Idea of the day: a Thumbs-Up button in the browser, which you click whenever you find a webpage that interests you. Click it up to three times depending on how much you like it, a la TiVo ratings. Clicking the button either posts to your own weblog, or maybe to a central website that aggregates ratings for browsing and allows you to syndicate your own ratings to your weblog, if you have one.

This would be an ideal way to manage my upcoming links sidebar and, if centralized, a great way to browse new links by people I trust. No personal weblog or technical skill required. Get to work, LazyWeb!

Update: Brad points to StumbleUpon, which handles ratings but no weblog integration or syndication. And Graham points to Erik Benson’s Morale-O-Meter, which is a bookmarklet that posts website votes to a links sidebar. Very nice, thank you both.

I’m guest-blogging over on Jason Kottke’s Remaindered links sidebar for the next couple weeks. The links come fast and furious, so check frequently. This is a dry run for my own links sidebar, which will have to wait until the next redesign.

Also, you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much here lately. My family’s been dealing with the rapid decline of my grandmother, so I’ve been spending almost all available free time at the hospital. While I’m not comfortable getting into personal details on my own site, my mom is baring her soul on her own site. It’s an intensely personal, difficult read.

Finally, a worthy parody. Everyone, meet Space Ghost Kid.

The following is my contribution to Newly Digital, a distributed writing project about early computing experiences started by Adam Kalsey. Read the other entries, and then write your own: Brad Choate, Steven Garrity, Anders Jacobsen, Dan James, Adam Kalsey, Cameron Marlow, Jeff Nichols, Chris Pirillo, Andre Torrez, and Bill Zeller.

Continue reading “Newly Digital: Hack's Retreat” →

The Transfiguration of Harold Maines is a documentary about a man with a dream: to become a horse. Not sure what to think about this, except that there must be a market for films catering to the human-equine transformation fetishists. At any rate, the trailer is very odd. (Hat tip to the sorely-missed Mister Pants.)