"We eat with our eyes," Iliana Regan told me, "and then it travels to our brain, and we love the sensation of the taste and the hot. I think it does a lot for the senses." Pretty steamy, right? Food is sexy. There can be no doubt. But just like sex, it's not always pretty. And in food and sex alike, humans love to take pictures.
There are laws about the sex part, but food is not censored in our society. The temptation is strong in the smartphone age to share our daily deeds with the world. It makes them less mundane. Meals are miraculous, really. Food is sacred. It gives life. But the rest of us on the Internet aren't at the table with you. We can't taste how good it is. Sometimes, if the light's not quite right, or you're too close up, what feels really good to you might look really gross to us.
I am a big fan of David Eggers, first having come across his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, part novel, part autobiography, several years. Since then the man has become a paragon of bringing good writing to the children of various inner cities with his 826 Valencia projects (where I once volunteered, name after the initial effort's address in San Francisco), starting up a quarterly literary magazine called McSweeney's, a book imprint, and the quirky but always interesting website.
This week online one can find the article In Which I Fix My Girlfriend's Grandparent's Wifi and am Hailed as a Conquering Hero, a short piece of fiction that just speaks volumes to me. I thought you would enjoy it as well.
Since 1955, the North American Aerospace Defense Command has tracked Santa Claus like a Soviet missile. Back in the day, it was CONAD - the Continental Air Defense Command. When Canada joined the defense grid in 1958, offering access to Santa's Arctic airspace, it became NORAD. To this day, NORAD staff, family and friends volunteer to track this bogey across the Yuletide sky.
These days, NORAD and Google work together to track Santa. Now that the private sector is so good at tracking things, Google can let citizens track Santa Claus themselves. For the 2011 NORAD Santa exercise, anyone with a smartphone can search 'Santa' on Google Maps for mobile and get a Santa target lock in the palm of their hand.
And here we all thought we were changing the world and creating The Future. 74% of online adults say they use the Web for no reason whatsoever. The Internet is just there, dangling over our heads like a mobile full of planets and kitties and smiley faces, and we're just staring up at it from our cribs like a bunch of little babies.
At least, that's what this Pew Internet study is getting at, I think. It gives a bunch of different numbers, really. They range from 53%-ish to 81%-ish. It's pretty hard to nail down. Anyway, various kinds of people use the Internet for various kinds of things, including nothing. Here are some charts and graphs to look at.
MMMmmmm. Thanksgiving. The most delicious American holiday. What did you have? Macaroni and cheese? Pumpkin pie? White meat or dark meat? Doesn't matter, because @FAKEGRIMLOCK, a giant robot dinosaur, is sneaking up behind you, and he has very diverse tastes. Tomorrow is NO EAT FRIDAY. Will you survive?
You may recognize that metallic crunching sound from the comments section on ReadWriteWeb or many of the other big blogs, or perhaps out in the wild on Twitter. FAKEGRIMLOCK stomps around the Web, thriving on code, coffee, beer, bacon and the bones of stupid human bloggers and commenters. Mostly out of fear of becoming his NO EAT FRIDAY meal, I sat down with FAKEGRIMLOCK to ask him what he wants. After devouring everyone else at the table, he turned to me and said, "HERE INTERVIEW. OR ELSE."
It's time for the US Open tennis tournament and inside the players' lounge, there's an ominous sign posted by the event's Tennis Integrity Unit warning of the dangers posed by Twitter.
Snapped quickly and posted online by CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell, the posted sign and policy are an amusing reminder of what happens when the exciting world of social networking and the exciting world of tennis come together under the watchful eye of people who could care less about the Twitter part. There are many, many things that could be done with Twitter to make the tournament even more engaging. No doubt some of those things will be done. But the Tennis Integrity Unit would like to warn you, players, about what not to do. Check out the sign below.
NPR music podcast All Songs Considered just released a show about breaking up with your favorite bands. It got me thinking about favorite web apps or services that I've broken up with. So in the tradition of Internet era music, I'm going to directly rip NPR's idea and breakup categories.
In this post I tearfully discuss past relationships with MySpace, Last.fm and Soup.io. I finish with a love story that has a happier ending: Flickr. I'd love to hear your own tales of web app woe in the comments.
The iPad is a futuristic looking device, but imagining something much like it isn't terribly new. In the video below, the former newspaper giant Knight-Ridder shows its vision of the newspaper's future - delivered by tablet computer. Circa 1994. It's amazing how much the company got right. The tablet's user experience, design and impact on media as a whole sound just about right. The timeframe predicted was 10 years too early. And the vision of tablets used without wireless content downloads is amusing, isn't it?
Venture Capitalists have a big impact on the software that hits the web and the rest of us have been fortunate to get a good look into many of their minds thanks to the recent rise of the blogging VC. Some VCs love to share how they think about various technology issues on their blogs - but what do they really love?
VC Larry Cheng posted his 4th annual Venture Capitalist Blog Index today, listing and ranking 155 blogs written by venture capitalists. I discovered it when a feed we have in our team RSS reader tracking comments posted around the web by VC Fred Wilson delivered the link. I put the list into ITA Software's Needlebase, scraped a list of all the blogs, then put them in a Blekko custom search engine. I searched for the word "love" (as I always do in any new search opportunity) and found that these 155 blogging VCs have used the word love in exactly 15 blog posts so far this year. What do they love? Read on for an amusing survey of 15 things blogging VCs love in 2011.
