Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment June 12th:

• Two Current TV Journalists Sentence to 12 Years in North Korean Labor Camp - So the short story is this: "Two journalists weaken U.S.", but that's hardly news is it? The vast preponderance of so-called journalists today is to pick at the speck's in America's eye while ignoring the logs in everyone else's eyes. Oh, that's right, the logs in everyone else's eyes is Americas fault. My bad…
• Could Twittering about your vacation put your home at risk? (Associated Press) - Don't just let anyone be a "follower". Don't accept friends invites on any social media except from people you really, really trust. If you can, separate your work networks and your personal networks so you can post only appropriate information to each audience.
• Major Mount Changes Coming to World of Warcraft - Hmmm… maybe levelling a Pally wouldn't be that painful after all.
• Great Move, EC. Now We Have to Download IE Ourselves… - Hurray for Microsoft! I'd love to see them continue to play hardball with all the "sue-to-win" pansies. Want people to come to your browser? Build a better one. Some have and are doing quite well, but always forget that Microsoft continues to carry the weight that make our current technical enjoyments what they are. MS has their faults, but their pro / con balance sheet is skewed way over to the pro side.
• Free Anonymous BitTorrent Becomes Reality With BitBlinder (Enigmax/TorrentFreak) - hmmmm… I'll have to put this on my "play around with" list.
• Why Natal Is a Big Deal - If Natal can indeed live up to the hype and get released in my life-time, then it truly is a big deal. Then it will take a generation or two of games being made for it to realize its potential. So hopefully by 2013 or thereabouts, we'll really be into a new gaming world… hopefully.

Things I read that I found interesting and worthy of comment June 10th through June 11th:

• Trillian Astra Enters Public Beta: Does Anyone Still Care? - I keep meaning to upgrade my Trillian client, but just haven't gotten around to it yet.
• Not Everyone is Excited About Facebook Vanity URLs - Interesting and a big toodoo (how you spell that anyway?) about nothing. Those that care one way or the other get and use what they want to accomplish what they want. There's nothing on the web today that identifies any entity behind any actual name or "handle" beyond corporate sites that have certificates behind which is a reasonably trustable verifying organization (begin Verisign flame-wars). Cool if there were a personal version, but those that have been tried thusfar have failed. I believe it was because they didn't wrap enough other benefits behind merely certifying that <a href="http://myname.com">myname.com</a> and <a href="mailto:fname@myname.com">fname@myname.com</a> actually is certified as Fname Myname who lives in State, U.S.A.
• CIOs: The Econalypse Ate Our 2009 Budgets - No other shocks here than to see someone else using "econalypse", though I prefer my econolypse spelling. Buckle in tight folks we aren't anywhere near the bottom so long as the feds continue to hold the stick in full nose-dive. Guess in one respect the ground rushing up to fill our sights and completely obliterate us is "stimulating". Here I thought the stimulus was supposed to be for recovery, but guess it was for fear and panic.
• Clip, Blog, Tweet, and Share with Amplify -

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment June 8th:

• Twitter "Not Playing Ball" but Will Experiment With Verified Accounts - hmmm… online identity service anyone? Yeah, it would need a nice long list of identity and security features to be really viable, but I have the list and the technologies to make the list happen exist, so…
• Fear of Aerial Images - Not only refuse to be terrorized about terrorism. Refuse all the fear-mongering from everyone. Turn off the news, go live your life and you will be amazed at how much better everything will seem and eventually be as you move forward pursuing you dreams and ignoring those that want your dependency.
• Activision 'Disappointed' by Lack of Price Cuts at E3 - I'm disappointed as well. Guess my purchase of a PS3 continues to slip into the future and at this point will wait till we come out the otherside of the 'econolypse' I mentioned in my earlier posting. That means probably no PS3 till 2011 or later depending on how much longer my fellow citizens continue to tolerate the socialist overlords and their apparent messiah.
• Paid Twitter Streams Are Here: Super Chirp (Michael Arrington/TechCrunch) - Difficult to square the reports of impending economic doom and the idea that people would spend vital, "survival" dollars to get celebrity tweets. People mag and other rags aren't enough at the check-out line, eh? Ah well, I'm sure I'm spending money on things that others would deem silly as I otherwise prepare for the impending and at this point, unavoidable econolypse.

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment June 5th:

• Information Card Specification Standards Approval Vote - Could the process to get us strong, usable authenticaiton and SSO functionality for the web take any longer? Sheesh! I'm tired of the toy projects. Someone build something robust, all-encompassing and secure… NOW! (P.S. OASIS seems an appropriate name as the identity crowd sits on some isolated island for the dithering academician. There's gotta be an entrepeneur in that group somewhere willing to some to the mainland and deliver something real.)
• Motion Control To Lengthen Console Hardware Cycles - Makes sense as the add-on motion functionality from both Xbox and Sony seem to be fairly technically advanced such that the peripherals will probably approach the $100 mark all on their own. Add $100 to a basic $199 Xbox and now you're already $50 over Wii at $249. It will be interesting to see what MS and Sony throw in as the bundled "game / interactive" title.
• Bing Off to a Good Start: Takes #2 Spot Ahead of Yahoo - Temp lift? Yeah, probably. Still neither is doing anything to really take out Google. Would be interesting to know what the relationship is between search provider and online e-mail, portal, calendaring, online apps provision is? I mostly use Google as I long ago tired of Yahoo's headache inducing pages. I was a long-time Hotmail user and continued with it after MS bought it, but the calendaring and other tie-ins just didn't keep up with Google, so I switched a year or so ago. So now my email, calendar, online docs, RSS reader, etc. are all tied into my blog, Facebook, phone, etc. So guess what? Google is my search provider since it is everywhere I "go" and it works for internet and all the rest of my online "life". Is pursuing purely "search" the best way to get "search" destination numbers up or should focus on total online offerings be the goal means with "search" as the consequent reward?
• A Look at the Zelda Teaser Image - Zelda… yawn…

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment June 4th:

• Time Puts Twitter on Cover, at Vanguard of American Economy (Ryan Tate/Valleywag - Gawker) - Hugely LOLing right now. Figures the moronic marxists at Time would think a company with lots of buzz and no business model in sight is at the Vanguard of Anerican Economy! Kind of like how all those trillions of "stimulus" money is actually going to get the private economy moving. At least their stupidity / insanity / blind-commitment-to-socialism is consistent. Gotta give them that. So far, the only business model around Twitter are what other businesses are doing with it. I'm not saying Twitter isn't building value, but only as a message transport mechanism. Is TCP/IP or SMTP or FTP or SSL at the "vanguard of the economy"?
• How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live (Steven Johnson/Time) - Everyone I know tired of the breakfast cereal type updates after their first week using Twitter or it's kin. Also if this guy's experience of using Twitter in a conference is "life changing", then he either hasn't really been on and around internet tools for very long or has a really hideous life. Just sayin'.
• By puzil - Picture of the day.
• ThoughtFarmer, Cultivating Social Intranet Software - I have no specific comment on this particular article other than to comment on not even being passably interested in reading one more thing about "social-net-anything".
• Palm Pre Review Roundup - Good to see someone providing something that may drive the iPhone to greater heights. For now, neither the Pre nor the iPhone give me an itch to give up my BB Curve.
• Adapter plays HD files off of any hard drive - So if you don't have an Xbox or PS3 to stream video from your home network to your TV, this is a pretty cool, though manually intensive (attach / remove hard drive from PC) way to watch video on your TV.

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment June 3rd:

• Arming the Boston Police with Assault Rifles - yep, would be a much better expenditure to spend the money as a subsidy for private citizens to arm up. No, seriously.
• Hands-on with Wave: Weird and quite wonderful (Rafe Needleman/CNET News) - The coverage here and the description makes me think of an online Groove. Cool product built by the Lotus Notes guy and purchased by MS. Groove's main claim to fame was that it was peer2peer. Interesting to see what Wave turns out to be if / when it grows up.

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment June 2nd:

• Sucks to Be Nintendo… - Come one everyone, let's show some proper levels of skepticism out there please? Everything I've seen on this is clearly emblazoned with some such disclaimer, "Vision presentation only, actual functions and features may differ". Sure, this is cool if you can actually pull it off and I'm SERIOUSLY dubious that this can be done in the next couple of years. Cool as the Wii controller is it isn't anywhere sensitive, responsive or accurate enough for serious game playing. Anyone who's played with the Xbox or PS2 camera games has to be seriously skeptical, right?
• Millions of Chinese Twitter Users Suddenly Unaware That I Dislike Ramen - No wonder President Obama sees so much to admire in the advanced Chinese regime. At least the cattle are moved around by modern trains though, eh B.H.O.?
• Nintendo Hard at Work on Wii Catheter, Wii Hip Replacement - OK. So regardless of anything else in this article, the title alone made me LOL.
• US CIO Kundra Calls for Web 2.0 Co-Creation of Knowledge With Citizens - Friggin' government. The internet has been fine without you. Go away. Don't you have some hard working entrepreneurs fortune to confiscate or something? Oh, that's right, you'll steal that money to fund this complete and utter boondoggle. At least thats all I hope it adds up to. Bahhh, bring on the revolution!
• Ten Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed - and here I thought the point of being a musician was to achieve the title of this article? Or is that just guitarists? Sorry to be so flippant, but I'm so VERY tired of this topic. Distinguish yourself from the clutter of junk out there and you'll do fine. If not, then embrace the oft-repeated ethos of "not selling out". Mission accomplished… I'm not buying.
• Supreme Court to Review 'Business Method' Patents (Michael Orey/Business Week) - So unless you work for a consulting company where your ego is already way out of whack, any reasonable thinking person knows this whole business process patent crap has been just that. The Amazon "one-click" fiasco was the poster child for this for a long time. The interesting thing to me isn't whether the court will come down on the side of business method patents as being unpatentable, but how they define the line separating what "ideas" may or may not fall into that category. Of course, the court has ruled contrary to the Constitution quite a bit lately (no, I'm NOT talking about domestic - overseas wiretapping… completely legal under Rep and Dem admins), so I could be unpleasantly surprised, though this case hardly ranks as high as some other bonehead calls by the high court lately.
• *Left 4 Dead 2* Announced For November - Yeah, baby! Bring me more of that zombie shootin' goodness!

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment June 1st:

• Five Reasons to Be Terrified of Google Wave (Chris Dannen/Fast Company) - I know what he means by all these silo'd social nets that need interconnected, but the promise I see in Wave is that it would replace all those disparate parts or let you use them if you wished. Let someone else tie these things together into a package. I gave up Twitter by and large when all my family moved to Facebook. Why twitter and try to tie that into Facebook when that function already exists within Facebook? All of this is turning into way too much trouble. Reminds me of trying to manage friends in ICQ, Yahoo and MSN back in the dinosaur years. What goes around, comes around, eh?
• SOE Pulls the Plug On *The Matrix Online* - Huh… I thought this was dead quite a while ago.
• Can We Finally Commit to the End of Knowledge-Based Authentication? - Ditto. I've been here for along time, but good to now have supposedly "non-biased" players weigh in so I can point my customers to it. Then perhaps, they'll consider it and not just pass it off as "vendor spin". Given the rash of Xbox Live accounts that were behing "pwned" via Q&A guessing a few months back, I'm surprised this hasn't happened in big enough numbers at a financial institution to make it to the headlines.

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment May 28th:

• Mole: PSP-Go details confirmed, smaller PS3 is on the way (Ben Kuchera/Ars Technica) - Bigger, smaller? Who cares? The PS3 needs to be cheaper. Drop the price to $299 and I'm probably "in". Though that probably continues to slip daily with my lack of faith in the economy's ability to recover given the government's continued interference / "help".
• Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today? (Tim O'Reilly/O'Reilly Radar) - This looks like what I've been wanting from the "social net" experience. Open the thing up and get all my comms unified into a meaningful, logical and actually consumable (i.e. comprehendable) format / model. I don't want to Twitter at Twitter.com or some standalone app. I don't want to Facebook at their .com site while my IMs and email all continue to live elsewhere… and NO, Facebook's "inbox" is not my email or even semi-desirable communication channel. I'm sure Wave isn't the end-all-be-all, but it appears to be a huge step in the right direction.

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment May 27th:

• New Modern Warfare 2 Trailer Finally Premieres - Oh Yeah! This will definitely cause me to set aside my WoW for a bit of playtime with this. I'm sure my FPS playing brother-in-law will be ready to go to war on this one!
• Identify: A Firefox Add-on For Researching People - Cool idea. I need to experiment with this across my various "identity" sites.
• Stop Trolling Craigslist & eBay, Try Easy E-Commerce at Woya - Very interesting. I'll definitely be checking this out.
• Do people care about data correlation? - Good stuff, particularly since this discussion does include the last point, which rounds out the various reasons quite well. Imagine how the results would skew for the general population which includes people like me that studiously avoid any "fill out this questionnaire and get cool stuff" pop-ups or mailings from even legitimate sites.
• World of Warcraft Getting Updated Druid Forms - Phormtaiqr says, "Hurray!"