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Entries from February 2007

Nice work if you can get it

February 23rd, 2007 · 1 Comment

Bill Clinton has earned over $31 million in speaking fees since he left office. The link is to a tool created by Adrian Holovaty at the Washington Post that shows when and where he spoke and how much he was paid for each appearance.

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The ups and downs of OpenID

February 23rd, 2007 · No Comments

O’Reilly Radar has a good post on the state of play in the OpenID world. I’m certainly watching closely to see how the number of sites that accept OpenID grows. Becoming an OpenID provider is simple, altering your authentication system to accept OpenID is significantly more complex.

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Are .plan files the direct ancestor of blogs?

February 22nd, 2007 · 1 Comment

Rogers Cadenhead asks the question. My answer is yes. They’re one of the direct ancestors, anyway.

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Dealing with comments and feeds

February 22nd, 2007 · 1 Comment

Tim Bray has some thoughts on how to make sure comments on his blog posts get the recognition they deserve.

One problem I’ve always had with commenting systems on blogs is that I haven’t yet found an easy way to follow a conversation that interests me. (On my own blog, I subscribe to the comment feed, [...]

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Everybody loves cartoons

February 21st, 2007 · 1 Comment

Japan’s government attributes the fact that none of their trucks in Iraq were attacked by insurgents to their being decorated with cartoons.

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Salon had the Walter Reed story two years ago

February 21st, 2007 · 1 Comment

The Washington Post has gotten a lot of attention for its series on poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, not just because the story was important but also because it achieved immediate results. The military is already addressing the problems the journalists documented. What I didn’t know until today was that Salon had [...]

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A pipe from your Netflix queue to your DVR

February 20th, 2007 · 2 Comments

I’m just linking to this because it’s an extremely cool idea:

I would love to see a Yahoo! Pipe (or program) that set my Windows Media Center to automatically record movies from my Netflix queue, and then remove them after they are successfully recorded (am I asking too much?). For example, the Turner Classic [...]

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Who says you can’t have it all?

February 20th, 2007 · 6 Comments

Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame argues today that in the end niche brands are where consumers are headed, and that big is usually equated with bad. The two examples he provides are Converse, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Nike, and Scharffen Berger, a small chocolate company that was bought out [...]

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Great customer service

February 19th, 2007 · No Comments

Joel Spolsky has written up an excellent guide to offering great customer service. What he doesn’t say is that the customer service tips he offers are good advice for just about any relationship.

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Simple sketching application

February 19th, 2007 · 3 Comments

Anyone know of a simple Flash application that lets you sketch pictures and save them to show to others? I’m sure there are dozens of applications like this, but I can’t find exactly what I’m looking for. Here’s a use case for the application: you need to sketch your apartment layout and email a [...]

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