linkmachinego.com

1 April 2006
[web] MyDeathSpace.com — tracking the deaths of MySpace users… ‘Cause of Death: Text Messaging + Train’
1 March 2006
[web] Google Users: I Can Quit Anytime — could you go cold turkey on Google? … ‘Six days a week, Shari Thurow spends copious amounts of time conducting searches on Google. But each Saturday, she makes a point of observing a “Google-free day.” The rules are simple: Use any search engine except for Google. In practice, however, the policy is surprisingly difficult to implement…’
5 February 2006
[photos] Spotted on Flickr: Dave Gorman’s Photostream.
1 February 2006
[web] The Grand Support Email Speed Contest — how long does it take 10 companies to respond to a simple emailed question? [via meish.org]
30 November 2005
[myspace] The Hit Factory — Wired on MySpace‘[MySpace] encouraged creativity to the point of chaos. For MySpace’s mostly young demographic, their pages were multimedia outgrowths of their jackets, lockers, and notebooks – a place for band stickers, poems, personality quizzes, R-rated photos, and anything else HTML allows.’
11 October 2005
[im] Meebo.com — firewall-bursting instant messenging from a website for AIM, MSN, Yahoo and GTalk. [via Waxy’s Links]
14 June 2005
[web] Is It Normal? — confirms by peer-review if your odd little habits are normal or not … Q: I shower at the night is that normal? A: Showering in the evening is a crime against God, and you shall surely burn in the fiery pits of Hell, heathen.
8 June 2005
[blog] In Passing — snippets of overheard conversations blogged … ‘Let me put it to you this way, bottom line: if any half of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie makes you cry, you are living a terrible life.’
3 May 2005
[tea] Software for Tea-Making Duties — Wired News on Teabuddy‘Teabuddy lets co-workers create office groups online to record rounds and requests, complete with personalization options like milk and sugar preferences for individual colleagues. Before leaving for the kitchen, responsible brewers log onto Teabuddy and check a box next to the name of those for whom they are making a cuppa. Teabuddy tallies the total cups made and consumed by each employee, keeping a history that lists the date each user last poured forth — it’s “objective, factual proof of who’s done what and when,” according to a message on the site.’
29 April 2005
[web] The Archivist — update on the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle‘[Kahle] wanted to back up the Internet. There were only 50 million or so URLs back then, so the idea only seemed half-crazy. As the Web ballooned to more than 10 billion pages, the archive’s main server farm — hidden across town in a data center beneath the city’s other big bridge — grew to hold a half-million gigabytes of compressed and indexed pages. Kahle is less the Internet’s crazy aunt — the tycoon who can’t stand to throw anything away — than its evangelical librarian.’
14 April 2005
[web] Domesday 1986 — the BBC’s project to mark the 900th aniversary of the original Domesday Book now online. ‘…the BBC published its Domesday Project on a pair of twelve inch laser discs with a laserdisc player and microcomputer.’ [via Yoz]
8 April 2005
[royalty] Royal Wedding Cam — Watch Charles and Camilla get hitched tomorrow.
26 March 2005
[crime] Don’t fuck with Ovid — A LiveJournaller tracks down his credit card thieves. ‘…they found yet another piece of damning evidence. Credit card companies will sometimes send out “checks” that you can use to make a cash advance. One of them had one of my Visa checks in his pocket. Signed.’ [via Waxy]
13 March 2005
[web] Words from Flickr [via Waxy]

letters from flickr

25 February 2005
[useful] Paypal Fee Calculator‘We Calculate Them. Paypal Takes Them.’ [via Waxy]
24 February 2005
[search] Keeper Finders — Paul Boutin compares five desktop search programs … ‘You probably won’t find all the Steely Dan songs in your iTunes library or every PDF with the phrase “owner’s manual” using the Windows search. If you use the right desktop search application, it’s a snap.’
20 February 2005
[tv] Trendies twitch over a TV Tease — the Sunday Times covers Nathan Barley. Chris Morris: ‘Hoxton types are just a subset of Nathans. Before writing, we became Barley twitchers, spotting Nathans in Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, and Penzance. Hosegate is not Hoxton — it’s a fictional construct in response to the fact that Nathans are absolutely bloody everywhere. This is worse than bird flu.’
19 February 2005
[web] net.history: Was this the first image on the Web? [via Waxy]
18 February 2005
[comics] Ask Metafilter: What’s Your Favourite Webcomic?
14 February 2005
[tv] So Was It “Well Weapon”? — the Londonist blog reviews Nathan Barley‘… the concept itself feels a bit less red hot. Since Nathan Barley emerged on Brooker’s (now defunct) TV Go Home website, something over five years ago, the dot-com boom has bust and, rather than being an apparently emergent master-race, its illegitimate Carhartt-wearing children now seem automatically self-mocking. That’s not to say that Nathan and his ilk aren’t funny on screen. They are. But they are also funny off screen, which means that Nathan Barley is not the vitriolic weapons-grade satire C**T was, and is instead more of a freakshow.’
1 February 2005
[spam] Interview with a link spammer — The Register meets a Blog Comments Spammer. ‘…he’s confident he’ll stay in what is primly called the “search engine optimisation” business for a while yet. Why? Because the demand exists. “The reality is that people purchase Viagra, they require porn, they gamble online. When people do that, there’s money being made.” And if this sounds suspiciously like an “ends justify means” argument to you – it does to us too.’
19 January 2005
[words] Cliché Finder‘A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest LINK.’ [via linkbunnies.org]
15 January 2005
[linky] “So what’s so cool about del.icio.us? I don’t get it.” — Metafilter discusses del.icio.us‘[I] love just watching the main feed. It’s like this waterfall of transient reference needs, online velleities and obsessions.’
20 December 2004
[porn] We were sold into porn slavery, cry African islands‘Sao Tome remains a mere adolescent in the world of online porn (in terms of countries, Germany leads the way with 10 million pages, and the UK is close behind with 8.5 million), that figure corresponds to 1.7 pages per inhabitant. Germany in contrast has 0.12 pages per person, and the UK, 0.14. Winner of porniest country in the world is Tonga with an incredible 7.7 pages for each of its 110,000 inhabitants.’
10 December 2004
[photos] Found Photobooth Photos: Is this You?
3 December 2004
[web] A Del.icio.us Interview — interview with Joshua Schachter the man behind del.icio.us‘Q: I’d like to nominate del.icio.us for “Best Use of a Non-Dot-Com Name” — is there a deeping meaning to the name? A: Not really. I’d registered the domain when .us opened the registry, and a quick test showed me the six letter suffixes that let me generate the most words. In early discussions, a friend referred to finding good links as “eating cherries” and the metaphor stuck, I guess…’
20 October 2004
[distraction] Just Letters — fun, multi-user fridge magnet letters …

7 October 2004
[internet] ROTFL-3000 — The new keyboard for Chatrooms, AOL and Blogs … ‘HOME, DEL, etc have been replaced by face-parts so you can make your own emoticons if you so wish.’
1 September 2004
[missing] Raising the Dead — interesting article about finding missing people using the internet, Google and many eyeballs … ‘Families post all over the Web, searching for missing loved ones. Local coroners and cops, nudged by the Doe Network, upload pictures and vital statistics of their Does. Groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children do the same. Networkers comb through it all like they were playing the kids’ card game Concentration, digitized by Patricia Cornwell. Comparing death dates on coroner sites with last-seen-on dates on missing persons sites. Checking for scars, tattoos, anything that distinguishes the person from a crowd. Googling until the coffee runs out. It all sounds like amateur hour. It is amateur hour. There’s no order, no discipline to the investigations. These amateur sleuths slog along at their own pace, chasing their own bogeymen. “That’s why the Doe Network is invaluable – real people looking at real data,” says Emily Craig, forensic anthropologist for the state of Kentucky.’
10 August 2004
[web] Do You IMDB? — profile of the Internet Movie Database. ‘…how does IMDB work? It’s easy to imagine some airplane hangar in a dusty, out-of-the-way desert location, and inside is a sea of desktop computers manned by 20-something Oompa Loompas in T-shirts, jeans and Converse. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.’ [via Sashinka]
5 July 2004
[web] Group Hug continues to pull me back … Kissing the Stripper and Grandma: ‘…while I was with a stripper, I kissed her a few times. And after showering and brushing, of course, the next person I kissed on the lips was my grandmother, on mothers day.’
28 June 2004
[web] ‘Nerd Values’ Help Propel Tiny Craigslist Into Classifieds Threat — more on Craigslist and Craig Newmark … Peter Krasilovsky: ‘One thing about Craigslist — it is real thin. That makes it easy and fun to read, easy to maintain. While newspapers have been adding feature after feature to keep up with (job site) Monster.com’s own feature creep, there is Craig with these little text postings, and they do the trick.’
21 June 2004
[web] The Craigslist Phenomenon — profile of Craig Newmark – creator of craigslist‘While he was at his first job, as a software programmer for IBM, he enrolled in ballet and jazz dance classes to meet women. He ended up in the hospital with a hernia.’
8 June 2004
[web] Cracking the Code to Romance — brief profiles of hackers using the web for dating… the googler, the blogger, the sniffer and the stalker …

‘Moore has written several Unix shell scripts that run on-the-fly background checks on people who use wireless networks in his neighborhood. With the help of the popular network-traffic analysis utility Netcat, his script “sniffs all the traffic on the Wi-Fi network, greps for email addresses, and looks them up on Friendster.” Then the script sends Moore an email that includes a link to the users’ Friendster profiles, along with their pictures and login IDs. At a time when it seems that nearly everyone has a Friendster account, Moore says, “You can do really creepy stuff. You can get the profiles on everyone in your local café, then see who their friends are, and just walk up to them and ask, ‘Aren’t you Tom’s friend?'” More disturbing, Moore’s toolkit allows him to get zip codes and last names, making it easier to track down the real-world addresses of his targets, thus opening up a whole new universe of creepiness. “You could do all sorts of mean things,” he says.’

26 April 2004
[internet] Creative Commons in a Connected World — Lawrence Lessig is giving a lecture in London … [via The Obvious?]
5 April 2004
[books] Amazon World — amusing user reviews from Amazon.com. Moby Dick: ‘I am quite the fan of stories which involve man eating sea creatures, such as Jaws. Moby Dick is nothing compared to such classics, I fear. In fact, it is boring with a capital B. What is the whales motivation? You dont know. There is no suspense, and I find the idea of people hunting whales offensive. Offensive with a capital O. Whales are lovely, peaceful creatures and that is why their slaughter has been outlawed. This book makes whales seem like demonic, murderous creatures of doom. Such a thing should not be read to a child, for it preaches that animal cruelty is ok. Never before have seen such an abundance of immoralality! I am offended! I feel as if my brainards are going to freeze over and crumble like spoiled peanut brittle. Take my word for it, dont read this book’ [via Kottke’s Remaindered Links]
9 March 2004
[passwords] BugMeNot.com — avoid web registrations on sites like the NY Times. [via del.icio.us]
30 January 2004
[web] Gathering At The Waterhole — overview of del.icio.us‘[The] aggregation of links, combined with a feature that lets users collect links from other users in a special “inbox” (like the front page, but only featuring the users you’ve chosen) turns the site into a unique social experience. Like a weblog, yes, and a bookmark managing application – but also a unique social link-sharing tool, crammed with potential for sharing information and ideas.’
12 January 2004
[web] How to Become an Obnoxious Internet Cam Whore in Five Easy Steps‘Here’s a simple formula to keep in mind: YOU + WEBCAM – CLOTHES – DIGNITY = $$$. Don’t let your dignity get in the way of your online prostitution.’ [via Pete’s Organic Link Farm]
7 January 2004
[web] So What Were You Reading? — Most read and emailed News Stories of 2003 from BBC News.
6 January 2004
[media] UK Newspaper “The Daily Star” Swipes Content From retroCRUSH‘ On 1/05/04 I spoke with a the News Editor of “The Daily Star” named Kieran Saunders and what he told me takes the cake. He said, “Well, if it’s on the internet it’s up for grabs. You can’t copyright anything on the internet.” I told him that was untrue and he then refused to speak with me further, and said all future communication needed to be sent to their legal contact, Steven Bacon in London.’ [Related: retroCRUSH’s Worst Sex Scenes Ever | via Boing Boing]
20 December 2003
[internet] The Mood Of LiveJournal‘anxious (6.9%)’ [via interconnected.org]
26 September 2003
[comics] Web comics via RSS — a short lesson from Bugpowder.
24 September 2003
[comics] Tapestry — RSS Feeds for Popular Online Comics.
4 September 2003
[web] The Internet Archive has developed a beta full text search of 11 billion webpages dating back to 1996. [via Scripting News]
24 August 2003
[internet] Dyke to open up BBC Archive‘Mr Dyke said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet. The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes, Mr Dyke added. ‘ [Comment from: Metafilter, Slashdot, Oblomovka]
10 July 2003
[end-of-free] This is the Future of Online Newspapers — the Guardian will start charging for some online content‘The Guardian was at pains to point out that all the stories (including its archive) will remain free. It will charge annual subscriptions though for its email digests – one at the beginning of the day that cover the day’s papers and one at lunchtime that covers breaking news – as well as for crosswords, an ad-free version of the site and a new digital facsimile service.’
10 June 2003
[web] Drudge Match — Camille Paglia interviews Matt Drudge. [via Anil’s Daily Links]

‘PAGLIA: There’s something retro about your persona. It’s like the pre-World War II generation of reporters — those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they’ve all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds — utterly dull and insipid.

DRUDGE: But you look at these tanned, blow-dried gym bunnies like Brian Williams, NBC’s next anchor — all they do is read off a teleprompter, and no one has a problem calling them journalists. In the end I really don’t care what I’m called, as long as it’s not blogger.’

4 April 2003
[web] The Secrets of Drudge Inc — behind-the-scenes at the Drudge Report‘Drudge amassed a vast network of independent sources. That network of instant-messaging buddies is heavy with media insiders who use Drudgereport.com as an industry echo chamber. Drudge’s network has helped him routinely beat the big boys to the punch. In just the last few months, he broke the news of celebrity photographer Herb Ritts’s death and even scooped CNN when Walter Isaacson resigned as that broadcaster’s CEO. “There is always this feeling that Drudge is about to break something,” says Phil Boyce, program director at WABC radio in New York. That leads many loyal readers to check the site 10 to 15 times a day.’ [via kottke.org]
30 March 2003
[tech] Compressing Webpages for Fun and Profit — a how-to about compressing pages on the fly with PHP to speed-up downloads and save bandwidth. ‘…what if I told you that you can third your content easily with no work on your part whatsoever? It sounds like a pitch I might get in a lovely unsolicited email. The secret lies in the fact that every major browser of the past 5 years supports transparently decompressing content on the fly.’ [via Neil’s World]