Laundry hanging inside the house signals
Laundry hanging inside the house signals the arrival of winter.
Uncategorized
Google has so many ways to read the news
news.google.com, Reader, FastFlip. Now “Living Stories“
Ultra-orthodox Judaism meets Radical Islam
An article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz carried the story of how ultra-orthodox rabbis “in a desparate bid keep flock away from Web,” are denouncing even ultra-orthodox Jewish web sites. The page carried a scary banner ad for a video seeking to expose radical Islam: “Obsession: radical Islam’s war against the west”.
Thoughts about privacy and social networks
How social networks impact privacy and influence our lives
On emusic
Over-all, I have had a good experience with emusic.com since I joined this music download service in early 2006. At that time it cost $10 per month for 40 downloads. It was the only for-payment legal music service available in Israel, except for some Russian sites, whose legality was murky enough to make me wonder …
Telephones in the modern era
My first experience with a cellphone was while staying in a Bedouin tent in the Judean desert. It was at a time when Maaleh Adomim, a large Jewish settlement, was encroaching on Bedouin who had lived in the area since they were ethnically cleansed 40 years ago from the Negev desert. In order to protect …
A better facebook interface
One of the problems for Facebook’s interface is that people post at an unequal rate. Those who post a hundred messages a day drown out those who post just occasionally, and this happens despite attempts to balance things. A solution to this would be to introduce an alternative “friends” view which would present just the …
Red Corner
Red Corner is a movie about an American who comes afoul of the Chinese legal system. It stars Richard Gere and a lovely Chinese actress named – I think – Ban Lee. I’m writing from an Ipod and it isn’t so easy to look up references. Quite a terrible movie. I wasn’t so worried about …
Memories and experience
Walking in the woods today I turned my thoughts to my early childhood. The fields and woods were growing dark under a gibbous moon and there was plenty of time to let memories surface. I thought of the houses in which I lived, of moments with parents, of childhood friends. It was actually surprising how …
Tagging would fix Twitter and make it more useful
Nova Spivack likes to differentiate interest networks, like Twine, from social networks like Facebook. The problem is that people also use social networks to follow their interests, especially as in the case of Twitter. The result is that if we want to follow, say, Dave Winer’s thoughts on RSS, we also have to follow his …