Adventures in Egotism

I had too much caffeine too late in the evening today and so I find myself at 3am converging my blog, Flickr photos, and Furl bookmarks into one uber newsfeed. Try it out. I’ve also got rotating headlines from this feed on my personal page now.

I’m glad to have these three foci of my web generative activity in one feed. What I still need is a way to provide this feed to people who don’t want to deal with anything other than e-mail. I’m surprised there isn’t any service out there that sends a daily e-mail snapshot of a feed (or feeds). If there was, FeedBurner could provide it as one of their click-through subscription mechanisms. Such a service would likely not last long as newsfeeds become a greater part of the net software ecosystem.

Incidentally, last night at the 2604 houseparty I had a great conversation with a guy named Nick who’s starting his doctoral program in the Berkeley sociology dept. He says sociologists aren’t paying attention to the internet. Amazing. He was really excited by the “what did you call it?” “social bookmarking.” I am too. Now if it was just easy enough for my mom to use.

Update: I just noticed that the animated headline box doesn’t splice in the Flickr and Furl items as I expected. I’ve reported this to Feedburner; I hope they fix it.

The New York Times warns of “Disney’s craven behavior“.

While I agree that Disney is most interested in their bottom line, I’m not sure that they’re so evil when it comes to free expression.

I’ll bet anyone that this movie gets released. I think the higher-ups at Disney trust it will. But by fighting it they

• retain their conservative consumers
• enhance Michael Moore’s renegade image
• increase the hipness of their Miramax subsidiary
• garner the release loads of attention

The movie is called Fahrenheit 9/11 ferchrisakes. The potential viewers are just eating this up.

From the “America Family Association”:

What is your position on homosexual marriage? Cast your vote in the National Homosexual Marriage Poll. The results will be presented to Congress. Please Vote Now!

I am pretty confident that no one in Congress believes that such a poll is valid, but that doesn’t mean they won’t tout it to the media. Why don’t you voice your stance?
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How many times have you heard “The medium is the message”? It’s kind of poetic. And since it’s attributed to eminent media critic Marshall McLuhan you find a way for it to make sense.

Then today I read an e-mail (below) explaining that he never said that and his real message is “the medium is the massage”. The media work us over, the way we perceive the world.

So I’m believing this guy. Taking the Internet medium as authoritative. This guy made a case, he did research. It’s so exciting to think that everyone on the outside is wrong, ignorant.

Yet, ironically, this medium massaged me. The mythology of the Internet and the influence of its participants have shaped the way I perceived that e-mail.

When, in fact, the medium is the message.
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The Columbia Journalism Review has a compiled listing of major media companies and what they own.

Note: the entry for ClearChannel may take a while over a dial-up connection.

Henri sends a link to this wonderful Japanese video, where two guys do the Matrix bullet-time in real life, on stage, with ping-pong balls. No computers, no special effects, no wires, all in a single shot. [The Butt Ugly Weblog]

… are so cool.

I prefer SharpReader, which just hit version 0.9.2

But why must it use 40MB of RAM?

At Tim’s birthday party last weekend, I was arguing with Jim and Brandon something about Euro currency policy. Then Carlin said, “You know why the U.S. went to war? To defend the dollar.” I hadn’t heard any mention of this anywhere. This morning I looked for some corroborating info, and found a bunch.

It’s not about a conflict of Occidental and Islamic civilizations. It’s a battle of currencies: American and European. While America is dependent on oil, oil-exporting nations are dependent on American dollars. The “the entire global oil trade is conducted in dollars”, meaning that everyone needs dollars. Demand for the dollar maintains it’s high exchange rates. But in October 2000, Iraq switched its oil trading to the Euro, threatening the dominance of the dollar.
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jish.nu | weblog

You know that kid in star_wars_kid.wmv? Someone tracked him down and people are giving him money… $3519 so far.

Why? you ask. “My $2 donation was about what it cost me to see Attack of the Clones. This had better character development, and the special effects were almost as good.”

I suppose Experiment 1 was trying to compose my thoughts to be lucid. And tasty, like a cabernet sauvignon.

Experiment 2 is sharing what I read online. Why. Because I send these things to my friends already, and I entertain the idea I could stop that and they’ll just show up here everyday. Or when they have time and want to read what I’m reading. I imagine turning them on to RSS, but that’s just the technolust in me.

Without further ado:

Other view: Why just look to Europe? There’s more to this world

Billions in Charity Money Could Be Saved, Study Says

Tall Tales of Appalachia

Korea’s New Wave

enjoy.