But in the meantime, while we thought about what sort of things the Home Server might do, I came up with the (again, patented, but the patent dropped) idea of an internet-connected teddy bear that contacts a web site to tell stories. People would tell stories to the web site, and in return for these stories, they would be paid per listener. Bear purchasers would pay a monthly subscription fee. The child would get access to every single story ever told via the breadth of the lazyweb, and the parents could configure the bear to tell only certain kinds of stories (e.g. nonviolent, child age 4-6, Jewish, with a moral message, etc. Stories would be reviewed and tagged.)

Excerpted from one of my favorite MetaTalk posts of all time. (Waxtastic.)

This is a notion that popped into my head during a discussion with our search vendor today: online search is a folksonomy. Every search a user performs could be seen as a tag she’s applying to the result she ultimately clicks on. Over time, you could imagine a page featuring a tag cloud formed of all the searches that got people to that page.

Maybe that’s an insight obvious to everyone but me, but it felt novel. It seems we always talk about how tags could help search (hand in hand with the discussion of how no one actually uses/understands tagging, which may not be so true); why don’t we talk more about how perhaps the most common activity performed on the Internet is actually a form of tagging?

Bonus: The tag cloud you’d see if we did this for all pages on Snarkmarket would feature “snarkmarket” in giant letters, and then the following phrases, getting progressively smaller: breck girl, media galaxy, googlezon, listenings, robin+sloan, matt thompson, shipbreakers, homeless by choice, matt+thompson, by your command, giantess, media+galaxy, chicken porn, breck+girl, robin+sloan+and+matt+thompson, eminence gris, snarkmarket “this i believe”, mothball fleet, “by your command”.

And that would be my favorite tag cloud ever.

I’ve been waiting for this for months, ever since I first heard Google was testing out the ability for users to manage external email accounts through Gmail. Every few weeks, I’d peek back into my settings and see if I’d been added to the group of users this feature had been rolled out to. And at last, the moment is here.

I love Google the way Winston loves Big Brother.

Both of these things will expire soon:

1) You’ve got a month to check out the Harvard Business Review’s list of breakthrough ideas for 2007 before it goes into the paid archive. Full of counterintuitive goodness, although the articles are of uneven quality. All-in-all, provocative.

2) Copy, Right? has posted a mammoth dump of cover songs, including a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Good Enough,” from The Goonies. I loved that song because it sounded obnoxiously good as the MIDI track to the NES game Goonies II. I actually remember Goonies II being a surprisingly creepy and atmospheric game; it had these maze sequences scored by a brooding arpeggio that just freaked me out.

Michael Pollan, whose Omnivore’s Dilemma may have been my favorite book of last year, has an excellent essay in today’s New York Times Magazine.

Ratchet Up points to a video demo-ing software that let’s DJs rapidly remix music videos on the fly. The technique is a mix between fast sampling and beatboxing, and I’d be psyched to see it done live. Especially if the source video was this.

Before they were just talking, but now it’s reality: Brian Eno’s scoring Spore. (Walkerrific.)

By the way, speaking of open-source processes and design, I just learned about Architecture for Humanity’s plan for an Open Architecture Network:

By embracing open-source technology and removing barriers to the improvement, distribution, and implementation of well-designed solutions, we can, more than ever before, ensure that communities in need receive innovative, sustainable and, most importantly, dignified shelter. Since the mid-1990s, the sharing of information and technology has steadily gained popularity in the high-tech and arts communities. Why not adopt this approach in the area of humanitarian reconstruction and long-term development?

I’m a bit skeptical, but it’s also well-established that I’m a sap and an open-source triumphalist, so I wish them luck.

• PagePacker makes pocket-sized books,
  (tags: books cool design freeware howto lifehacks writing)

I think Eric Schmidt just made a thinly-veiled EPIC allusion at MacWorld: “I’ve had the privilege of joining the board and there’s a lot of relationships… if we merge the companies we can call it Applegoo — but I’m not a marketing guy.”

What think you? Can we take credit for that one?