Category: link blog

These are my Delicious links for December 20th:

• MotionSponsor.com – Fund a film,Share your dream – Potentially very interesting concept of crowd-sourced film financing. Much like the Internet has changed the profile of campaign finance (i.e. from few large donors to many small donors), there are many potential advantages of a micro-finance approach to film financing. By lowering the minimum threshold to participate in financing a film (in this case to €25) this kind of approach could enable a less profit-driven approach to film-making (i.e. I’m willing to donate $50 to a film idea I like without need to make it back) which may help more interesting but less marketable films get made. Given the potential for this idea, I’m surprised Motion Sponsor is the first implementation I’ve heard of. The company is actually French (the site is available in French and translated English) and they seem to have thought through the design of the system pretty well, however the site leaves a bit to be desired. Definitely a concept (if not an implementation) to watch.

These are my Delicious links for December 12th through December 15th:

• The Top 10 Most Outrageous Holiday Gifts for Foodies – "I’m sick and tired of reading about ideas for recession-era holiday gifts. We have one little global financial meltdown and all of a sudden we’re all supposed to do our Christmas shopping at Family Dollar? I don’t think so. This is Christmas! The season of greed and gluttony! The time for Americans to dig ourselves into a financial, spiritual, and health hole so deep that it lasts until Spring. Christmas is no time to start cutting up our credit cards and pulling ourselves out of this financial mess.

  The “experts” keep telling us we’re in this recession thing for the long haul, so what harm could one more season of unnecessary overspending do? In that heartwarming holiday spirit, may we present the Top 10 Most Outrageous Holiday Gifts for Foodies, celebrating the best in kitchen presents that are insanely overpriced, shamelessly unitasking, and utterly, completely necessary."

• The End of Wall Street’s Boom – National Business News – Portfolio.com – Very interesting article by Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker, revisiting his experiences as an investment banker in the 1980's in the context of the crash he thought was coming 20 years ago.
• Namecheap.com – The Great NameCheap Twitter Trivia Contest – Free Domain and Hosting Giveaway – One of the most innovative and well thought through Twitter marketing campaigns I've seen. NameCheap, the Domain Name Registrar I use, is trying to drive Twitter integration with their registered users which they're doing through a giveaway administered via the NameCheap Twitter account. They have >3,400 followers so far.

These are my Delicious links for December 4th through December 8th:

• techvideoblog.com » Blog Archive » Online video sites HD quality comparison – Side-by-side comparison of specs for various online video hosting services offering HD streaming. YouTube HD and Facebook HD have the best quality.
• Why Wall Street Always Blows It – Henry Blodget's article for the Atlantic on the causes of the current economic crisis and financial bubbles in general. This version includes an intro and summary outline by Henry, who offers the perspective of someone who was in the middle of the last bubble and largely on the sidelines of this one — "'It's different this time,' by the way, are the four most expensive words in the English language."

These are my Delicious links for November 29th through December 3rd:

• “Prop 8 – The Musical” starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and many more… – Just cause I didn't want to be the last person in my social network to bookmark this one 😛
• Michael Wolff’s Calm, Reasoned Analysis Of MySpace, And The “Cretins” That Flock To It – BusinessWeek – Excerpts of an interview with Michael Wolff, Rupert Murdoch's biographer. The best quote in the thing is at the end: "[Murdoch] wants to make money off of what he rightly saw as a rising lower class [in the rest of the world]. He came to this country and he sees, that’s just not really true. No one really identifies with being lower class [in the US]. As soon as it comes to you—‘I am lower class’–you run, and you have to rehabilitate all of your aspirational identifiers."
• Rising Star: Joel Moss Levinson | Access Hollywood – Celebrity News, Photos & Videos – Joel named AccessHollywood.com's Rising Star of the week is probably more awesome (and appropriate) than his NYT write-up or Tonight Show appearance. Well, maybe not quite more awesome, but definitely more appropriate 🙂
• twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter – post RSS to twitter automatically – Straightforward and useful tool for posting RSS feed items to Twitter. You can choose which URL shortening service is used and configure the format of the resulting tweets. You can manage multiple feeds across multiple Twitter accounts from one Twitterfeed login (using OpenID) as long as you have the Twitter credentials.
• Embed Ads In User-Generated Videos With ZunaVision – ReadWriteWeb – Write-up of ZunaVision, a consumer-grade tool for embedding images or videos automagically on any flat surface in another video. You're supposed to be able to try it out for free, but the site seems to be down.
• BorrowLenses.com – Camera Rental and Canon/Nikon Lens Rental – Mail order photo equipment rental service.
• YCombinator Startup Creates A Better Download App Store For Windows (BaseShield) – Write-up of a company creating an online app store for Windows applications that run in a sandboxed virtualization layer with granular controls to keep the software from accessing unapproved local resources. This is pretty much exactly what we had planned for the future of Konfabulator and the Yahoo! Widget Gallery.
• CrunchGear » Archive » A mesmerizing look at the Hatfield Hotdog Launcher – Very well-made mock-umentary on the creation of the hot dog launcher used at Phillies games. Only in Philadelphia. (via rganguly47)

These are my Delicious links for November 21st through November 26th:

• Mr. Tweet -> Your Personal Networking Assistant! – Interesting tool delivering the functionality of the Facebook Friend Finder to Twitter. Just follow @mrtweet on Twitter, and it will analyze the content of your Tweets, your followers, etc to give you suggestions on who to follow.
• Plentitube: Your Agent for Online Video – BusinessWeek – Interesting concept for a low-end disruption of the talent agency model. Plentitube is an online marketplace for connecting online video creators with conventional media distributors (i.e. networks, brand advertisers, etc).
• Jason Nazar’s Blog » Blog Archive » A Tale of Two Tech Cities – Silicon Valley vs. Los Angeles – "At parties in the Bay people talk about Twitter, Friend Feed, what’s being written on Valleywag and Techcrunch, and kickball games between VC’s and entrepreneurs.

  At parties in Los Angeles people talk about a media deal their “closing”, what TV star is at the party, and some “gray hat” spam-like technique that made them an extra 100K last month."

• The Real O’Neal Puts His Cyber Foot Down – NYTimes.com – I've always loved Shaq — I saw "Blue Chips" in theaters, and disowned the Lakers (esp. Kobe Bryant & Dr. Jerry Buss), the team I grew up loving, as a result of them choosing Kobe over Shaq. But, the fact that he's on Twitter makes me love him so much more. Shaq's Twitter account gives us fans a very personal glimpse at his life and personality, and he's even more awesome than I always expected him to be.

These are my Delicious links for November 14th through November 19th:

• RCA Secret 2008 – Really cool concept for an art sale: 2,700 postcards done by different artists of all levels of fame, signed on the back, and sold anonymously at the same price (£40). It's like a grab-bag of fine art 🙂
• A Marriage Manifesto… Of Sorts | RD Blog: The Devil’s Advocate | ReligionDispatches – An interesting form of personal protest against bans on gay marriage: don't recognize *any* marriages. Elegant and potentially very effective on a personal level.
• DryIcons.com – Free Icons and Graphics – Pretty solid quality icon and graphics free to use anywhere as long as you provide proper attribution (you can also purchase commercial licenses that don't require attribution). Not sure how these guys are making any money, but I'll take their stuff 🙂
• Google Analytics Blog: Want to track Adobe Flash? Now you can! – Google Analytics is now available for Flash-based content through an AS3 translation of the JavaScript tracking code. The AS3 code has also been open-sourced.
• Tryit Editor v1.4 – A handy in browser editor for basic CSS to help dummies like me figure stuff out.
• Eater SF: Eater Map: Your Guide to San Francisco’s Douchiest Bars – Pretty self-explanatory title. I am sad to say that I've been to all of these places at least once (and only a couple more than that), and I fully agree with the assessments of douchebaggery. I'm more than a little relieved that none of my regular spots made the list…phew!

These are my Delicious links for November 10th through November 12th:

• Official Google Blog: Promote your video with YouTube Sponsored Videos – YouTube Sponsored Videos is a new advertising program that enables all video creators — from the everyday user to a Fortune 500 advertiser — to reach people who are interested in their content, products, or services, with relevant videos. Anyone can use Sponsored Videos to make sure their videos find a larger audience through easy-to-use automated tools allow content owners to decide where they'd like their videos to appear, place bids in an automated online auction, and set daily spending budgets. Then, when people search for videos, YouTube will display relevant videos alongside the search results. These videos are clearly labeled as "sponsored videos" and are priced on a cost-per-click basis.
• Jottings.com – Anti-spam Email Link Obfuscator – A wizard that generates Javascript code to obfuscate mailto links on your site from spambots.
• Generate High Quality YouTube Embed Code · How To Make YouTube High Quality Video – An online script that generates the code to embed a high quality YouTube video. Several different embed size and configuration options to choose from.
• Free Flickr eXporter iPhoto Plugin (FFXporter) – FFXporter is a free iPhoto export plugin for Flickr. This provides a convenient way to upload your iPhoto descriptions, titles, keywords (tags), and ratings along with your photos. It also supports sets (yay!) and preserves GPS tags and other EXIF data.
• GPS Visualizer – GPS Visualizer is a free, easy-to-use online utility that creates maps and profiles from GPS data (tracks and waypoints, including GPX files), street addresses, or simple coordinates. Use it to see where you've been, plan where you're going, or visualize geographic data (business locations, scientific observations, events, customers, real estate, geotagged photos, etc.).
• Google Docs – GPS data logger comparison – Comparison spreadsheet of GPS data loggers reviewed by http://scilib.typepad.com/techreviews/
• Mac geotagging software showdown at bioneural.net – A comprehensive review of various Mac software solutions for geotagging photos based on GPS log data.
• An ABC of geotagging photos on the Mac – Extensive examination of the various options for geotagging photos using a Mac. Long story short, there is no simple turn-key solution. But, this article lays out in great detail the different pieces you can put together to make it work.
• Op-Ed Columnist – Obama and the War on Brains – NYTimes.com – Nicholas Kristof on Obama's candidacy as a blow to anti-intellectualism in American politics. A poignant example of how far we still have to go: "in the final debate, Mr. Obama spoke at a ninth-grade reading level, while John McCain spoke at a seventh-grade level." That a ninth-grade reading level is considered high-brow for discussions of the most pressing issues effecting our nation is not a good sign.

These are my Delicious links for October 31st through November 4th:

• Twitter Technology Blog: We Got Data – Summary of APIs by which one can access data from Twitter: REST API; Search API; Data Mining Feed; Pinging Service (Gnip); Firehose.
• Wonkette: The D.C. Gossip » Blog Archive » San Francisco Voters’ Last Chance To Rename Poop Factory After George W. Bush – This is both hilarious, and one more indictment of California's FUBAR proposition system. Proposition R is a San Francisco ballot measure to rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. The argument for is obvious, but the argument against – that this would be an insult to the facility and the people who work there – is pretty compelling.
• follow cost: Is that Twitter celebrity worth the pain? – Calculates the relative cost/annoyance of following an individual user on Twitter. The unit of measure for Twitter annoyance is miliscobles.
• BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | E-mail error ends up on road sign – The Swansea council needed a Welsh translation for a street sign, but unfortunately the translator was out of the office.
• YouTube Blog – YouTube now supports deep linking to a specific time within a video. For example, appending #t=1m15s to the end of the video URL would take you to the video and start it at the 1:15 mark.

These are my Delicious links for October 23rd through October 29th:

• This Is That Guy Who Wins All The Lame Corporate Video Contests – Ad Wizards – Videogum – Coverage of my friend Joel, the professional contest winner, spawned by the NY Times profile on him. The best part of this one is definitely the comments: "this guy worked with me at summer camp one year. he sucks."
• From West Wing to the real thing | – An interesting analysis of the parallels between the (somewhat prophetic) story of Matt Santos character on Season 7 of "The West Wing" (2005), and that of Barack Obama on whom the Santos character was loosely based.
• Some Guy With a Website by August J. Pollak – 10/20/2008 – Costume contest – Hilarious door sign for Halloween party organizers banning "the use of non-clever and hastily assembled Sarah Palin costumes."
• Joel Moss Levinson: Meet Online Video Contest Guy! – Coverage of my friend Joel, the professional contest winner, spawned by the NY Times profile on him.
• Joel Moss Levinson Understands the Internet, Earns $200,000 – Urlesque – Coverage of my friend Joel, the professional contest winner, spawned by the NY Times profile on him.
• Finding a Gold Mine in Digital Ditties – NYTimes.com – My friend (and client), (Happy) Joel Moss, the professional contest winner profiled in the New York Times. What has this world come to?! 😉
• See real-time trends on Twitter – Graphs historical volume of tweets containing user-defined terms over time.
• Confronting Ghosts of 2000 in South Carolina – New York Times – A look back at the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary in which the Bush campaign viciously smeared McCain with unfounded personal allegations against him and his family. It turns out a good number of the people involved on the Bush side in 2000 now are working in and with the McCain campaign. The article also provides several specific examples that demonstrate McCain clearly subscribes to the maxim that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds (otherwise known as whatever it takes to win).
• YouTube – Broadcast Yourself. – Video demos of the new "Enterprise" features for Google Analytics released October 22, 2008.

These are my Delicious links for October 17th through October 22nd:

• Domainr – Handy tool for coming up with Domain Names using non-standard TLDs.
• Powell Endorses Obama – The Caucus Blog – NYTimes.com – A recap of Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama on Meet the Press, including video.
• More on the Soldier Kareem R. Khan – The Lede – Breaking News – New York Times Blog – Background information on Kareem Khan, the Muslim American soldier who was killed in Iraq and cited by Colin Powell in his endorsement of Barack Obama on Meet the Press.
• WANTS FOR SALE – A really fun concept by a designer couple who wanted to do a creative project together with the goal of making a little extra spending cash. So, they decided they would paint the items they want to buy with that cash and sell each painting for the price of the item in question (e.g. “A Slice Of Pepperoni” went for $3). Essentially, they’re asking their respective patrons to each sponsor the purchase of an item — it’s an Amazon wishlist in painting form.
• Service: Online Only: The New Yorker – The photo of the mother of Kareem Khan, a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq, at her son’s grave in Arlington that Colin Powell cited during his endorsement of Barack Obama on Meet the Press.
• National Journal Online – Word Of Mouth Fueled Obama’s Star Turn – Interesting account of the serendipitous fashion by which Obama was invited to keynote the 2005 Democratic National Convention, his springboard onto the national political stage.
• Andrew Lahde: The Hedge Fund Manager With a 1000% Return – Finance Blog – Felix Salmon – Market Movers – Portfolio.com – On the subject of Andrew Lahde, the anti-subprime hedge fund wunderkind who just made a splash with his fuck you letter of resignation from the financial world, here’s a snapshot back to 10 months before the US stock market collapsed in which he predicts “a deep recession.” Prescient guy. It kinda sucks that our system managed to so disenchant him that he’d rather say fuck off than try to help fix things.
• The Big Picture | Andrew Lahde: Goodbye! – The farewell letter of Andrew Lahde, the most notable hedge fund manager to profit from the collapse of the housing bubble (and the US economy). The most impressive thing about this letter is his willingness to call it quits on a high note and resist the temptation to parlay his recent successes into other opportunities. I admire his discipline and self-restraint. The least impressive thing about it is his unbridled vitriol, which I find gets in the way of the substance of his message, with which I mostly agree. I fear people who should take his content to heart will be too busy reacting to his incendiary rhetoric. Good luck Andrew!
• STOCK MARKET EXTREMES – This comprehensive study looks at stock market turbulence and how it can affect investment
  performance. Professor Seyhun studied stock market returns and risk for all months from 1926 through 2004, and for all trading days from 1963 through 2004. His findings highlight the challenge of market timing, since a small number of months or days accounted for a large percentage of market gains and losses. For example:
  • For the 1963-2004 timeframe, the index gained at a geometric average annual rate of 10.84%, for a cumulative return on $1.00 of $73.99 over 42 years. If the best 90 trading days, or 0.85% of the 10,573 trading days, are set aside, the annualized return tumbles to 3.20% and the cumulative gain falls to $2.70.
  • In the 1963-2004 span, missing the best 0.6% of the days (a total of 60 days in all) created an exposure to 95% of the risk of continuous stock market investing. In this situation, the average annual return would have been 19% less than that of Treasury Bills.
• Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy – “[W]hat matters is who you are, not when you do it. If you’re the right sort of person, you’ll win even in a bad economy. And if you’re not, a good economy won’t save you…if you’re worried about threats to the survival of your company, don’t look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.””Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible…The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. Fortunately it has gotten very cheap to run a startup, and a recession will if anything make it cheaper still.”

  “It’s hard to say whether [the] advantages [of a recession] like lack of competition outweigh disadvantages like reluctant investors. But it doesn’t matter much either way. It’s the people that matter. And for a given set of people working on a given technology, the time to act is always now.”