Shut Up And Click It

Neocons petition the White House for secession

In another storm of brilliance, a bunch of grassroots petitions have sprung up on the White House's site asking for states to be allowed to secede from the Union. Texas has the most signatures so far, followed by Louisiana and another dozen or so, including New York(!) and New Jersey.

Interestingly, Texas seems to be the only one of these with unique language:

The US continues to suffer economic difficulties stemming from the federal government's neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending. The citizens of the US suffer from blatant abuses of their rights such as the NDAA, the TSA, etc. Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect it's citizens' standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.

(I, for one, would like to see Texas balance its budget without the federal funds that make up 37% of its state revenue. Or any of the "red" states, for that matter.)

The rest all have this boilerplate, with just the differing state names plugged in:

As the founding fathers of the United States of America made clear in the Declaration of Independence in 1776: "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.""...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government..."

I wonder whether these are just innocently copy/pasted by people seeing the links get passed around or there's some astroturfing going on here.

As Anil Dash points out, this is a milestone for open government. And no, I don't expect any of these petitions to go anywhere.

The New Early-Adopter Addiction: Turntable

Turntable is a game changer. You join via Facebook; for controlling growth, you must have a friend on Facebook that is already a user of the service at the moment. After logging in, you browse the different music rooms or create your own. If there’s an open DJ spot (five maximum to a room), you click “Play music” and your avatar transports to the stage. Queue up some songs—they have an extensive library or you can upload your own. Songs played in the room rotate evenly between the DJs. Listeners in the room can then “awesome” a song (and their head starts to bob, and the DJ gets a point) or they can “lame” a song.

via techcrunch.com

Turntable is freaking *awesome*. I was on there all day at work listening to everyone’s tunes, and I’ll probably be on there all day tomorrow.

Give it a shot, you won’t regret it. turntable.fm

Things to Watch (And Use) in the Year of the Curator

There’s already been a lot of buzz about how 2011 will be the Year of the Curator. If you haven’t read it yet, start with Brian Solis’s fantastic State of the Blogosphere 2010 (down for me right now, so here’s a cached version) in which he defines the role of curators:

In social media, a curator is the keeper of the interest graphs that are important to them. By discovering, organizing, and sharing relevant and interesting content from around the Web through their social streams of choice, curators invest in the integrity of their network as well as their relationships. Information becomes currency and the ability to recognize something of interest as well as package it in a compelling, consumable and also sharable format is an art. Curators earn greater social capital for their role in qualifying, filtering, and refining the content introduced to the streams that connect their interest graphs.

I wholeheartedly agree. The social media firehose is getting ever bigger, and it’s getting harder and harder to pick out the things truly worth reading or watching. I thought I’d spend some time writing about the tools I use to find (and share) interesting content.

First up: MetaFilter. MetaFilter is nothing new, but it’s where I turn when I want deeply engaging content and a high-quality conversation around it. MetaFilter is free to read, but costs $5 (one-time fee) if you want to post or comment. It’s also moderated by humans. Always. I’m amazed that these two features are sufficient to keep it completely free of spam and (most) stupidity. If nothing else, throw it in your RSS reader.

Next: Flipboard. Flipboard is an awesome little iPad app that displays images, text, and video from your social networks, RSS feeds, and Flipboard’s own human-curated categories (only the ones you want, of course). Outside of the their own curated lists, it doesn’t sound like much, but the alternative views of your social feeds are really great, bringing things to your attention that you might otherwise have missed. The main thing I love about it is that it’ll inline images or articles your friends link, thus decreasing the friction of having to load things yourself and increasing the chance that you’ll see something really great.

My companion to Flipboard is Reeder. Reeder is a gorgeous little RSS reader for iPhone, iPad, and (soon) Mac. The interface is fantastic, it syncs with Google Reader so you can keep proper read/unread status across multiple clients, and it has a host of built-in methods to share things with your networks. And, of course, it can save to your Instapaper account if you want to read something later.

The SAY 100. This is a list of 100 influential online voices, as started (but not finished) by SAY Media (yes, I work for them, but this is still a really awesome project!), who picked a leading voice for each of 10 topics, and then asked each of those ten to pick their top ten. The result is a list of great starting places for whatever topics you might be interested in learning about or following.

Another neat thing I use with a certain group of online friends is Naus. Naus is powered by a dead-simple engine for tumblelogging written by one Charlie Loyd, a good friend of mine. It doesn’t do a lot of things that you can do with Tumblr, but that’s not the point. It’s a place for a handful of us to dump links, images, videos, and essays we want to share with each other. I highly recommend doing something like this with some of your friends — it’s a really great way to share things with people you know will be interested in them, and to read things you know you’ll be interested in. Keep it to a small group, no more than 10 or 20. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what happens.

Last, but not least: Stellar. Stellar is brand new. Think of it as a meta-feed (“flow” is their term) of everything your friends have marked as  a favorite on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo. It lets you share tweets and images/video as easily as retweeting or pasting a link, but it’s totally opt-in. Only people who are following you on Stellar see your Stellar favorites show up in their flows. Get an account (okay, put yourself on the waiting list), and start clicking that star button on Twitter and Flickr!

Gawker hacked in response to 4chan taunts

So, here we are again with a monster release of ownage and data droppage. Previous attacks against the target were mocked, so we came along and raised the bar a little. Fuck you gawker, hows this for “script kids”? Your empire has been compromised, Your servers, Your database’s, Online accounts and source code have all be ripped to shreds! You wanted attention, well guess what, You’ve got it now!

via www.mediaite.com

Gawker seems to have pissed off the wrong people this time — a group of crackers (not hackers) calling themselves “Gnosis” broke into the Gawker content management system in retaliation for Gawker insulting 4chan.

A torrent of stolen data including source code, content database dumps, and user account data has been posted. The best part? Gawker stored passwords using crypt(), aka DES with a 12-bit salt. This means it’s pretty damn easy to guess at passwords. If you were registered for commenting on any of Gawker’s sites, you should make sure none of your other accounts use that password immediately.

Somehow I find it hard to sympathize with Gawker here.

Facebook messaging is a snooze

Facebook just announced their new messaging system.

Count me out.

I’m not particularly interested in giving Facebook yet another way to slurp up more of my data into their systems where I can’t easily get it it back.

I’ve always hated Facebook messages. Mostly because I have to access them through Facebook’s site (or app) and they’re really hard to share with anyone who isn’t on Facebook. The original implementation got a bunch of other stuff wrong too, most notably the fact that in an N-way conversation for N > 2, the default action is reply-all. (Why on god's green earth?!)

This doesn’t strike me as a really great way to think about communication. No subject lines? No threading? Okay, they’d better have some kick-ass search, and I doubt that they’re going to. They claim to be “working on” IMAP support. Why isn’t it here now? The answer to that is that Facebook doesn’t want you to use IMAP because then you won’t go through their site to get to your messages.

Sure, I’ll probably get my @facebook.com address just in case someone really can’t figure out any other way to contact me (there’s a reason I list my email address and IM screen names on my Facebook profile), but I’m not about to start using it instead of real email and IM. Maybe if it were anyone other than Facebook.

… hey, maybe that should be my new slogan. “Anywhere but Facebook”. What do you think?