A: Britney Spears. Q: What if Michael Jackson and Cher had a love child?

Microsoft Word metadata embarrasses Brit government.

An amazingly huge pixelated aircraft carrier. the detail here is *insane*

Check out these smooth new-look Birkenstocks.

I took a lot less photos in Paris than last time I was there (photos!), but I still got some good ones this time around (well, "good" by my standards anyway).

What you don't see in these photos is the series of miracles that occurred during our visit to Paris. There was uber-chef Pierre Gagnaire getting me to eat (quite happily for the most part) 4 or 5 different sorts of fish & seafood, the nearly-perfect weather in Paris during our stay, and, most miraculous of all, we avoided eating in any of the excellent restaurants we ate at during our last trip (save for a bad pain au chocolat habit I've developed in frequenting the Boulangerie Malineau), opting instead for a bunch of new excellent restaurants.

Make your own stamps.

If you're one of the few men in NYC who hasn't seen Paris Hilton's bush (yet), here's what it looks like.

Rebecca Mead on NYC's celebrity dermatologist Dr. Zizmor for the New Yorker.

Ladies and gentlemen, Pro-Keds.

Holy robots! Kraftwerk to release new album, their first in almost 20 years.

TVBrick, open-source TV streaming.

Cat Stevens v. Flaming Lips.

WebVerbix is a free online verb conjugator that handles over 100 languages.

Four basic tests for fair use of copyrighted works.

Photo of the world's scariest-looking criminal.

Using MT to create a photoblog.

Google search for pages named "untitled document".

kottke.org gets some linky love from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column.

Hmmm, there seems to be a new Harry Potter book out. Also, 870 pages??!!?

1957 Atomic Revolution comic book.

Cracking Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle code.

Massive list of journalists with weblogs.

I took a few pictures of Copenhagen while I was there.

Sega LCD games in Happy Meals.

MoveOn primary results.

MovableType and Userland on the Google/Blogger toolbar.

Illustrated catalog of Acme products.

Washington Post using TextAds to advertise individual articles.

Wind is the Enemy.

Finally, some font management in OS X. and the rest of the Panther goodies look nice too

After a nice time in Copenhagen (thanks to the Reboot team for a good time), we're back in Paris for a few days. Feels a lot like home here, very comfortable. Who knows, perhaps it will be home one of these days.

p.s. To the person with the open wireless access point near Rue du Temple, thanks for the hookup. :) (And to the folks organizing the free wireless trial in Paris.)

E-mail to RSS script. from the interesting and new Eightlinks.com

So, House of Leaves is a book about a book about a book about a movie that doesn't exist. Or something like that. Post-modern fiction at its best (or worst if you're not a big fan). I would *love* to see this book -- or the movie it describes -- made into a movie, but I can't think of any particular director who would do it justice.

• books
• houseofleaves
• markdanielewski

Multitasking OS for the Intellivision.

Google Toolbar adds BlogThis button. there's Blogger in my Google!

Hulk uploader pleads guilty. Appeared in court with green suit and tie

Skip this one and watch Requiem for a Dream instead...Spun just ripped off all of Aronofsky's camera techniques. I should have known not to go see something with Brittney Murphy in it. It was good to see Jason Schwartzman in a movie again, but would have preferred seeing him in something better.

RIAA to sue hundreds of file traders.

P2P services to start lobby.

Sneak preview of Bush's re-election website. with XML/RSS syndication for weblogs

MovableType licensing debate.

Interview with "pro-choice suicide" community moderator.

Apple accused of manipulating G5 benchmarks.

The Nth Country Experiment. How two amateurs built a nuclear bomb in 1964 with a library card

Spamming guestbooks and blog comments for Googlejuice.

$12k donated to 19-year-old RIAA defendant.

I'm at Reboot in Copenhagen, Denmark today. Don't know how much I'll be writing about it, but I could go off at any moment. Highlight of the day so far is one of the organizers calling Microsoft, a Reboot sponsor, evil.

ShareLive index of P2P files. Arguably legal since they're not hosting the files or network?

Why Star Wars Galaxies sucks.

$32k blog question on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?.

Nintendo wins anti-piracy suit against Lik-Sang. Hong Kong retailer sold game copying devices

The Internet Under Surveillance. Extraordinary 150-page breakdown of global Internet censorship, by country

GoogleGuy Says. Insider info culled from a Google employee's forum posts

Harrison Ford finger gallery.

The power of weblogs, blogging Mt. Everest. How 2 links at Kottke and The Presurfer growed to 840 links and 200.000 visitors in 24 days

Uber web mail app Oddpost now features an RSS reader.

Google launches AdSense, context-sensitive text ads that even small sites can use. Perfect for weblogs

Back on May 15th, I wrote a 221-word entry on my first impression of The Matrix Reloaded. At last count (mid-afternoonish on June 17th), people have left 700 comments in the thread attached to that entry (7 of which are mine). Those 700 comments comprise a total of ~125,000 words (~180 per entry); that's about 3.3 150-page books. The HTML file is in excess of 1.3 MB in size, has been viewed about 5000 times in the past two weeks (during which about half of the comments were left), and is responsible, all by itself, for 5.3 gigabytes of data transferred from kottke.org this month.

In comparison to the rest of kottke.org (just a few more stats here), the most comments on previous thread was just over 200 (a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon thread that is no longer online), there are around 3500 comments that have been left on the site in dozens of threads, and over the past 5 years, I have posted around 2500 entries to kottke.org, 27 of them since the Matrix post. My total bandwidth usage for June thus far is about 14.6 GB.

In short, the Matrix thread is unexpectedly large, and depending on how you look at it, is anywhere from 10% to 36% of my entire site, and significantly more than 50% of the total output since May 15th. If you were to look at all the content of the site in the aggregate, you might come to the conclusion that kottke.org is a Matrix Reloaded-related site even though it's been chugging along Reloaded-free for more than 5 years.

Given that the thread is still active (25 posts today alone), how do I deal with it going forward? I haven't read any of the conversation since around comment #200, and if it hits 1000 comments (which, 2 weeks ago seemed unlikely but now seems inevitable), the file approaches 2 MB in size, and sucks up 15 GB of bandwidth a month, it seems prudent for me to close the thread.

On the other hand, it continues to be valuable as a forum for a small number of participants and a larger number of readers...and from what I can tell, is a relatively high-quality conversation. Who am I to shut down a conversation that I'm not involved in? This may be my site, but the participants own the conversation. As much as it makes sense to shut it down, I'm inclined to let the participants go as long as they want. Who knows, maybe they'll even let me know when they're done.

Related: Sam Ruby's experiment of moderating discussions on weblogs.

Oh, and just for fun, I pasted the entire thread into Word and used the AutoSummary feature to come up with this 100 word summary of the thread:

The Matrix 1.1?

Wake up Neo...
Real vs Matrix.
Sorry, no "matrix within a matrix". "Wake up Neo."

Neo is human.

RTFB Neo!

Rewatch The Matrix.
Neo: Yeah.
Neo: Ahhh.
Neo: What?
Neo: Morpheus.
Neo: What?
Neo: Stop.
Neo: The Oracle.
Trinity: No, Neo.
Neo: Yeah.

The Matrix Overloaded

Matrix Within A Matrix?

3. DOUBLE MATRIX theory.
NEO: No.

Regarding a Matrix within a Matrix:
Aren't 2 matrices sufficient?
Neo: "No."
Neo: "No."

Morpheus: "Rest, Neo.
Morpheus: "Rest, Neo. (of the matrix)

Enter the Matrix

Matrix within a Matrix...
Matrix within a Matrix...
Matrix within a Matrix...

That's just begging to be set to music. Or to be included in a anthology of philosophical poetry.

Orrin Hatch wants to destroy your computer.

Ads supporting targeted, one-person weblogs. IWantMedia and PaidContent as case studies

"Jane Roe" wants Roe v. Wade overturned.

22% of Americans stupider than ever.

Radiohead announces North American tour. tickets go on sale June 21

Microsoft internally discussing employee weblogging.

Dave Eggers corrects the first-name-only rumors.

People are forming large, temporary mobs in Manhattan.

Get your "wardriver" stickers.

Bezos and Jobs Meet the Segway.

Iranian weblogs popular but controversial. Blogging threatened as conservatives attempt to restrict Internet usage

Gamecube games dumped and distributed online. A hack to play burned minidiscs is reportedly in development

A roundup of what one might expect from Apple at their developers conference next week.

Poland's own Kaycee Nicole?.

Spurs win NBA title as Duncan almost has a quadruple-double. He finished with a mere 21 points, 20 rebounds, 10 assists, and 8 blocked shots.

NYT on Urban Nomads. read: gutter punks

Seeing U.S. President George Bush and French President Jacques Chirac get all buddy-buddy at the recent G8 Summit inspired me to make a silent film about the sometimes-tender / sometimes-turbulent relationship of these two powerful men. Witness the giddy highs and depressing lows of a very public love. The film is called Ceci n'est pas une guerre (c'est l'amour), or This is not a war (it's love), and I hope you enjoy it. (Flash 6 required, ~580KB, best viewed with sound on.)

Thanks to Andre, Matt, Meg, Leonard, Mouser, and Caterina for their help with this. :)

Tips for my upcoming trip to Copenhagen.

In an effort to keep things as uncluttered as possible around here, I don't provide a lot of metadata for the remindered links in the sidebar: no posted by, no time, no dates, and no attribution. In order to adjust for the lack of attribution, here are some sites I regularly draw excellent links from:

Gulfstream, Muxway, Anil's Daily Links, BoingBoing, Slashdot, paranoidfish, lightningfield.com, The Morning News, What Do I Know, brushstroke.tv, ex machina, and Magnetbox.

If you've got some time today, give them a visit.

Lance Arthur has himself a new web site.

Popular Mechanics revisits Roswell. Newly declassified documents and a deathbed confession conclusively debunk UFO claims

Pixar has found what Disney lost in the early 90s...the something that makes animated movies actually watchable. I think it may have something to do with the lack of singing. IMO, as soon as Pixar gets rid of Disney as the distributor of their films, the sooner they'll start pumping out even better movies.

O'Reilly is finally inlining their comments by default after their articles.

Dave Winer celebrates one year of non-smoking with a flat panel TV. Congratulations!

The JC Report is "inside global fashion trends".

Ten of the dumbest ads in the last decade.

Worth1000 owes $4000 in bandwidth fees. Photoshopping community uses 1.4 terabytes over their monthly quota

Top 10 Pictures of Thom Yorke Looking Pretentious.

Microsoft discontinues IE for the Mac.

The Economist on the housing bubble.

Three-dimensional filesystem browser for OSX. Pretty, but impractical

The web site for The Believer has a feature called Idea Share. Here's a sampling of ideas that people have shared:

There should be a tax break for perfect attendance at the voting polls. Unlike the law in Australia, which forces you to vote, this would just award those citizens who are consistent participants in our democracy, kind of like a bribe. Small but noticeable: $25?

Invite different kinds of people—architects, cartoonists, plastic surgeons—to attend a lecture on an undisclosed subject. Tell them that they will be tested on the information. Instead, take their notes, doodles and all, and display them as an exhibit, perhaps in conjunction with a transcript of the lecture itself, or perhaps with the subject of the lecture remaining a mystery.

There should be more novels about sentient animals.

There should be a device hooked up to your car's stereo system that displays whatever song and artist you're listening to—whether it be tape, CD, MP3, even radio (it would look it up using the Internet)—in a scrolling LED ticker tape­type display on your bumper or running boards.

Animated shows for adults a big hit. Adult Swim beating the late night talk shows with the 18-24 demographic

The Third Annual Media That Matters Film Festival.

WonderWalker. Oddball applet puts user-made bookmark icons on a spatial map

Supreme Court ends Sex.com battle. Domain goes back to its original owner

George Bush wrecks on his Segway. expect to see this photo all over the web in short order

The Mirra is a new Aeron-like chair from Herman Miller.

John Gruber's detailed critique of Trackback.

Duke Nukem Forever vs Take Two Software. 6+ years of vaporware hell leads to a public battle between developer and publisher

OJR on Gawker and other localized blogs. Can they succeed where local city guides failed?

37BetterPayPal.

Hellraiser: Bloodline
Man in space battles Pinhead, as did ancestors. (Ancestors don't do anything in space.)

Cyborg Cop
Drug agent's brother could be a cyborg. (Wasn't that an episode of Leave It To Beaver?)

Sense and Sensibility
Men romance and abandon sisters in 1900 England. ("Romance and Abandon" was Austen's first title)

The Gunfighter
Upstarts dare the fastest gun in the West. (And then what?!)

Showgirls
Dancer stoops low to rise in Las Vegas. (Hey, that's kinda clever.)

Saturday Night Fever
Brooklyn nobody becomes disco king to Bee Gees music. (Shoulda stuck with this same plot for Battlefield Earth.)

The Usual Suspects
A detective questions a con man about associates. (Wake me up when that one's over.)

Wonder Boys
A writer and his student collide with life. (What does that mean, collide with life?)

Sun creates Javapedia Wiki for "all things Java". WillSomebody PleaseMakeAWikiThatIs ActuallyUserFriendly?

Don't Blog. Headlines from the future

P2P Hosting for Blogs. think BitTorrent for weblogs

A mondegreen "is the mishearing of a phrase, such that it acquires a new meaning".

Entire text of "The Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2". 300+ pages of computer articles and programs from 1976

NES "Kung Fu" SARS hack. SARS Folk Art, Exhibit A

Space Ghost Kid.

The Phonaesthetics of "Blog". Is "blog" an ugly-sounding word?

To Whom It May Concern:

The most recent issue of your magazine, the Début Fiction issue, arrived in our mailbox yesterday. Forgoing for now an exploration of your reasons for accenting the "e" in the English word "debut", I would like to direct your attention to pages 98 and 99 of that issue. Page 98 is to the left of the crease of the magazine and contains part of an article entitled Our Perfect Summer by David Sedaris, an article I was keenly interested in reading when I saw it in the table of contents. Page 99 is to the right of the crease and contains two vertical half-page flaps that open to reveal an advertisement for UBS. Let's call the flap that opens toward the crease page 99A, the flap that opens away page 99B, and the revealed advertisement page 99C.

Here's my problem. Page 99A keeps opening up and flopping down in front of the Sedaris article I'm trying to read on page 98 because the thumb on my right hand is not nearly long enough to clamp it down with the rest of the pages on the right hand side of the magazine. I had to resort to an unorthodox, complicated, and uncomfortable magazine-holding position in order to keep page 99A from interfering with my reading, a position that, had it lasted any longer than the two minutes it took me to read the text it was covering, would have driven me completely bats.

I realize that with all the excitement around the Débuting Fiction in the magazine, you probably forgot, just this once, to run the magazine through The Condé Nast Magazine Usability Lab. And also that UBS probably loves the fact that their exhaustively-honed advertising copy is flopping down in front of the hilarious literary stylings of David Sedaris like a pop up ad on the web and precipitating a post (with a link, no less) on a personal web site of modest acclaim. But this flap, it's seriously annoying. Please make it go away from all future issues of your magazine.

Yours very sincerely,

Jason Kottke

ps. Please do not print this letter in your magazine. I do not wish for my, how you say, inelegant grammar, odd punctuational choices, and inadequate vocabulary to be snickered at by your discerning readership.

pps. I love this bit from the Sedaris article:

"But it's perfect," my father said. "A real beauty, just like your mother here." He came from behind and pinched her on the bottom. She laughed and swatted him with a towel and we witnessed what we would later come to recognize as the rejuvenating power of real estate. It's what fortunate couples turn to when their sex life has faded and they're too pious for affairs. A second car might bring people together for a week or two, but a second home can revitalize a marriage for up to nine months after the closing.

Friendly free advice to the People at Six Apart. Right on, Olivier

Warner Music memo on internal P2P usage.

Researching the Fargo film death. she wasn't seeking the Fargo treasure, after all

Our Perfect Summer. a brand-spanking new story from David Sedaris in the New Yorker

This is what kottke.org might have looked like in 1996.

Oblivio harassed via search queries. Coming soon: harassment via referral querystrings

My favorite post in the Matrix Reloaded thread: musings on the connection between Reloaded and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.

Way more than you'd ever want to know about the SAT.

Jonathan Goodyear paid US$200 for $200 million in BlogShares.

A running list of BlogSpot defectors.

Gizmodo features 1983's top gadgets.

Top 5 TiVo hacks from the upcoming TiVo Hacks book.

Sun hires Christina Aguilera as spokesperson. Wireless Java gets dirrty

I missed Julian Dibbell's The Unreal Estate Boom in Wired last November (I was in Frizzance), but I recently rectified that oversight. Too many interesting bits in the article about virtual spaces and economies to exhaustively list here, so here's a short one:

"The minute you hardwire constraints into a virtual world, an economy emerges," explains Castronova, the Adam Smith of EverQuest. "One-trillionth of a second later, that economy starts interacting with ours."

Some thoughts:

1. I'm not sure if that's always true. Slashdot has an economy (with karma as currency) but as far as I know, no one is selling their karma to less karma-rich folks. But, it's close enough.

2. Back when ICQ was still popular, people sold low ICQ numbers on eBay. #163896 went for $41.

3. When MetaFilter was inundated with new users, Matt throttled new user signups to 15 people a day. But he also let in anyone who donated $5 toward server upkeep and bandwidth. Many people joined this way.

4. And just in case you didn't think they were smart, the folks at Ludicorp recognize that virtual economies & real world economies are tightly coupled in the way that Mr. Castronova describes above. Expect The Game Neverending to let people play extensively with the intersection of the virtual and real world economies.

ps. Julian Dibbell is keeping a weblog called Play Money in which he's documenting his attempt to make real money in the virtual world of Ultima Online.

Freshly-redesigned Radiohead site.

View the teaser trailer for The Incredibles. Pixar's next film

Google Catalogs: The end of catalogs clogging up the mailbox?. I never want to receive another Pottery Barn Baby & Bath or whatever it's called again...

Andy Baio will be posting to the remaindered links weblog (RSS) for the next couple of weeks. Welcome Andy. And thanks to Lance for posting there for the past couple of weeks. Rumor has it that his special brand of linky goodness will be popping up elsewhere on the web in the near future.

Technorati adds keyword searching. search the full text of 362,537 weblogs

Hong Kong Lipton tea. hyperviolent, but thirst-quenching

4-dimensional Rubik's Cube applet. More potential positions than the total number of atoms in the universe

First person account of Apple's meeting with indie labels about the iTunes Music Store. very detailed as to how the Music Store works

Hit or Stand is a Flash app that teaches you proper blackjack strategy.

Some thoughts and observations from Book Expo America 2003. includes Al Franken / Bill O'Reilly shouting match

Setlist and some early reviews of last night's Radiohead show at the Beacon Theatre in NYC.

Make your reservations now for Summer Restaurant Week in NYC. June 23-27 & June 30-July 4

Enter the US Air Guitar Championships tonight in NYC.

Webby Awards announced, the web yawns.

Support the Numbered Shirts Project by sending in a pic of your wearing a shirt with a number on it.

Meet the man responsible for the design of the original iMac and iBook.. Jonathan Ive, V.P. of Industrial Design at Apple

Let Martha know you're on her side..

Does your signature really matter?. The Credit Card Prank tests the theory of the illegible signature, including signing with stick figures, a grid, "Mariah Carey"...

Egregious, sacherine, truly amazingly awful Michael Jackson 9-11 benefit song finds its way online.. MP3 track available on JacksonDailyNews.net: "What More Can I Give"

Network Effects: Use of the Internet in the Chinese Rave Scene describes how Chinese music promoters and DJs are using the Internet to download & share music, read foreign music-related media, plan events, and generally share knowledge about their interests & craft, despite the Great Firewall of China:

I began to see a number of distinct effects of the rapid increase in Net usage on the nascent Chinese club scene: local DJs and producers were using the Internet to obtain new tools for producing and distributing their own music; websites were springing up to inform users about new developments in the Chinese scene and provide new opportunities for participants to communicate with one another; and music makers and clubbers alike were using the Net to learn about and obtain new music from both domestic and international artists.

and

Some Chinese DJs even use music downloaded from the Net in their live sets, making their own compilations of MP3 files of music from China and abroad and recording them on CDRs; I have observed DJs at some of the largest clubs in Shanghai and Guangzhou using these CDRs in the DJ booth. Among some in the Chinese underground hiphop scene, only tracks which have been downloaded are considered truly "underground" and thus valuable, while any music which is available for purchase in physical form is seen as being tainted by commerciality to some degree.

When I was in Beijing in 1996, I observed several people handing out club flyers around hotels and in the more hip/affluent parts of the city. They were particularly keen about giving flyers to anyone who looked like a tourist.

San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore at 50.. Published Ginsberg's "Howl," big party Sunday will likely feature Eggers, Lemony Snicket in attendance.

Ooh, design your own yarmulke.

Symbolify..

Burning rainforests, pollution saving the world from global warming.. Smoke, fossil fuel particles counteract warming, but stupid environmentalists are making it harder to keep burning everything.

Chrysler loses $1.2billion, cancels Design Award. Saves $60,000 in prize money.

Buildings of Disaster... in miniature!. Collect 'em all! WTC, The Dakota, Three Mile Island, the Texas bonfire tower and many more!

Matrix Reloaded thread now has 428 comments and is well into Slashdot territory on a variety of levels.

With all the hubbub about Martha Stewart right now, Jeffrey Toobin's Lunch at Martha's from February's New Yorker is a good look at the legal issues involved in the case and Stewart's personal feelings about it:

When we took a lunch break, it was clear that the wounds of the past year ran deep. After I admired the silver chopsticks that had been set out, Stewart said, "You know, in China they say, 'The thinner the chopsticks, the higher the social status.' Of course, I got the thinnest I could find." After a pause, she added, "That's why people hate me."

The article reveals Stewart to be attentive to detail and controlling, but it's hard to see that she would be interested at all in jeopardizing her career, forture, company, and reputation over "three-hundredths of one per cent of her total net worth". It just doesn't make sense. The SEC is barking up the wrong tree here.

Suede yarmulkes available in all the colors of the rainbow.

Quicktime movie of opening title sequence for Six Feet Under by Seattle-based Digital Kitchen.

NY Times executive editor resigns over Jayson Blair case. I honestly can't believe Blair's personal misconduct is being treated as a company-wide crisis

Danger Hiptop in color now available.

An open letter from Martha Stewart.

Teen girls are helping the FBI catch pedophiles by teaching agents how to IM properly.

Nullsoft founder pissed off at AOL.. Details at News.com.

Turns out it's not women in pants after all.. Malaysia fines unmarried couples for holding hands in public. Imagine! In public!

Subscribers leaving AOL in droves.. More than one million AOLers pack it in.

It's Official: Ken is Gay.. Fashion Insider Ken (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) joins Barbie and Anna Wintour at the next Marc Jacobs show.

New! From the people who brought you the Internet, it's LifeLog!. DARPA solicits bids to develop digital super diary to record everything, and they do mean everything, a person does.

J.K. Rowling will read new Harry Potter book live on Internet.. June 26th webcast will include questions from the audience, like "when is Harry going to have it off?"

Britain's Royal Mail says artwork infringes on stamp copyright.. Anti-war poster shows Queen Elizabeth II in gas mask. Comes in three colors!

Wicked Good Guide to Boston English Pronunciation.

Spike Lee sues VIACOM over use of name 'Spike.'. Also reportedly in legal discussions with the game of Volleyball, the railroad industry and that blonde vampire guy from Buffy.

San Francisco Design Museum opens.. Upcoming exhibits include "The New Homeless Box: Beyond Cardboard" and "The Stylish $200,000 San Francisco Home: Beyond Cardboard"

Amazon list: World Domination Primer.

Codd's twelve rules for defining relational databases.

Great first person account of an American visiting Iraq during the war because he had to see it for himself.

Build Your Own (Messenger or Laptop) Bag..

The Xeni backlash has begun.

The word on the street is that this book by Veronique Vienne (published by Yale University Press) will be a retrospective of Chip Kidd's work as a book jacket designer and will include many full-color illustrations of his work. I have a thing about book cover design so I'm pretty jazzed about this.

Update: Ben writes in that there was a bit about Mr. Kidd in the first issue of Radar magazine...which I unfortunately missed and is not online.

Palm to buy Handspring.. Price: $169million.

Sam Ruby is conducting an interesting experiment with the comments left on his weblog. He's identifying potentially inflammatory comments by changing the text color, striking the text (like so), and linking the text to an explanation of why it might be so displayed. Here's an example of a comment that has gotten the firehose treatment. People are upset about their comments being modified, but as Sam says on his explanation page, "nobody has an inalienable right to place information on my website." As long as he clearly states what he's doing, isn't modifying or adding any text (not even misspellings), and doesn't allow anyone else to mimic his editorial functions, Sam can do anything he wants with the text on his site.

I'm happy to see Sam trying to moderate the discussions on his site to make them more useful. My only worry with his particular implementation of comment annotation is its negative nature. I'm not sure that slapping people's hands with a ruler is the best way to keep control and might result in even more unruliness. It would interesting to see how a more positive approach (perhaps as a supplement to the flamebait annotation) would work to reinforce the good ways in which people express themselves in comments. I've been wanting to mark good comments on my site with a gold star or something for awhile (I could never get Movable Type to do it and was too lazy to bother whipping up my own solution), but maybe setting off good comments in a different text color or with a background color would be sufficient. Perhaps the people who are complaining about their comments being modified wouldn't feel so unfairly persecuted if their comments had been marked as positive instead of negative.

Fuckity, fuck fuck...looks like the Field Day festival might be cancelled!.

iTunes Music Store to begin selling more indie music?.

Apple QuickTime 6.3 supports 3GPP.. Setting up for QT via cell phone.

Intellectual property lawyer blogs "off-the-record" conference.. And Dan Gillmor asks "Why not me, too?"

Smokin' in Hoboken: NYC Smoking Ban a Bust.. Bar business down 40%. Layoffs, protests, handbag thefts up.

Ice cream with a head.. Newcastle Brown Ale ice cream available, sadly contains less than 1% alcohol.

Greenspan sees US economic upswing in third quarter.. Calls tax cut "fortuitous," but sees remote threat of "corrosive deflation."

"Sims" creator in first-look deal with Fox.. Has already created a puppet-animation show set in feudal Japan and reality show starring a robot.

You are officially getting more Spam than legit email.. May 2003 marks the first time that Spam accounts for 51% of email to company inboxes.

Donald Rumsfeld orders breakast at Denny's.

Intern wanted for the Lafayette Project.

"Three Days in Yosemite" photos by Charlie Morey.

No, no, no....dude, watch me, this is totally how you do the robot..

New web site for Thomas Keller's French Laundry restaurant.

The Gotham Gazette is featuring weblogs from newcomers to NYC.

US Secretary of State: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit.". White House and Pentagon pressured Colin "That's Colin, like the internal organ" Powell to use shaky intelligence on Iraq; also to use someone named "Scooter" as speechwriter.

Bush touches French president.. Also finally answers the burning question: Can President Bush actually have a conversation?

Shocker: Bust-Enhancing Pills Are Bogus!. Next up: Spam can't really increase penis size by three inches. It's more like two, two-and-a-half, tops.

More than 1,100 dead in Indian heatwave..

Women in pants "abomination before God.". Swaziland's monarch points to Bible, world points to own ear, spins finger and rolls eyes.

FCC strips away old, antiquaited anti-monopolistic rules.. Opens up grand possibility for Fox News Everywhere All The Time Forever You Commie Pansies Network

Jonathan Ive named Designer of the Year by London's Design Museum.

TiVo provides second-by-second viewing reports..

A recipe for a curry dish called "The Assmaster".

Peter Maass had the Salam Pax scoop under his very nose for weeks and missed it completely. some journalist he is... ;)

A book about Amazon.com on Amazon.com. it's meta-tacular!

"I think one of the most serious problems in the free software community is that “open source development” allows a small group of individuals to exhibit all the sluggishness, stupidity and beauracracy [sic] of a large company".

Gothamist takes food away from the obviously very hungry Jeffrey Steingarten.

Gecko-like sticky tape is like Velcro without the other half. I want to run up walls with this stuff on my shoes!

You Grow Girl, cool garden tips and techniques.

Bill Thompson wants a little less conversation about social software (and presumably, a little more action):

This lack of awareness about what has been done before means that, by and large, the ongoing debate about social software is generally uninteresting, intellectually shallow and largely irrelevant.

It is a shame, because the people having the discussions are intelligent and write well, and they are struggling with real issues.

However the easy availability of online publishing tools, the drive to cross-link every discussion and comment to everyone else's, and the almost complete lack of any historical or research-based perspective means that the result is no more interesting than an overheard coffee-shop conversation.

I can't say that I disagree with Thompson's viewpoint here except to say that coffee-shop conversations have value as well.

Season finale of Six Feet Under: did Brenda's boobs get bigger?.