who

SF New Tech picks: Lunch-o-tron meets comment-o-meter

I'm at the San Francisco New Tech Meetup tonight, immersed in Web 2.0 startupville. Tonight's lineup of pitches:

Conduit. A utility for making toolbars to go with your blog or site. We recently covered the tool's new capability that lets the user swap between different toolbars they've installed. The concept is interesting: It lets site publishers put their sites into toolbars. I didn't expect users to take up this idea, but the company's executives report strong growth and more than 12 million users.

SezWho. This is an interesting system that allows users to … Read more

fooWHO: social bookmarking with a pinch of eHarmony

A new site named fooWHO grabbed my attention earlier today. It pitches itself as a delivery service for links and stories that are "just for you." The site bases this presumption off of a rather lengthy personality test that you fill out at your leisure, consisting of questions in a dozen different categories, ranging from arts and entertainment all the way to your taste in automobiles and their transmissions. The remainder of the service is very similar to Reddit, with a front page of popular stories and a pool of submitted links that can be rated up or … Read more

Minisodes: For those who find 30-minute sitcoms too deep and drawn out

The average half hour sitcom runs about 22 minutes, but for some people that's simply too long. Most successful web videos average between 2 and 5 minutes, and the folks at Sony Pictures Television have found a new way to deliver classic television to this shortened-attention-span set. As highlighted in a recent story by CNN, The The Minisode Network is presented on Myspace and offers a swath of retro television episodes that have been carefully edited down to five minutes in an effort to update the old shows for the post millennium web format.

The network offers a variety of programming from Dilbert to Diff'rent Strokes, but is something lost in translation as the video editors slice and dice everything from the original that is considered not essential? Are these mostly ancient sitcoms even worth watching today in either form? While I can't be certain whether it's a result of the hack jobs or the dated material, most of the mini-episodes I watched felt incomplete and not really worth watching. The editing was clean and seamless, but the stories lacked any real development (something that's already a problem with the sitcom genre). The jokes were still there and the punchlines were also kept intact, but the timing was wrong and the humor was all but lost on me.

… Read more

Lines

When I was a young college student, I camped out overnight with friends in a parking lot outside Tower Records (remember them?) to buy tickets for The Who's 25th anniversary tour. This was the summer of 1989, and the Internet was a university research tool--I didn't log on to send my first e-mail for another year, and back then I only had one friend to communicate with! To get decent seats (or, sometimes, to get any seats) for a popular show back then, you either had to wait in line outside the nearest Ticketmaster outfit, or call the … Read more

Tom Merritt gets a theme song via the Lifehouse Project

Tom Merritt does a lot of podcasting, so clearly he needs his own personal musical theme. If you do too, check out The Lifehouse Project's Method Music. Developed "under the patronage of Pete Townshend," songwriter and guitarist for The Who, the online service collects your voice, a noise you make, and a rhythm you tap out, and then magically creates from these inputs a brief melody that is supposed to capture the spirit of your inputs without simply just mashing them together.

The service didn't work for me, but it liked Tom. He got a lilting, … Read more

Some phones should never be made

There's really not much to say about these phones. Just look at the picture--it's too depressing to spend much time discussing them. What we will say is that, according to Gearfuse, these are Samsung 707SC handsets slathered rather disgustingly with colored stones made by Swarovski. (What a surprise!) They were just released in Asia, made for Softbank Japan. As far as we're concerned, Samsung had a better idea with its Simpsons models.

Untitled.

Tangled mess or work of art?

Definitely the former. This "accessories sculpture" was created when I innocently tried to pull a 6-pin FireWire-to-6-pin FireWire cable out of a box stored underneath my desk. One tug and out popped this circuitous entity, made up of wires, cables, adaptors, earbuds, a couple cassette adapters, and one Griffin TuneCenter. This type of thing doesn't happen overnight.

Taking suggestions for a title.