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Lately when I’m watching older TV shows and movies, I’m struck by the number of plots that just wouldn’t work today due to the prevalence of mobile phones and smart phones. The inability of one person to get in touch with another was a key tool in the toolbox of fiction writers everywhere. You don’t need Lassie to go get help when you can dial 911 on your mobile phone, unless you’re on AT&T, in which case your phone won’t work from the bottom of the well, or pretty much anywhere else. ...

In light of the launch of EveryBlock and some hosting issues, Adrian Holovaty is shutting down chicagocrime.org and has posted his reflections on the site. As he points out, it wasn’t the first mashup ever launched, but it was the first one that enabled me to see what was really possible when you combine data from a number of Web sites to create something new and different. These days, the word “mashup” almost seems dated, but back they were fresh and startlingly innovative. ...

Mark Paschal at Six Apart has created a new Movable Type called Action Streams. The idea is that it compiles your activity on other sites into a single stream of data that you can use on your weblog as you wish. It’s an evolutionary advancement over other systems that provide similar functionality, but I think it’s important. Sites like Facebook build these sorts of streams by tracking your activity on your own account and on other services that you attach to your Facebook account. If you run your own site, you can generally use widgets provided by other sites to include recent activity on your Web page. For example, there are a number of ways to display recent Twitter tweets, del.icio.us bookmarks, or Flickr photos on a blog. Beyond that, most sites provide Atom or RSS feeds, and there are plenty of tools that you can use to consume those feeds and display them on a Web site as well. ...

Andrew Brown noticed that Pluck Site Life, a community software package for newspaper Web sites, handles obnoxious commenters in an unusual way: it enables moderators to put them in a ghetto where they see their own posts but nobody else can see them. Here’s why it’s inhumane: But in all these cases, the public punishment of bad comments serves to encourage better behaviour, which is what we ought to be trying to do. People go online to show off, and they will respond to incentives about what sort of behaviour gets them admired. ...

Yahoo has established itself as an OpenID provider. This really is the year of OpenID’s full emergence. If you’re not accepting OpenID logins for comments on your blog, you probably should be.

Mindset Media has created a profile of the typical Mac user. As a Mac user, the question isn’t whether you exhibit these qualities (of course you do), but which of your friends who aren’t yet using Macs are the best targets for conversion based on these criteria. Your eMusic-subscribing, Prius-driving, organically-farmed-broccoli-eating, microbrew-drinking, Kucinich-loving, crappy-Acer-laptop-using, know-it-all buddy really needs your help.

Last year there was a huge squabble over the order in which various states would hold their primaries. A few state parties wanted to subject the unfortunate citizens of their states to more automated phone calls and other annoying forms of campaigning, so they moved up their primary dates. The national Democratic party penalized two of them – Florida and Michigan – by decertifying their delegates. The delegates assigned in those primaries will not count toward naming the nominee. That may or may not have been a good idea, but all of the Democratic Presidential candidates agreed to abide by the decision and not campaign in either state. None of the major contenders even had their name on the ballot in Michigan other than Hillary Clinton. ...

As movie studios rely more and more on international markets to bring in revenue, movies are getting simpler and more universal. That explains what has struck me as the diminishing quality of major movie studio releases in recent years. I draw my general impression of what the studios are putting out by keeping track of the new movie HBO shows each Saturday night. Most weeks I’m not interested, and when I do bother to watch, I’m almost universally disappointed. This effort to make movies more broadly popular not just among Americans but across the world can probably be blamed for the sad state of movies today. ...

I’ve been trying to figure out what it really means to vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Their differences are much more stylistic than substantive, or at least that’s how it seems to me. Republican voters have the advantage of being able to draw plenty of contrasts among the candidates on that side of the aisle. A vote for John McCain is a vote for something very different than a vote for Mike Huckabee or for Mitt Romney. With the Democrats, it’s a bit tougher to judge, so I’m always looking for help from the media. ...

Veteran North Carolina political observer Kirk Jones explains why 2008 may really turn out to be a <a href= http://www.exileonjonesstreet.com/2008/01/27/impressive-win/">transformational election. Not only did Democrats turn out almost twice as many voters for their 2008 primary as they did in 2004, but they also did so without resorting to the kinds of petty corruption that politicians traditionally resort to. I’m as skeptical as anyone about just about everything, but even I look for signs of hope. ...