Journal Entries

Once In A Lifetime

Olympics happen once every four years. Most are unlikely to ever experience them in their own country. I get shivers whenever I see banners with the Olympic Rings on them. This is once in a lifetime event, and I intend to make the very most of it.

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View From the ISS at Night

Knate Myers stitched together this wonderful time-lapse video, using photographs taken from the International Space Station. The music is Sunshine (Adagio In D Minor) by John Murphy.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

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Roger Ebert on the recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado:

This would be an excellent time for our political parties to join together in calling for restrictions on the sale and possession of deadly weapons. That is unlikely, because the issue has become so closely linked to paranoid fantasies about a federal takeover of personal liberties that many politicians feel they cannot afford to advocate gun control.

App.net

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Dalton Caldwell:

We’re building a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers.

Our team has spent the last 9 years building social services, developer platforms, mobile applications and more.

We believe that advertising-supported social services are so consistently and inextricably at odds with the interests of users and developers that something must be done.

Help us create the service we all wish existed.

Putting my money where my mouth’s been for the last few years, and backing this audacious project. I hope it succeeds.

What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable?

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Derek Powazek:

Every community-based site in the history of the web has essentially been a stab at creating a social network. Most of them fail as businesses, with the rare exception of small, lucky communities that become self-sufficient but not exactly prosperous. What if that’s just the way it is?

A Silicon Valley Bar

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A million people in Silicon Valley walk into a bar. No one buys anything. Bar is declared a rousing success.

– Jeffrey Zeldman