sippey.com

new drawing from timothy buckwalter

via timothybuckwalter.typepad.com

Love it.

sorry you lost; here's your invoice.

The AP story reviewing the "highlights" of Sarah Palin's book had this interesting bit:

She reveals that about one-tenth of the $500,000 [in legal bills] was a bill she received to pay for the McCain campaign vetting her for the VP nod. She said when she asked the McCain campaign if it would help her financially, she was told McCain's camp would have paid all the bills if he'd won; since he lost, the vetting legal bills were her responsibility.

Wow. Really?

inbound: houston

Inbound: Houston is a public art project that will replace highway billboard advertisements with images of what the viewer would see if the billboard wasn't there. Here's an example:

Via (and more photos at) notes.husk.org.

yes. you should call him.

Inspired by clusterflock...

I love the web.

killer tweetage

Ev's post outlining the rationale for the implementation of RTs in Twitter is full of interesting bits*, but this is the sentence that stuck out in the post. Emphasis his:

This last point [re. unstructured data] is not obvious but is particularly important for fulfilling Twitter's goal of helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible.

I think this is the first time I've seen Twitter's goal stated that succinctly. I Googled the phrase and scanned the Twitter website and couldn't find an occurrence of it before...did I miss it somewhere obvious? I like it -- it's deep, wide and actionable. And without being heavy-handed about it, it necessarily makes the acts of contributing to Twitter (tweeting, RTing, favoriting, following, listing) crucial inputs into the act of discovering on Twitter. (Think: social filtering, preference mining, influence analysis, etc.)

Ev goes on to define the perfect Twitter; emphasis mine this time:

The perfect Twitter would show you only the stuff you care about -- relevant, timely, local, funny, whatever you're most interested in -- even if you don't follow the person who wrote it. And, of course, it would give you ultimate, fine-grained control in how to do so. We want to give you more ways to help the good stuff bubble to the top.

Which is the perfect bookend to David Hornik's post this morning about Twitter and advertising.

* I have lots of opinions about commentless RTs, but am holding back until I've had a chance to experience them firsthand.

and i actually liked dumb and dumber

You know, I had forgotten all about CD-ROMs until this afternoon's visit to jimcarrey.com.

Good times.

greg knauss is on a roll

The latest from Greg: DIEFEEBLE, the wristband in ashen gray, "for leading that life of quiet desperation that you keep hearing about."

the case for twitter ads

David Hornik makes a compelling* argument for Twitter to bring on the ads. Esp. of note is the graf about context...

The very data others have suggested Twitter should sell to third parties is invaluable to create the necessary context for a successful advertising model. Not only will Twitter know the things about which any given user is tweeting, it will also know who that user is following and the things about which they are tweeting. That's a huge amount of context for advertisers. I'm guessing Toyota would love to advertise to an individual who tweets about shopping for a new Honda Hybrid.

Worth reading in full.

* I'm required to say that about any post from a board member of my employer. Have you seen the great LinkedIn / Twitter integration, BTW?

unsubscribe

Today is Maura Johnston's last day at Idolator.

i'd use this

Kindle for PC: perfect for tech and text books. Mac version coming soon; O'Reilly, it's about time to kill Safari.

oh i'm sorry, were we talking about your weekend?

Mena pointed me to Style Rookie ("Tiny 13 year old dork that sits inside all day wearing awkward jackets and pretty hats") and now I Can't Stop Reading. I'll do this this one time to get it out of my system and avoid reblogging every new thing she posts; here's the intro to her latest*...

Hi! How are you? How was your weekend? What did you do? What'd you think of TaySwift on SNL? What'd you think of some sports event that took place these past couple days? How's your cat? How's your dog? How's your husband? The newborn? OH UH HUH GOOD STORY GUESS WHAT

"Subscribed" is too weak a word.

* Yes, that's 7 "meh"s in the title of the post. See what I mean?

brief interviews

The Office's John Krasinski has written and directed a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I had no idea.

Two quick notes:

• Actually, I had no idea until learned about it via the always helpful Ezra Cooper, who writes that it "can maybe best be described as a scarifying experience. Not redeptive, or cathartic, certainly, but more of a bracing shove."
• If you Google the title, the IMDB.com page for the film now outranks the Amazon.com page for the book. Hooray for Hollywood! (And for AMZN, obviously.)

are close votes a feature or a bug?

I'm not quite certain that this is completely sound polisci -- public optics and the news cycle has to play a role in the political calculus of massively important president-led bills like health care reform -- but Rafe Colburn makes an interesting point about the 220-215 vote in the House yesterday.

Every vote over the minimum necessary to secure passage represents compromises that the Democrats as a group would prefer not to make. It’s not that Nancy Pelosi was lucky to pass the bill, it’s that the Democrats wrote the strongest bill they could that would get enough votes to pass. That’s good strategy.

a twenty year regret

Twenty years ago this week I was living in London, enjoying a semester abroad as a senior in college. Instead of hopping the first plane I could find to Berlin, I watched the wall come down on television. I've regretted that decision ever since.

predicting the future

I love this bit from Chris Dixon's blog post announcing Founder Collective.

We believe the best people to predict the future — and create it — are fellow entrepreneurs, not former bankers drawing graphs and developing abstract theses.

i am not a food blogger

But I'm a blogger who likes food. And this week I had three dishes at three restaurants in New York that are worth mentioning.

1. The filetti pizza at Motorino Pizza in the East Village. People in SF's East Bay (including me!) love to talk about how great the pizza is there (and it is!) but the filetti at Motorino's on Monday night was delicious. (Of course the food geeks at the table told me that the guy that used to be there (Anthony Mangieri -- who appears to be more than a little obsessive about pizza) is coming to San Francisco. Which is good.)

2. The breakfast potatoes at Markt in the Flatiron district. I had these on my last trip, and had forgotten about them. But when my eggs, potatoes and toast arrived this morning, I remembered. Delicious, with the right amount of peppers and onions layered on top.

3. The tagliatelle with meat sauce at Il Bastardo, again in the flatiron district. Il Bastardo is one of those places you'd probably walk right by, especially if you're a real food blogger. And the place itself is one of those cavernous places that probably had its back room rented out more often than not in the go go days, and is open until 4 am for the clubbers, but their taglietelle was great. The pasta was perfectly cooked, with a generous helping of just-sweet-enough meat sauce. Paired with an unknown sangiovese, it hit the spot.

There you go! Now I'm a food blogger.

the last days of gourmet

Kevin DeMaria posted a photo essay of the last days of Gourmet Magazine.

So good. (via)

developing the ambient array

Do you love cities? And architecture? And computers? And vague phrases like "ambient arrays" and "biophysical mesh networks" and "knowable material"? Do you dress primarily in black? Then chances are you could probably use Molly Steenson's new Urban Informatics Speech Title Generator to help you brainstorm your next talk at that great conference where other lovers of biophysical mesh networks will gather.

Favorites of mine:

• Discussing the Playful Map
• Activating the Physical Thing
• Developing the Ambient Array

no one suggested twenty-ought-ten?

Big news in the Times today about how car companies are choosing to pronounce "2010" in ads for new models. (Shortcut: they're going for "two thousand ten" over "twenty ten".) Here's Jon Pearce, group creative director at Team One, the agency for Lexus:

"Twenty ten feels a little slick, a little self-consciously futuristic. ... There's nothing worse than trying to position -- or reposition, for that matter -- yourself with forced lingo."

Because car companies have never used slick, self-consciously futuristic or forced lingo before. So why start now.

isthebaybridgeopen.com recap

Last Tuesday night, after Caltrans closed the Bay Bridge for repairs, I set up a single serving site: isthebaybridgeopen.com, and then proceeded to pimp it lightly here and on Twitter.

Just because I find this kind of stuff interesting, here's a quick summary of visitor traffic and activity. The data here is from Tuesday night through "now" (or whatever Google Analytics defines as "now"):

• 2,756 visits / 3,285 pageviews
• 45 comments, or 1 comment for every 73 pageviews
• 48 tweets, or 1 tweet for every 68 pageviews
• This was a local story, so the vast majority of the visits were from California
• 45% of visits were direct, 55% were clicks from referring sites

And the top ten referring sites were...

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. SFist
4. Google
5. Planet.mozilla.org
6. Baybridgeblog.org
7. mobile.SFist.com
8. oduinn.com
9. sippey.com (hey, that's me!)
10. bayarearidersforum.com

Obviously this wasn't a huge viral hit. But it was a fun little $15 / 15 minute project. And in case you hadn't heard, the Bay Bridge is now open.