Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I had read about NASA’s use of Snoopy and the Peanuts characters as unofficial mascots for Apollo 10 (it was well documented in Charlie Brown and Charlie Schulz, which sat on my Pop-Pop’s bookshelf alongside the Peanuts Treasury), but don’t remember seeing this. Courtesy Google Image Search and the LIFE archives:

As good an argument for [...]

I’m impressed by the new LIFE photo archive at Google Images–it’s a truly significant work of digital content. But it’s missing one important thing: a usage policy. The images are marked (c) Time Inc., so it’s clear they aren’t public domain. But is there any way to purchase usage rights? The only reuse provision seems [...]

I may have to stop using Ubiquity for a while. I’ve used it exclusively because it, plus the share-on-delicious script, provides a great keyboard-only way to tag web pages for Delicious, simply by ctrl-space and typing share Delicious bookmark description tagged delicious tags entitled title“.
Alas, there are definite memory issues with Ubiquity or with the [...]

I checked out a new people search engine (123people.com) on a link from Lifehacker and, of course, searched for myself. I was surprised to see a lot of discussion about an old piece I had written after the first Bloggercon, a two post thought stream called “What is a blog” and “Blogging and empowerment” that [...]

New York Times: Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning. It’s good to see the book publishing industry come to its senses.
Now that the parties have agreed to revenue sharing from book sales and library use, it becomes even more clear that Google Books is yet another Internet mediated disintermediation. Google Books is probably the best targeted [...]

I installed the new Firefox extension Ubiquity yesterday and just got around to going through the Ubiquity 0.1 User Tutorial today. It’s seriously like nothing I’ve ever seen. Well, not exactly true: it’s like putting a Unix command line together with Quicksilver and Greasemonkey and Google and Wikipedia and…
So OK, it’s amazing. The ability to [...]

I was just wondering the other day: what happened to Technorati? Apparently they’ve been reinventing themselves as an advertising and media company. The latest step: the acquisition of Blogcritics, the open cultural criticism site for which I’ve written in the past and may do again in the future. Announcement on the Technorati Blog; coverage at [...]

Courtesy a little bird, it’s possible to download Firefox 3.0 already, though it hasn’t been announced yet.
The latest public download is RC3:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0rc3&os=win〈=en-US
but if you remove rc3 from the URL, you get:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win〈=en-US
which is a valid URL. (So much for security by obscurity.) Enjoy your early start on Download Day! (Tip o’ the hat to Dil.)
Update: Or [...]

I’m working on a Google Site for a group I belong to, and it’s been an uneven experience. The user experience for general editing is quite good, but things get very hairy very quickly when you try to insert “gadgets” onto the page. I assumed that adding, for example, a Google Map to a page [...]

In the last few days of the primary season, I’ve become utterly addicted to NewsJunk, Dave Winer’s new aggregator for political news and commentary. I’m not sure how, but the site has managed to maintain a high signal to noise ratio while still reaching far beyond the usual news sites. Last night, for example, it [...]

The talented Shimon Rura just launched a new service called tweet and shout: music people are talking about. It mines Twitter to find bands and musicians that people are talking about, and provides the number of people and tweets and cross-references with the Amazon sales rank.
What’s refreshing about Shimon’s work is that he admits the [...]

Google started baking some mashups into the main Google Maps interface earlier this week. As a Wikipedia editor, the one that intrigued me was the ability to hover over a feature on a map and click through to a related Wikipedia article. The question I had was, how do I change my article so that [...]

Still working on getting the new site up and running. I reinstituted the blogroll today, starting from scratch (it’s amazing how many links, old friends’ blogs particularly, have lapsed). If you’re reading this in RSS, you’ll have to go to the site to check it out.
I also removed the del.icio.us widget from my sidebar, because [...]

Google App Engine appears to be Google’s answer to Amazon’s web services—a simple, highly scalable development and deployment platform for web apps that need to scale. It’s an interesting offering that takes a slightly different tack from Amazon, with the requirement to build an app as a fully integrated stack (not to mention, the application [...]

I’m starting to think that people on social networks, like everything else, follow predictable principles of organization. You can be in an equilibrium for months, adding very few friends to your local aggregation of people, when all of a sudden someone new shows up, and you make dozens of connections in the next few days. [...]