Links: Nov 11, 2005

Jumbo list of links today, to make up for my quiet next week. We fly to NZ on Monday and put all the house furniture into the shipping container this weekend. Next time I post it'll be from the other land down under ...

• Inside Digg--BusinessWeek article with the founders of Digg, talking about how it works, why it works, and what's coming next. API in the works, and expansion to other areas. There's an interesting battle looming between collective wisdom and artificial intelligence, personified by Digg on one side and Memeorandum on the other. One harnesses users' editorial judgement, the other replaces it. I think we'll see a lot more sites like Digg coming.
• Asterisk Telemarketer Torture--beautiful script for telemarketers. Now I'm hard-pressed to choose between this and screaming monkeys. Maybe we should have a Beating Spam session at ETel?
• $10 Linux Answering Machine--nice little project to put Asterisk on a box and use a soft modem for the telephone interface.
• OpenVoice--genuine Australian accents on your telephone system. I'd love to get Fred Dagg on my voicemail.
• SAP Dismisses Open Source--provocative words given Google (built on open source) has a 10x market cap and 10x stock price.
• What Time Is It In The World?--clickable Google Map giving you local time at that place. Very nice! Compare with the elegant simplicity of timeandddate.com, which has an impressive depth of functionality, including meeting planning across multiple timezones.
• Everyware - The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing--interesting book by Adam Greenfield, whose notes I bloggedearlier. Adam pointed me to the article that started it all, which is a much more lucid explication of his design principles than the notes.
• grouphug.us--public confessional (caution: lots of bad deeds confessed to). Wow. In the words of one friend, "it's a trainwreck."
• OC Makes Careers For Indie Bands--MySpace not the only game in town for building buzz around bands. As the marketing muscle of the labels atrophies, along with their whole raison d'etre, end-around marketing like this is increasingly the only way to make it big. MySpace, OC, and other ways of reaching audiences become far more important than radio payola.
• VMars = The New Buffy?--I'd never heard of the show from any of my Buffy-fan friends, but the creator of Buffy loves it and just appeared in it. I'm BitTorrenting the first season to rectify my ignorance.
• Fox Previews Show on MySpace--no sooner is the ink dry on the MySpace deal than Fox is trying to boost ratings for its crappy-performing shows. 99% of the time media can only amplify something that's already good; you can social network/buzz market a turd and all you'll do is put the turd on the tips of our tongues. It's obvious that Fox thinks they have a captive audience who'll make popular any old crap that's thrust in front of their eyes (classic Old Fart thinking about Young Kids). It'll be fun to see this play out.
• AP Story on Mashups--interesting quote at the end from Adrian Holovaty (he of the Chicago Crime mashup) about the inevitability of ads in Google Maps. When they come, he'll bail to a map provider without ads. It's unclear there'll always be such a provider. IMHO, ads will be the business model for supporting the many millions a year that Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft must be paying to their data and hosting providers.
• PDA Tour to Backstreets of Venice--very cool. I see no reason why these have to be official and blessed--free podcast tours could be made as grassroots tours of a city. Pop on the headphones, follow the instructions, listen to the stories. I'll make one of my hometown when I get to New Zealand.
• Podcasting Pissing Match--new media as asinine as old.