Posts by matt

If you’re one of the subscribers to the RSS feed I scraped together with Wotzwot for Romenesko’s sidebar, you might have noticed that the feed had stopped working properly. Here’s an updated version; here’s hoping it stays intact.

Has anyone else heard of Freeconference.com?

“FreeConference.com offers a terrific value to consumers

Tee-hee (via):

Wha be tha blake prevy lawe

That bene wantoun too alle tha feres?

SHAFT!

Ya damne righte!

After hearing about Google’s BigTable data-organizing scheme the other day, posters at Google Blogoscoped started musing about the possibility of a Google database where anyone could list and organize oceans of content. Then Tony Ruscoe discovered that Google had recently added the subdomain base.google.com. Then the site went live. Briefly. Long enough for folks to capture some screenshots and an official description:

Post your items on Google.

Google Base is Google

Although I’m kind of against floor ads (because 1) do you really want people walking all over your brand name? and 2) what will we do when we have no more surfaces left to advertise on?), I’ve gotta admit this is hella clever. (Via AltText.)

Stephen Dubner has posted a previously unpublished interview with August Wilson on his Freakonomics blog, in which the playwright talks about the men he admired growing up. It’s funny — so many of the men Wilson identified with were fighters — Sonny Liston, Charley Burley, Malcolm X — but so much of this interview is about acceptance.

MeFi-ed again. (Fourth time around, yo!) The natives are pretty much calling for our heads by this point. Oh, but backlash can be ugly.

When I was tiny, among my favorite toys was the Playmobil gas station, which I guess offered its own commentary on the times. But this Playmobil airport security checkpoint set makes me a bit sad. Not Armageddon (that’s so ten months ago), but sad. (Via Off Center.)

Is it just me, or is the “foobars are a conversation” meme totally played out? The first hundred Google results for the phrase “are a conversation” reveal that among other things:

• Blogs are a conversation.
• Books are a conversation.
• Markets, of course, are conversations.
• Links are a conversation.
• You are a conversation.
• We — (hu)mankind — are a conversation.
• Church services are a conversation.
• This woman’s paintings are a conversation.
• The mass media in toto are a conversation.
• Political systems are a conversation.
• Website hacks are a conversation.
• Noises are a conversation.
• Funk and hip-hop are a conversation.

I could go on. At what point does (did?) this phrase lose all effective meaning?

Speaking of miniature photography, these photos of a model railroad set are so incredible I’m actually reposting them from Boing Boing, even though you probably already saw them thrice by now.