Remember urination? So 2004. Now we're peecasting! Pass it on.

I love Caterina.

OK. So, blogging is basically impossible. But here:

• How Berkeley Can You Be? parade photo essay — absolutely hilarious. (Via Nelson's Weblog, which has become a favorite.)
• Terizm, Terizm, Terizm - also hilarious, but for all the wrong reasons. (Via Joi.)
  
• Today's best spam subject line: "gesticulating still more anxiously" - indeed!
• At Web 2.0, but I don't have time to blog it. Jeremy Zawodny, on the other hand, is the new Heath Row — he's covering it intensely.
• Ev says goodbye and Ben and Mena take 10m in funding. There you go!
  
• If you read the same blogs as me, you'll have seen the oft-acerbic and oft-intelligent remarks by the prolific commenter pb@pb.com — the best thing thing to come out of Web 2.0 for me is that I now know the real identity of pb@pb.com.
  

I've had this post about Adam Bosworth, Alchemy and the Google browser sitting around for months now and it is driving me crazy, because I want all the credit for guessing this before it happens. So, for the record, if Google is making a browser, and if it is going to be successful, it will be because there is a sophisticated local caching framework included, and Google will provide the reference apps (replying to emails on Gmail or posting messages to Google groups while on the plane).

This modern world! We're thinking about moving our office and definitely want to stay in Yaletown. I looked around on some of the big property management sites but got frustrated with their search. So I typed in 'Yaletown office space' in to Google and the first result was the Yaletown office space blog - each post is a new space for lease. Cool :)

Not having enough time to finish writing a post that I started 7 weeks ago now is starting to drive me nuts. Not having enough time generally is sucking. I'm down to an average of 4-5 hours of sleep a night over the last month or so. But the causes are all good, so ...

In the meantime, I need to link to this kick-ass press about Flickr though (I think this link is time limited). My two favorite lines:

But the folks who've created www.Flickr.com get it. They get it, and then they went and beat up some kid on the playground and they took his stuff, too.

(hee!) and ...

The Flickr folk succeed, essentially, by stealing damn near every single great idea that's floating around on the Internet.

That last point is very true. People are so afraid of stealing, and they're so afraid of being stolen from. It's insane. Because by "stealing" I just mean taking other people's ideas. That's what ideas are for. That's why there's music. That's why there's culture.

A lot of innovation goes on in our offices, but one of the reasons the results are good is because we have no fear of recombinant idea folding. Our egos don't get fed from being recognized for inventing cool shit and then taking all the credit for it, but from playing the game large, on the field with everyone else, part of the ecosystem; we have no 'not invented here' syndrome.

A update on Gmail, sylloge.com and spam:

One thing I didn't realize was that Gmail lacks any way to empty your spam folder without going through it page by page, selecting all and then deleting. When you have 275k+ spams, that means 2,750+ times skipping through the process, which obviously is never going to happen.

So, my mailbox filled up pretty quickly. Around the end of July, I predicted it would be August 25th at 8pm. In the event, it appears to have been on August 25th at 11:25am.

I didn't get around to checking it until a few weeks later, but that's where it seemed to have stopped, and the meter read 102% utilization of my 1GB of space. Now, a little over a week after that login, I am receiving mail again, and am down to 101%. How'd that happen.

Turns out that Gmail is now automatically deleting spam older than 30 days. In my case, it hasn't quite worked out - the last page in my spom folder is all messages from July 15th (perhaps it is catching up - I can image some really serious database replication issues as they start doing so many deletes).

As of right now, I have 270,504 messages marked as spam and another 7,448 in the inbox (almost all of which is spam as well). My ISP has turned off the catch-all, which may help.

I can't tell how big the gap is in between the end of August and [whenever service resumed in September] -- I paged through many times trying to find it, but 50 pages only got me to Sept 16 so I gave up -- but I am very curious to see whether I will always be at or over the 1GB limit now with just the 30 days worth of spam.

Ben gave me his new HP [smartphone wifi thingie - what's it called, this one?] to look at, including the handsome settings screen he designed. I couldn't help but slip a few random appointments and tasks in for him to deal with. This afternoon, he had half an hour for "Think about Deleuze." Now, by IM:

dude, "think about deleuze" popped up while i was in the middle of ranting to someone about the 'contours of narrative space'. it made me smile.

Just wait till he gets to March 7th, 2006.

Here's an example of why I love work so much: we needed to make a slideshow thingie for people's photosets. So Eric whips it up and I'm slow in sending him UI component grapics. So in the meantime, he makes it just work with favorites, and personal tags, and the global set of all photos tagged with the same word (explanation here). Cal gets back at 11pm from giving a talk to the local php group, whips up some scripts for fancier urls. Next morning Caterina, George and I settle on a design for displaying them, and up they go.

But the really cool thing is this: flickr.com/photos/tags/decay/show - an excellent slideshow presentation that just emerges, created by no-one/everyone. (Replace 'decay' in the URL with 'green' or 'sky' or 'clouds' or 'paris' or whatever.)

I've never worked in a context where so much gets done in a day.

Just over four years ago, I got a digital camera.

Flickr and Del.icio.us

joshua023: gonna stab the next person who proposes coming up with a tag scheme to be used by everyone
sylloge: me too
sylloge: nerds
sylloge: THEY DON'T GET IT
joshua023: we should start a tag consulting agency
joshua023: people would be like
joshua023: how do we organize our data?
joshua023: and they'd pay us $800 an hour to say 'tags'
sylloge: Joshua: Tags.
sylloge: Stewart: Definitely. Tags.
sylloge: Joshua: Yep.
sylloge: ka-ching
joshua023: thank you, drive through

Kottke posted good musings on 'web as platform' which makes me itch to say a bunch of things, but I kind of have to hold off for a little longer.

I will re-iterate one point from Marc Canter's reply though:

- Data needs to be portable. If Flickr starts to suck, you should be able to easily move all of your photos to a better service.

DUDE - FLICKR AIN'T GONNA EVER SUCK. IT ROCKS.

And if that wasn't enough, I will say two things: (1) syndication is continuous partial export (so, in a sense, it is already there) and (2) part of our promise to paying customers will be that their photos and all metadata are safe and accessible. That means server uptime, backups in multiple locations, ability to order CD/DVDs, and, absolutely, the ability to export everything.

In other words, whether or not it is easy to move all your photos to a better service will be up to the better service. But we'll do our best to ensure that is a moot point.

Andrew Otwell has a great and meaty review of Malcolm McCullough's Digital Ground . Bottom line: "It's the best current book on interaction design, and should appeal to both designers and theorists."

I'm a fan of Malcolm's and having had the chance to hang out with him in Amsterdam (twice), Maastricht and Paris, also a friend. I will have to pick this up right away!

I never read much scifi — Caterina, reading over my shoulder advises me that you will all sneer at me for saying 'scifi' rather than 'SF' ... grow up, you pieheads! — growing up, but I've read maybe a dozen scifi books by now. Permutation City was recommended to me by so many smart people that I was excited to pick it up. Almost done now. The first half was really excellent (I'll reserve judgment on the second part till I am done). This stuff should have been required reading in my undergrad philosophy of mind courses.

But, even in good books there are bad lines. And one of the reasons I was never attracted to SF (see?) in my younger days was this way of putting things:

It was bad enough that her true body was a pattern of computation resonating in a tiny portion of a otherwise silent crystalline pyramid which stretched into the distance for the TVC equivalent of thousands of light years.

Indeed.

Folksonomy : social classification - a great neologism (coined by Thomas). Thanks for posting it Gene.

(Aside: I think the lack of hierarchy, synonym control and semantic precision are precisely why it works. Free typing loose associations is just a lot easier than making a decision about the degree of match to a pre-defined category (especially hierarchical ones). It's like 90% of the value of a "proper" taxonomy but 10 times simpler. (Of course, I don't know if there is a lesson there for the everyday work of IAs - different kind of problem.)

Update: I meant to link to our very own Cal Henderson's 'tags' plugin for Movable Type 3 (which lets you use tags rather than fixed categories in MT3).

(Mostly boring:) If you're like me, you hate the AIM 'feature' which allows you to be signed in at more than one location at a time.

I don't know when they started this, but now 'AOL System Message' (the friendly helper who tells you that you are signed on in more than one location) has some bot functionality: type '1' to have it log you off at other locations and '2' to get a count of places you are signed on at (I was signed on at three locations just now ... but I only have two computers, and I could have sworn I closed trillian before leaving the office).

Unrelated: One small complaint about the Blogger WYSIWYG editor, which is otherwise a fantastic implementation:

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Give me a freakin' break! <b> is never going to die, people (and I don't think it should, either. Cf.).