There's nothing better than chatting with customers...especially when you're reading their book at the same time. (OK, not at exactly the same time. You know what I mean.) Now on Everything TypePad, a brief interview with Alex Ross.  (And that, ladies and gentlemen, makes Ross the direct or indirect subject of three of the last five posts here. I'll move on soon, I swear.)

It's not quite as simple as text, but TaskPaper seems to add just enough on top of plain text to make it worth using for keeping lists.  Of things.  To get done.

I suspect that there is a very small intersection between the set of people who appreciate lolcats and the set of people who appreciate Jenny Holzer. If, like me, you find yourself in that intersection, you will most likely appreciate these loljennyholzers.

The aforementioned Alex Ross in The New Yorker on his blog...

Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to procrastinate. Yet a nagging sense of possibility also drew me in. Classical music, my subject, was thriving on the Internet in unexpected ways. Not all blogs, I discovered, were devoted to cataloguing continuity errors in the films of George Lucas; a smattering of musicians, composers, and listeners were writing on music with intelligence and verve, revelling in the chance to express ideas that had no other immediate outlet.

The Standing Room liveblogged the City Arts & Lectures conversation with John Rockwell, Alex Ross and Linda Ronstadt.

8:13. Linda memorably describes Pavarotti's voice as like that of a lost child, abandoned by his mother at the side of the road, howling at desolation. Alex drinks some more water.

From Stating the Obvious, February 1997: The Network Diagram.  "I've abandoned link list. In its place I've drawn this simple diagram, a roadmap to the self-absorbed world of Internet publishing. Six degrees of separation? Ha. Try two at the most."

Extra credit for identifying the publications that still exist.

Spent a little bit of time at the Web 2.0 summit this afternoon, with the express intent of catching the following early afternoon lineup:  Kedrosky, Butterfield, Recordon & Fitzpatrick and then Safa Rashtchy's panel discussion with a group of baby boomers about how they use the web. Kedrosky convinced me that I need to learn more about dark pools; Stewart showed off some really sexy new photo mapping features coming soon to Flickr, and Safa's panel was as entertaining and enlightening as ever.  (This couple was on the panel, and they were great.)

I'm admittedly biased, but the highlight for me was David and Brad. They did a great job of laying out the problem of closed social networks: as more and more applications benefit from social interaction, connecting those apps to an appropriate set of your friends will become a more frequent occurrence. In short, soon you will be very very tired of using the word "friend" as a verb, if you're not already.

The solution is a combination of a technology tools, a mindset change, and user education.  The technology stuff is basically there -- XFN, FOAF and OAuth, for example -- and is being demonstrated now in the Six Apart Relationship Update Stream that David announced today. The mindset change requires social network operators to open up that data, which will come, even if it takes a while. The education piece is about providing simple user experiences that (a) teach users how this works and (b) shows them the value of expressing at least a portion of their graph publicly and (c) allows them to control and maintain their relationship data.

David's got a post up on O'Reily Radar that summarizes their talk; it's a good followup to his post on Opening the Social Graph at sixapart.com.

My God, I can't top linking to Webb. "You're very clever, young man, very clever.  But it's finite-state machines all the way down."

Thanks for playing, ladies and gentlemen, the official winner of the October 2007 edition of "the girl on a bike game" is miz_ginevra, who (un)knowingly takes the whole thing full circle.  (See, it's like when a stadium does the wave, and it makes it all the way around...oh, never mind.)

I've found the best twitter post ever. (Are twitter posts really called "tweets"? Seriously?) (Via this, in a kind of roundabout and meandering way.)

Nov 2007 . Oct 2007 . Sep 2007 . Aug 2007 . Jul 2007 . Jun 2007 .

(un)filtered is a product of michael sippey. there are older things at sippey.typepad.com/filtered, with archives back to 2003, and even older things at stating the obvious.