As Borg Ranjer takes over Radar…
- The CIA is publishing its most common searches in its “reading room” (via Robot Wisdom). Uh, wow. It’s like a paranoid-delusion-ometer. It’s great that they’re putting this information out there; I’d love to see more.
- This review of Conkeror, a Firefox extension for making Firefox more like Emacs (also via RW), made me laugh out loud. Those little number tags are so silly! Emacs’ relentless march makes me think of Kevin Kelly’s Immortal Technologies post, though he was talking about species, not keybindings. Will Ctrl-E mean what it means until the end of time?
- I’ll say something a little negative about Vox, since I’m mister frowny-face and since everyone else seems so relentlessly positive about it. Going through the invitation acceptance reminded me of passing through airport security — I had to use the email address to which the invite was sent (see “Is it really My Yahoo? Or is it theirs?” for why I care), and they required first name, last name, and birthdate to sign up. The pitch of the site is that you get to control who sees your blogging within your social network (and wow, I coulda used that the other day) — so give me control over my profile, and don’t demand information of me unless and until you absolutely need it. I’m always happier with a site that buys me a drink or two before trying to take me home.</mister-frowny-face> That said, the rest of the site looks great, and I love seeing Flickr’s actually-useful-social-network concept spread into the world. It’s too bad Friendster never opened up an API that would have made this sort of application possible on top of their data; they might be a much stronger site now if they had. Instead, we get to recalculate the casualness of our acquaintances all over again. (VCs, prepare for the network-of-social-networks pitch onslaught…)