Check it out at: haslayout.com

Previous to this past weekend, I've probably gotten a cumulative total of 4 unsolicited IM Spams in my life. Now I get one every hour, and I can only imagine that's going to increase. So far I haven't seen anyone else complaining about this online, but two other friends of mine whjo signed up for AIM Pages early on are having the same problem.

Stands to reason, and, frankly, I'm a little disappointed it didn't occur to me before. Sure, spammers can screenscrape your IM name from anyplace where it's posted in some sort of standardized or predictable format. In that light, AIM Pages is a well-formed treasure-trove of prevalidated usernames. EVERY PROFILE has a valid screenname right there with the same label. It'll be interesting to see what AIM does to protect us from this in the future. The not-too-distant future, I hope.

"In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as "illegal" file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little..., available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We're not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we're putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends." ... "Meanwhile, please enjoy the record. Everything else is secondary."

I haven't given it a spin yet, but remember being a fan of a couple of their older radio ditties. A close association with The Long Winters doesn't hurt much either. So, give it a try, and buy the cd if you like it. Let's prove them right.

harveydanger.com

PS - Thanks to Skampy for the tip.

It was amazing to be asked to be part of an Adaptive Path project, and to work with the amazing Jennifer Robbins, but it gets better:
This morning it was announced that Measure Map has been acquired by Google. Pretty cool, huh?

Congrats to Adaptive Path and the MeasureMap team, and special thanks to Jeff Veen for hiring me and Jennifer Robbins for being an amazing Creative Director and doing such a great job with the branding, iconography and the lion's share of the layout work.

Check in with Jeff for the full scoop: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/here-comes-measure-map.html

Standouts include a beautiful video for Stars' "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead", and an animated Arcade Fire video for "Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)".

Thanks to Jonathan at Bloklantis for pointing this out.

Google doesn't care, though.  The word means something and is an accurate description of what Google Zeitgeist does. So there.

According to Google, their Zeitgeist describes:

[s]earch patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google. For both breaking news and obscure information alike, people around the world search Google. This flurry of searches often exposes interesting trends, patterns, and surprises. The Google Zeitgeist page is regularly updated to reflect tidbits of information related to the search behavior of Google users.

So firstly, let's face it: A zeitgeist of Google = a zeitgeist of the internet = a zeitgeist of the world.
What other channel receives and parses more information for a larger demographic?  This is it if you want to know what the modern world is thinking.  At the main page, called the Zeitgeist Report, there is an overview of recent and common Google searches seperated by category and type.  From there, more granular queries can be made.  It's all very broad and simple and gives a very digestable view of recent transactions at Google.com.

Will this change your world?  I guess not, it's didn't change mine.  But it's very cool all the same, so stop hating. 

Creative Commons is in need of financial support. For the uninitiated, they are a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a simple, standardized way for content providers to control permissions to their work. All of the content on this blog is protected by a Creative Commons license and anyone can easily understand what that entails. How? Click the link and it's described there in simple, easy to understand, human readable words. Creative Commons has taken the initiative in protecting amateur journalists, photographers, authors, artists, bloggers, and the creative community at large and they've done it with aplomb. Let's all help them continue.

Support Creative Commons

So there are a few options here. You can wait for authorized updates from the developers. They're all coming, trust me. Or you can find versions that people have modified to work with Firefox 1.5, and hope they're stable. Some features can be replicated by other extensions that have been officially updated and you can try those out. Some people have advised modifying the config info for their actuall Firefox installation to make it think that it's only version 1, thereby causing it to not reject extensions that are not allowed for later versions. This will cause Firefox to allow ALL version1-ready extensions and frankly, makes me a bit nervous.

I choose instead, to modify the extensions directly. This is a more granular process and effects each extension individually. This way, you won't unknowingly install extensions that aren't rated for your Firefox, it'll have to be very deliberate. The odds of anything catastrophic happening are very slim. Worst case, you may have to startup in safe mode and uninstall any unstable extensions. All the same, I'm not in any way advising or taking responsibility for damage caused by what I'm about to tell you.

How to modify your Firefox Extensions to work in newer versions

• go to the download page for the extension
• Right-click and download the extension to your desktop
• Open the xpi file with a package explorer such as WinRAR
• Open the file called install.rdf in a text editor such as Notepad
• Find this line:

  <em:maxVersion>*</em:maxVersion>

• Change the line to:

  <em:maxVersion>1.6</em:maxVersion>

• Save the file back into the xpi
• Double click the xpi to install

Well, it finally got to be too much to bear. As much as I adore the SlayerOffice MODI2 dom inspector (also availble as part of Steve's outstanding Favelet Suite), but it just doesn't match the ease of use of Aardvark. I finally went and google for an answer, and sure enough, there was one.

From Wordpress support:
Download a working updated .xpi from here:
http://nmi.ath.cx/~seb/aardvark.xpi - and if that server's down, try this:
http://ka2er.free.fr/files/aardvark.xpi

There has been a good amount of concern and criticism about the upcoming adaptation of C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in Chronicles of Narnia series, but I'm wondering if christian ideologies might be finding their way into the cinema under cover of blue tights, rather than in the form of a CG lion. I wonder if there was any concern over this line when it was first uttered by Marlon Brando in 1979's Superman? See the trailer here: Superman Returns Trailer

AttentionTrust seeks to retain that information as a user's own property. The argument is essentially that if companies are benefitting from this information, that it has value. If it has value, is a commodity, and has an owner who must be compensated. This seems to me like a new take on an old debate. This is less a privacy concern (although proivacy certainly factors in), and more of a fair trade issue.

Herman Simon once said:

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."(via Bokardo).

This view clearly denotes attention as a quantifiable commodity, which AttentionTrust President Steve Gilmour has dubbed "Attention Metadata". It could be easily argued that the sale of Attention Metadata would benefit advertisers as much as users. Rather than spend money on developing clever ways to encapsulate and then analyze searches, browsing habits, click patterns, or even email messages -- and then spend money in court defending these practices -- the money would go more directly to the users, who would provide cleaner, more useful data. The user, in turn, would get a more personalized ad experience, increased transparency as to who has what information, and some sort of compensation.

I have enrolled with AttentionTrust and I'll be very excited to see how far they can take the issue.

I spent a good portion of the last few weeks brainstorming this design with Jeff and Jen and I think we came up with something simple, accessible, and fun... but mostly I'm just excited to have been a part of the project thus far.

There will be more to come before and after the yet-to-be-determined release date of the Measure Map service. Keep checking in with Jeff to get the latest news and be sure to submit your email address at MeasureMap.com if you'd like to be invited to test the app, or be notified when it becomes publickly available.

Measure Map is the first web traffic and stats package designed just for blogs. It is also the first product designed and developed internally at Adaptive Path. The tool will help bloggers understand trends at their site, and help them to better serve their visitors. Measure Map's simple, clean interface will make sense of the numbers, and setup is a quick, painless, 1 minute process. Find out more at measuremap.com.

Flock

The sole Flash suite out there fighting a wave of Ajaxian productivity suites and email doodads (read: Zimbra, Roundcube, et al), Goowy certainly had potential, but also the stink of the many failed Flash apps to come before it. Goowy, however, has so far proven itself to be a quick, intuitive, and pleasant experience. Some might have sought to hide the fact that this is a Flash app at all, as it's clean lines and svelt aesthetic seem to blur the line, but alas! The good people at Goowy fly the Flash flag proudly, as any right click will instantly reveal the app's true nature.

The Goowy desktop worries me a bit. There's nothing overly iffy about it, it has a news aggregater, an inbox, and an unobtrusize look, but I'm always wary of solutions that offer me yet another 'desktop'. If the aggregation were as powerful and comfortable as Netvibes, this might be a particularly useful state. I'm sure additional data sources are coming.

The mail interface should be instantly familiar, and the folder structure is typical and flexible. I didn't have any luck getting Goowy to play nice with my existing POP email accounts, but I'm sure that will eventually be a transparent feature.

The highlight for me was the games. I don't want games. I don't want to sign up for email and get a 'community', or a chat client or a bundle of games, but as soon as I clicked on the games button, my eyes focused on Sonic's spikey blue head. Immediately, I clicked on said head, and found myself immersed in a genuine platformer, right there in a Flash popup window. It was truly a blast and when I completed the first level and was congratulate in questionable English "Sonic got trough act 1!", I decided to do this write-up.

I'll have to spend some time with Goowy to decide whether it's really a viable alternate, but so far, I'm impressed. My gut tells me that I may end up with a cleaner, more streamlined approach, such as Roundcube. Either way, it'll be better than Squirrel Mail. Man, I hate Squirrel Mail.