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Tim Bray had this to say about bridge blogs: The part of my function where I relay issues and concerns and discoveries from the developer community into Sun is much more important than the part where I talk to the world. I prefer to deal with companies that respect me enough as a customer to listen to me, and I think that bridge blogs can be a huge part of that effort. Microsoft started looking a lot less like an evil empire when Microsoft employees started blogging. Not only did they put a human face on the company, but they made it clear that you could communicate with this huge company at a personal level. Ideas, complaints, and comments from customers seemed to be making it inside the corporate firewall. ...

One sentence on virtual gifts on Facebook: To date, users have exchanged more than 20 million virtual gifts, paying up to $1 for each, making them one of the site’s most successful revenue streams. Some of the gifts are designed by Susan Kare, creator of the icons for the original Macintosh and many of the icons in Windows 3.1.

Comcast is silently blocking a certain type of BitTorrent traffic in a malicious way. The link is to Ed Felten’s explanation of how Comcast’s blocking scheme works.

I think there’s a great misapprehension in the copyright industry that cost is the killer feature for online file swapping. That is to say that people use these services because they enable to get things they want without paying for them. I’m not arguing that isn’t the case for some people, but there’s also more to it. Here’s my usual process when I want to buy an album. First I check eMusic. If it’s available there and I have downloads left for the month, I download it. If I don’t, I put the album in the Save for Later list, in which case I may or may not remember to download it later. If it’s not available from eMusic, I hit Amazon.com’s MP3 store. If the album isn’t available there, 80% of the time I choose to just do without. (I have thousands of songs already, one album isn’t going to make or break my music collection.) If I were really desperate, I’d buy a CD, although over the past year or so I’ve lost my appetite for CDs completely. (I honestly think there’s a decent chance I’ll never buy another CD.) I know for sure I’ll never buy another DRM-protected track from the iTunes Music Store, and I have an iPod, so the other subscription services are of no interest me. ...

This is the first entry in what hopefully will be an entertaining ongoing series, The URL says it all: http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2007/10/kucinich_had_a_ufo_encounter_according_to_friend_shirley_maclaine.php

I learned a new term today – bridge blog. A bridge blog delivers the message of one community (country, organization, company, etc.) to an external audience, making that community more accessible to outsiders. James Governor points out that this was one of the most powerful functions of Robert Scoble’s blog when he was at Microsoft. Tim Bray does the same for Sun. I think the concept is interesting, particularly because I don’t think that “bridge blogging” can be completely effective if you set out to do it intentionally. An artificial bridge blog is basically just a P.R. blog, I’d think. ...

Apple just announced its results for the quarter that ended on September 29, and, um, wow did they put up some huge numbers. The one that stuns me is 2,164,000 Macs sold in the quarter, 400,000 more than they’ve sold in any other quarter, ever. (As John Gruber points out, a lot of people would have been holding up on Mac purchases because of the imminent release of OS X 10.5.) I can’t wait to see how many Macs sell this quarter. ...

Lots of blogs are abuzz today with the story of an Egyptian Abdallah Higazy, who confessed to being involved with the 9/11 attacks even though he was completely innocent. You may remember the story, summarized as follows: The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy’s life is worth garbage at that point, but … well, that’s why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States. ...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman blogs his rejection of New York Times book reviewer David Kennedy’s negative review of Krugman’s new book. Update: To clarify, the reviewer doesn’t work for the Times, he’s a Stanford history professor.

I worked out the design issue that I mentioned yesterday, and learned a few things in the process. The most helpful thing I encountered were the three most recent screencasts from Railscasts, which Jason Perkins pointed me toward. As an aside, if you’re not using screencasts to augment your learning, you’re really missing out. I think they’re probably the most information-dense way to learn development concepts that I’ve found – far more useful than book reading for example. I think that screencasts work well for two reasons. The first is that watching someone else do something is a very natural way to learn, and watching them work in a screencast is especially good because it’s as though you’re looking at their computer as they work, rather than watching them talk from a podium. The second is that they provide the opportunity to absorb other good habits through observation. I noticed three or four TextMate features I wasn’t already using while watching the screencasts that will certainly save me time down the road. ...