For example, I’ve been insisting to anyone who’d listen for the past few months...

I’m off to SF for O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on Tuesday. I’m going against the grain this year by taking my laptop along, “blogging” in “realtim...

Update: Read the comments. Dan and Joshua, who know way more about this stuff than I do, explain why I’m wrong and help me clarify what I’m really asking for...

Someday all the former isolationists, these strident libertarians, who have suddenly seemed to have grown a global conscience these last few weeks and started...

Here at the Voice on the Net conference , I just attended a panel by Doc , David and Duncan , which Kevin moderated. The topic was decentralization, and...

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 pres...

You know, if you had a band, and you were really determined to stay an underground band, instead of putting a vulgarity in your band name like in the olden day...

I should probably clarify some points. I’ve been linked to a lot as the requisite naysayer voice about the Google/Pyra deal, and that wasn’t my intention in my...

Prompted by some questions that people have asked me, I thought I’d throw out some statistics about my daily links . I’ve been doing them for about five month...

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...

Note to dumb self: If you still can’t connect to the computer that’s 10 feet away from you, even after trying fifty million times, you might want to make sur...

This is stupid. A while back, it was discovered that the U.S. government’s registration site for .mil domain names was wide open , making it possible for anyo...

I know a lot of people who are either professional developers or have some development background. So I asked around as to what’s considered the best merchant...

So, after we’ve all graduated to using microcontent clients to navigate through websites, people whose weblogs are primarily read through their RSS feeds are...

A few days ago, Gen asked me to do a writeup of the new laptop I got, a vpr Matrix 200A5 . I’m not usually prone to describing the gadgets and gizmos I buy,...

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 b...

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 shoul...

It may not be too late for TiVo to learn a lesson from Segway ‘s success in lobbying legislators through the use of technology that’s compelling enough to sel...

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...

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...

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 s...

I’ve always been pretty platform-neutral, so Apple’s little announcements are only of marginal interest to me. But the idea of developing a digital communicati...

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...

I’ve noticed in recent years that Asian countries are celebrating Christmas much more frequently. Of course this is especially surprising in "officially...

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 pre...

If you take a look at the developer documentation that’s just becoming available with the release of the first beta, you’ll see that Office 11 supports XSL tr...

So, who’s got the plugin that makes Tivo spit out a list of favorites to Amazon’s web service in order to make suggestions?...

In keeping with the community nature of the observance, the best links about today’s Link and Think event in honor of World AIDS Day are at MetaFilter , the...

Dear nested P tag with a class that has a negative margin style that screws up the way DIVs appear in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows: I would like that half...

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 g...

The Elements of User Experience is not just the first book to list all of the related skills and disciplines involved in the creation of web sites, but to cr...

Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limita...

I’ve been asked a lot, recently, to comment on the value of weblogs and to explain why I evangelize them as a communication tool. I tend to focus on the litera...

Picture the following scenario: Microsoft has created a weblog tool that is designed to run inside the firewall at a company. It’s browser-accessible from any...

Just in time for a Halloween scare, a new piece in magazine , Microsoft’s Weblog Software . Your feedback is welcomed....

Just a heads-up on next week’s magazine , I’ll be posting the promised follow-up to Why Tablet PCs Will Succeed , explaining why weblogs are the Tablet PC’s...

A scant three months later than I intended, today I launch my newest project: magazine . It’s an idea that I’ve been refining for almost a year, but I didn’...

You heard it here first: Internet Explorer for the Macintosh is the new Netscape 4. On a more substantive Macintosh web development note, we know that OS X s...

Sometimes following the links into one’s site reveals precious little gems of the web. But then again, sometimes you just get NETQUEER . Apparently, when they...

There’s a few things we’ve been too polite to point out to you, but it’s time to set a few things straight. I would like you to know that idiotarian is not a...

Internet Explorer for Windows was designed to accept multiple scripting engines to interact with HTML documents that it renders. The system for integrating the...

Naturally, I’ve got a couple of blank CD-RWs lying around, but I only like to use CD-Rs. So let’s make it interesting: everybody post the cheapest price (you c...

The Times has a pretty good write-up of Microsoft’s XP Media Center OS that’s coming out. I’ve seen some demos, and it is pretty impressive, especially since...

I realized sometime on Monday that it was gonna happen. Too many people reading it, the Network Effect had been triggered, and I was expecting an email any min...

This month’s New Architect has a great piece called Devil in the Details describing some IT implementation failures. The article’s focus is on examples lik...

Dear Danger HipTop T-Mobile Sidekick brand mobile internet access device: You suck. I know, I know, I’m your target demographic. A super geek who’s looking f...

Did we know that some Amazon lists are made by companies? For example, David Payne is an eBusiness Channel Manager at Viking , and has made over a thousan...

Unsurprisingly, I read it on Media News within a few minutes of getting it in my inbox. Ah, technology....

I thought it might be nice to take some time to commend some personal websites that I enjoy. I put categories on them for the sake of simplicity. This is just...

Dave says that RSS is a syndication format, nothing more. And that it has nothing to do with RDF. I am just curious, why does Dave get to make these decisio...

What about a Word macro virus that searched all available drives for Word documents, converted them to HTML, and then propagated itself to as many other users...

The drums, of course, are beating. The Anniversary is coming up, and everyone is insisting not just that we remember, not just that we mourn, but that we do it...

Why does your office use Microsoft Office, if it does? Which programs in Office do you use?...

Hey, whadaya know? My coworker Holly ‘s photos have showed up over at R4NT , right there amidst all the art and next to the interview with Chuck D. Why, if s...

I had feared that our current mayor in New York City, Mike Bloomberg, did things a little differently than Rudy Giuliani. As summer winds down, I hadn’t seen a...

Is anybody out there returning Usenet newsgroup messages as XML? No? Why not? Seems that hierarchially-organized plain text messages with lots of metadata migh...

Looks like Yahoo! Search has dropped Google results. Not that I’d ever use Yahoo’s search anyway, but it’s a bad sign for the big Y....

Speaking of missed opportunities in programming interfaces, why don’t mainstream Windows applications support usage metering at the function level? Meaning, wh...

Microsoft’s been promoting its Tablet PC s for about a year now. Despite all the claims, they’re more evolutionary than revolutionary, of course. But that’s t...

40 Foot Shipping Containers are like Legos that build our consumerist world. Update: Dan had to go and up the ante on container info , doing what he doe...

If web services are considered the API to an Internet operating system, what would be the device drivers? What’s analogous to the layer that abstracts the phys...

While hanging out last night, as I am wont to do, With several ex-members of the Deja crew, I pulled Lane over and gave him the scoop On how I would...

It’s like staring into a mirror ....

Should’ve seen that coming....

Amazon’s Gold Box seems to have a new splash screen explaining the concept. Might be time to start a Gold Box blog. Is there a weblog for Amazon developments...

I’m redoing my about page, and I’ll be adding a reference to some of the sites where I’ve helped people with standards compliance or style sheets. I haven’t...

Ben and Mena are doing a survey of Movable Type users to get information about how they use the system and how many there are....

Hey, are you a straight Asian female with a weblog? Try this bit of innovation: Refer to your boyfriend as "The Boy" when referencing him on your sit...

The burden of being me is best explained by a confession that I currently have a crush on the nl element of the XHTML 2.0 specification. This dorkitude is...

I am wondering why Microsoft’s announcement of upcoming WiFi products has flown under the radar so much. I can understand that their BlueTooth mouse and keyb...

It doesn’t take a scientist: Ain’t no skinny people at the KFC....

Happy seventh birthday to Stating the Obvious . Push is the future! Speaking of The Obvious , the occasion of the publishing of a second edition of Inform...

I don’t usually do the whole geek gear thing, but holy poop I am love this shiny toy ....

James is having another book contest , for Eric Meyer’s CSS book. Go check it out!...

Robert X. Cringely takes my assessment of eBay one step further and places the company at three times AOL/TW’s size, in terms of economic impact....

God love the Black Nerds : ERNEST THOMAS A/K/A RAJ (from What’s Happening!!) From 1976 to ’79, led motley clique of very uncool African Americans. Tutored...

Apparently, Paul is betting against Cameron ....

Andre kindly pointed out this weblog of Quake news from Blue’s News circa July 1996. I’ve always wondered why Stephen Heaslip deliberately gets written out...

My campaign to try and sell the virtues of NYC seems to be proceeding swimmingly ....

Cameron’s bet against Google . In the long term, he’s right. Google depends on the web staying as broken as it is, with no semantics assigned to content, and...

I thought everyone had read this, but then I mentioned it to a few people, and they hadn’t seen it. Do yourself a favor and read Clay Shirky’s thoughts on the...

Dear whomever replaces Bob Pittman: Please know, one of your biggest competitors now is eBay, especially with the purchase of PayPal. They now have a billing r...

Today marks three years (more or less) that I’ve been updating this site daily (more or less). It’s helped me make friends, learn lots of new things, improve a...

Okay, now that’s just freakin’ cool: Matt ‘s TiVo listing recently updated weblogs , courtesy of his Daily Crawl script and a hell of a lot of ingenuity. I...

Well, that worked. This main blog now runs on Movable Type . I put off switching from Blogger Pro for a long time, for a lot of reasons. First among thes...

The current world wide web consists almost entirely of pages that are either stories or tools. A few ambitious sites combine these two types of web pages in va...

In an interesting twist, the MP3.com suit against Universal could result in Universal’s recordings being reclassified as not being works for hire ....

Oh, one other note about symbolic links in Win2K , there has always been a way to make them through the UI, but it only works in one specific location: You...

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

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, regardless....

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 peopl...

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 t...

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...

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,...

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 pre...

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...

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...

The perils of ego-surfing. For the record, this is not me . And I’m glad it ain’t....

Only 92 Shopping Days Left! Just a reminder that we’re only weeks, nay days, away from Christmas overkill....

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 poise...

As promised: Microsoft Passport Part One: User Experience Okay, so after spending waaaay too much time reading all the documentation at the official Pa...

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!" r...

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...

As young Anakin Skywalker might say, " Yippee! " I was not once, not twice, but thrice linked yesterday, all by esteemed logs. To follow my progr...

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...

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 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...

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. How...