American Madness

As you might have guessed I tend to go through a lot of websites each day. Most of what I find I just post here, but every now and again I find something totally random to share with just one or two people. On occasion that random item is about halfway down a page and part of the second paragraph. It turns into a bit of a pain in the ass in trying to direct people to the sentence I thought they might appreciate, a treasure hunt of sorts to fnd an amusing line.

Well, now there is The Awesome Highlighter. You enter the web address of the page you want to highlight, go crazy with the highlighter and they provide you a link that you can share with people. Here’s an example. Once some one goes to the highlighted page they can jump from one highlight to the next.

I have noticed a few “issues” with the application though. For one, I can’t seem to un-highlight items. a second is that there is a limit of 2000* characters per highlight, though you can work around that. Also some of what I highlighted didn’t show (though I would say about 98% did). Looks like they need a little tweaking, but this could be a great tool, especially for groups working together on a project.

*Thanks for clarifying Luke we corrected it 

I recently came across the site RCRDLBL, add some vowels and you’ve got Record Label, which is the idea behind the site. It is a chance for musicians to have their music heard and maybe make some money. As they say “RCRD LBL is an online record label releasing exclusive and completely free music from emerging and established artists.” Oh, right, and it’s all free. Personally I am downloading some Bad Brains right now. They hand select the artists whose music they are pushing

A similar site, US Trendy is doing similar stuff, but also includes a place for Fashion and Art work to be displayed, kind of an artistic collective to show off your work and maybe get discovered. Instead of the music being chosen and artists being selected to have their work exhibited, US Trendy allows folks to upload their own stuff.

Finally on the music front we have Mp3gle. Don’t ask me if it is a legal, I have my doubts. It kind of looks like it is a file sharing search engine. I am not sure the sources it is searching, but it is allowing folks to search for music and then either play it or download it. And this isn’t music by folks you have never heard of, this is brand name, big label music, the type of stuff you pay to download on iTunes. Pretty nifty if you ask me

So, it is obvious we are fans of New York Magazine. We’ve used their content (usually crediting them). They’ve used our content (sometimes crediting us).

Any-hoo, it just came across my inbox that they are doing a website re-design which will probably launch next Friday. If you’d like to see a little preview of what the new New York Magazine homepage will look like, check it out here.

According to their announcement: “the new homepage has a more consistent organization—now you’ll always know where to find whichever type of news you’re looking for, and you’ll be able to search our restaurant listings, runway galleries, and product guides more easily.”

Classmates.com is not content to just be irrelevant, now they want to be incorrect.

The social networking dinosaur known for their annoying Web ads has now decided quote fabrication is the way forward.

As I was checking my Yahoo! Mail via My Yahoo! Homepage (now with bigger display ads), I noticed the latest Classmates.com display advertisement. I am afraid to report there are no interchangeable faces on the circa-1986 school book photos, nor are they proclaiming this man is now married to that woman. Rather, they decided to jazz up their decades-long banner campaign of data farming by including a photo of William Shakespeare (you may’ve heard of him) inserted into the mix. I suspect this is to insinuate that Bill went to school with you, and put his profile up on their site. Wacky hi-jinks ensued.

But the picture wasn’t enough. Above his smiling school book photo is a quote from the ever quotable man:

“I count myself in nothing else so happy in a soul remembering my good friends.” William Shakespeare.

Being the victim of a liberal arts degree, and having spent a lot of time with 500 year old English plays, the quote immediately sounded off. (more…)

I have found that when a topic interests me I have the tendency to talk with multiple people about it in various circles of friends. Sure, it drives my wife crazy since she feels like I am always repeating myself, but for the most part the people hearing what I am talking about are hearing it for the first time. Then what happens is a few days later I will find a website or article that references or plays off the idea that I had been talking about in these various circles. I had the option of sending out a mass email to a bunch of people who don’t really know each other or each others views on the issue/conversation/idea OR I could send out multiple emails to various groups of people.

Now I forego any direct contact with my friends and instead just blog about it.

Anyway, with various circles of friends this past week I was discussing social networking sites, more specifically that there are way too many of them and that there should be a meta-social network that allows you to have all of your social network pages managed from a single site. Basically you would be able to get your friends feeds an updates from all of the social networks you were a part of in one place. Ideally the uber-social network would be able to populate your social network pages as well, but as some folks pointed out to me, that would have a ‘bot’ controlling your page and most sites shut those pages down.

Anyway, to track the doings and happening of all your online friends there is now Spokeo. (more…)

Just a quick little post about my favorite topic: Green. Well, kind of, at least everything in this post can be tied together under the Green heading.

First up, a website for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was hacked and loaded up with spammer links to sell Viagra, Xanax and the like.

It looks like only the pages associated with the blog were attacked and linked to other hacked pages from Westmont College (that or the Christian College is running a side business pushing drugs).

Looks like the hackers exploited a flaw in WordPress (a popular piece of publishing software) security. Might be time for us to up our own security here.

(more…)

I’m a complete freak for organizational tools. I don’t subscribe to a particular system (such as Franklin Covey, which my friend Rick has mastered), but I do give a lot of thought to ease of use and effectiveness, especially as compared to slickness and coolness.

So I was a little too excited at running across D.I.Y. Templates, which features a directory of To Do List templates. They range from the quirky (the note card template seen here) to more complicated layouts that include daily or weekly timelines and checkboxes. There are forms for work stuff, finances, money, blah and even blahblahblahblah (spoken quickly).

(more…)

Every now and then criminals do things that just baffle me. Like posting details about their crimes on the internet.

Associated Press has an article today about Lt. Charles Cohen who goes around talking with police officers and detectives about the internet, specifically sites like MySpace, Facebook and Second Life.

Basically what Lt. Cohen is lecturing about is how folks, specifically criminals, don’t quite get that the internet is not their private diary, and that things posted on the web are visible are available to the public and can be tracked back to them. He is also working on breaking the police department mindset that the internet is another realm, not worth monitoring. (more…)

I hear so many people gripe and bitch about how expensive New York is and how there are no deals to be found in this town and that rent is too high and that they never have any money to do anything, and that is why they claim they have holed themselves up in their apartments on a Monday night watching Law & Order reruns on TNT rather then coming out and joining you for a drink.

Well it’s time to blow their excuses away with FreeNYC. FreeNYC is a listing of what you can find for free around the city today: special events, regular events and everything in between. Enjoy a free burger and beer at the Town tavern until the 11th, some bourbon in park slope, or free drinks and music on the Lower East Side. Each day a new set of free events is listed specific to that day.

They hope that “by scouring the city and its outlaying lands, FreeNYC helps you save a buck or two, while still enjoying all the city has to offer.” The site is updated daily and “supplies a variety of activities to keep you busy all week long. From bars and booty shakin’ good times to museums, performances and gallery openings, FreeNYC serves up culture that promises not to break the bank.”

So there you go, now it’s either time to admit you are obsessed with Jerry Orbach and S. Epatha Merkerson or get off your couch and spend some quality time with those friends you’ve been neglecting.

I discovered a new gadget online simply called Your Salary.

It’s simple, you plug in what you make and it runs a clock/calculator function that tallies what you are making per second, per minute, per hour and per day. It even runs it while you are on the site, showing the pennies adding up, turning into nickels, dimes, quarters, fifty cent pieces (why don’t those have a nifty name like “quarters” or “dimes?”) and dollars.

Unfortunately it appears to be on a 24 hour scale (so it is literally telling you the value of every second of your day as long as you are employed), so you only know your worth during a 24 hour day when you worked as opposed to calculating your typical 40 hour week, though as I jumped back and forth between this page, some conversations I was having through IM and just staring at the money I was earning, I did make $1.97.