Massive Change is a project by Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries.

Rolling Stone interview with John Kerry.

George W. Bush and John Kerry living together in The Sims.

The NYC Public Library is auctioning off a private dinner by Mario Batali, Eric Ripert, and Nobu on eBay.

405, a short film.

“The Living Links Center was established in 1997 for primate studies that shed light on human behavioral evolution”.

Poptech presentations

If you’re not here in Maine, you can catch the Poptech presentations on ITConversations. Malcolm Gladwell, the patron saint of kottke.org, is speaking right now.

• conferences
• Malcolm Gladwell
• PopTech

Satellite radio

I’m in Maine for the Poptech conference and my rental car is equipped with satellite radio (courtesy of Sirius). As I drove up from Portland last night, I tried it out…strike one because it wasn’t broadcasting the baseball game. But this morning, some energetic electronica propelled me quickly into town…which is nice because I don’t think Maine has too many stations playing that kind of thing. I’ll let you know how it goes as I use it some more.

Sox win! Sox win!. The improbability of the Sox comeback from 3 games down is matched only by the magnitude of the Yankees’ collapse.

Great interview with Neal Stephenson on Slashdot.

Home alone: On time apart and changing one’s mind.

Wikipedia entry on Apple’s typography.

Ben and Mena are reblogging at Eyebeam. Maybe they’ll reblog this for some hot meta action!

Watching the people who come to see the Mona Lisa. I’ve seen it twice and I actually paused to look at it because what’s the point otherwise?

The most branded object in the world.

Non-narcotics which are gateway drugs for other non-narcotics. Barney is a gateway drug for Pokemon, etc.

Red Sox force improbable game 7. I think the Second Coming of Christ would need to happen at Yankee Stadium tonight for game 7 to be more exciting than the last three games.

John Kerry and George W. Bush are actually very distant cousins. Is this family tree for real? Unsurprising that Bush, despite his folksy ways, is just as blue blooded as Kerry is.

The Republican Switchers blog details Republicans who are not voting for Bush in 2004.

Screenfull is like Superbad in weblog form.

Music Lab is looking at how people form opinions about music. “If you participate in Music Lab you will have a chance to download free new music.”

The revolution will be commercialized

Out of Technorati’s top 100 most-linked weblogs**, only 16 don’t feature advertising or are otherwise noncommercial:

Scripting News
Doc Searls
kottke.org
Jeffrey Zeldman
The Volokh Conspiracy
Scobleizer
Lileks
Joel on Software
Rather Good
Joi Ito’s Web
RonOnline
USS Clueless
BuzzMachine
Vodkapundit
Baghdad Burning
Crooked Timber

Lots of interesting observations to be made about the commercialization of weblogs…the quick uptake of advertising on blogs, the increasingly false perception of blogs as inherently unbiased by commercial interests (and therefore preferable to “big media”), the continuing shift from blogging as a hobby to blogging for a variety of reasons, the number of weblogs launching lately that have ads from day one, the demographic difference between the typical circa-2002 blogger and the blogger of today, etc.

Just a couple of years ago, almost every weblog on a top 100 list would have been noncommerical and the blogosphere in general was mostly opposed to advertising on blogs. Now it’s accepted to the point where I haven’t heard anyone complain about it in months…even Boing Boing’s audience didn’t protest too much when they added advertising a couple of months ago.

** In compiling this list, I ignored the many entries on the top 100 list that weren’t weblogs, are no longer being updated, or are artificially popular, so the total sample is somewhat less than 100.

Update: I just wanted to clarify that when compiling the above list, I counted sites with tip jars or non-ad affiliate links (e.g. Amazon) as primarily noncommercial. In specifying what was commercial, I was most concerned with advertising (text, banner, popup) and overt commercial situations (company blogs, blogs for magazines & newspapers, etc.). There’s no clean distinction between commercial and noncommercial sites, but I think the “ads & pro blogs vs everything else” distinction is useful in talking about how the situation has changed in the past couple of years.

The Guardian hears from US citizens about their initiative to write to undecided voters in Ohio. Among the Brits’ many transgressions: bad teeth, tea sipping, colonizing North America, and shitty food. We’re kind of an angry country, aren’t we?

AsianMack Super Filter “[sifts] through Apple’s iTunes Music Store so you don’t have to!”.

Profile of typographers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones.

Paul Shambroom will share his photographs of American town meetings this Wed at the Apple Store.

Why the Zagat’s guides suck. The new guide is “fairly creepy”, “equivocating”, and “supposedly pithy”, compiled by “majority rule”; use the Web instead of this “hornswoggling humbug”. “SooooEEEE.”

Tommy Corn from I Heart Huckabees has a weblog on Blogspot. Recent topics: The Petroleum Situation, Caterine Vauban, and the meaning of life.

The extended DVD version of The Return of the King is available for pre-order on Amazon. The film is now 4 hours and 10 minutes long, although the credits alone probably take up about 20 minutes.

Nick Denton, pornographer. Fleshbot is releasing its own porn films.

The faith-based Presidency of George W. Bush. My main problem with Bush has always been not what he thinks, but how he thinks it. He could be pro-choice, against the Patriot Act, pro-science, for gay marriage, favor individual rights over corporate rights, etc. and I still wouldn’t vote for the guy.

Even evil needs some salad every once in a while.

Steve Jobs is back to work at Apple after time off for cancer surgery.

Will Amazon enter the DVD rental market?.

More clues point to a Google IM client.

Tag surfing

Since I don’t live near a warm beach, I did some Flickr tag surfing this weekend instead. In roughly the order I discovered them, a story:

If you’re on drugs, you may end up getting a kiss at a party from a crazy drunk person. If you’re lucky, that someone might be a sexy blonde model with a great ass in a bikini.

(Kiss is my favorite, particularly with the hard rock fans sprinkled in.)

PowerPoint to the People is a PowerPoint contest being held in Berkeley. If Lessig showed up, he would 0wn.

National Novel Writing Month is coming up.

Jon Stewart for President. His recent Crossfire appearance is both sad and hilarious.

Novacaine addled

While handing my cup of soup over the counter, the African-American woman who ladled it out for me asked in such a way that the “s” was almost silent, “crackers?” I nearly shot back, “what’d you call me?” as a joke but instead bit my tongue, smiled, and thanked her. Lucky for me the bite didn’t hurt due to the massive amounts of novcaine coursing through my mouth from a morning jaunt to the dentist…although that and the accompanying dull aching pain may have contributed to almost putting my foot in my mouth in the first place.

The World is a new development by a company called Nakheel that is “an enormous world map made up of 300 individual islands”.

The super sizing of Star Wars action figures. “In each image, the Star Wars figure on the left is from 1979 and the one on the right is the re-issued version from 1997.”

12 areas to watch for the effects of global warming. “Climate scientists say they have identified a dozen weak links around the world, regions where global warming could bring about the sudden, catastrophic collapse of vital ecosystems.”

Dear Internet, you think you know me but you don’t so keep your advice to yourself. “My God, I was just trying to tell a story.”

Tests show promise for malaria vaccine.

Google already has an IM client of sorts.

On using Legos in a practical way (

On using Legos in a practical way (to spool film in this case). Great hack.

Campaigns should be using Google AdWords to advertise on topic-based search results. I had assumed the campaigns were doing this…I’m kinda stunned that they aren’t.

Eyetrack 2004 Heatmap. Great way of showing how people look at news sites.

Google Desktop

(Rambling ahead…) Google Desktop beta. Early impressions anyone? I think it’s pretty damn cool…a baby step towards the GooOS. Do a regular Google search and GD results are inlined right at the top (see screenshots for how it all works). How are they doing that technically?

I’ve cranked up the size of my browser cache…now that GD can index every page I’ve ever viewed in my browser, can I afford to throw any of it away? This one-ups what A9 is doing in caching visited sites and searching past search results.

Could this be Google’s portal play? If they’ve got info on all the files on my computer, why not display my latest calendar items, emails, online buddies, etc. right on Google’s home page?

But then there’s the privacy issues. Is Google using information from my local drive to improve my search results? Should they? “Mr. Kottke, I see you’ve mentioned ‘President Bush’ in a recent email. Here are some Google News stories on that topic.” Useful, but well, you know.

A co-worker wants to put Google Desktop on a Web server and use that as a search engine for a Web site. Not sure if that would work, but it’s an interesting idea. I’m sure some smart hacker will soon figure out how to expose his/her GD search results to the outside world.