Digital Brainwaves

Clive Thompson writes in this Wired article about how Twitter isn’t the self-centered outlet it’s usually made out to be. In fact, it’s more the opposite:

So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it’s experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can’t explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn’t have the same addictive effect.) Critics sneer at Twitter and Dodgeball as hipster narcissism, but the real appeal of Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It’s practically collectivist — you’re creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.

This is, unfortunately, something I appear to be missing out on, as not very many of my friends use the service. I’ve attracted a few to at least follow me on the Twitter page, but only a couple have actually signed up for Twitter. I have to concede, it takes time to get into the habit of using it, but you do have to try it, and give it a fair amount of time before abandoning it. After a while, you get into it.

If anyone in my circle of “real” friends signs on, let me know, I’d love to add you to my list.

(Hat tip: David Hewlett — yes, that David Hewlett — via Twitter)

It started with the initial, invitation-only release of GMail, touting a gigabyte of mail storage online. Yahoo! and MSN Hotmail quickly followed suit, increasing their storage space to the same amount. Gmail doubled their own to two gigabytes, and kept continually increasing it:

Over 2833.644474 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.

…hinting that, as the space slowly increases, it’s effectively limitless.

Yahoo! has given up all pretense, and has announced that Yahoo! Mail will be switching to unlimited storage, with hints that other Yahoo! services, like Flickr (presumably the free version, as opposed to the Pro version, which is already unlimited), may not be too far behind.

First — classical horns.

Squeaker bike horns, that is.

(Hat tip: Dvorak Uncensored)

Then, a 1984 mashup — the original Apple Macintosh 1984 ad, assembled by someone who’s quite the Barack Obama fan. Obama doesn’t impress me all that much, but whomever assembled this clip certainly does.

(This got bounced down the page a ways pretty quickly after I initially posted it, so I’m bumping it back up for a while. — Pauley)

By now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen some of the new sections popping up over on the right.

Technorati and The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem both show how Digital Brainwaves links to and gets links from other sites in the blogosphere. Technorati scans and spiders pretty much any blog that appears, when scanned, to be a blog. TTLB only catalogs and checks on those blogs that specifically apply to be listed. Each site has a widget in the sidebar to the right; TTLB shows my standing in the ecosystem, while Technorati’s shows links to details about incoming and outgoing links in addition to a search box for the site.

Pajamas Media has set up a weekly Predidential Straw Poll, where you can indicate your interest in one candidate for each party (you can choose just one, but they encourage picking one of each). Digital Brainwaves is now a voting precinct in the straw poll, kinda like real-life voting precints in the actual election. You can vote your preference here and see how it stacks up against other readers, as well as everyone who’s voted anywhere in the poll.

Of the four new widgets, though, the one I’m most excited about is the one at the top of the sidebar. Twitter is basically an IM “away message” that isn’t bound to an IM account, and asks only for the answer to one simple question: “What are you doing?” Users can post their responses and receive updates from others via their cell phones as SMS (text) messages, via IM (AIM, Gtalk, and some others), or they can post to the Twitter web page itself. Mac users can use the application Twitterific to post and receive updates from their menu bar, and I recently del.icio.us-ed a link to a “search box” widget for Firefox that allows you to post updates to Twitter from the search box that appears in the upper right corner of Firefox.

My Twitter network is pretty scant right now, so feel free to join if you’re interested. Please let me know if you join, so I can add you to my network, too.

MacWorld 2007 starts today. I’m at work, so I’m not going watching a video stream all that closely or anything. Instead, I’ll be watching for details most likely the same way you would find out (admittedly, if you care — Macs aren’t everyone’s cup o’tea) — madly hammering on the refresh button for live updates on a gadget blog.

That said, be sure to check out Engadget’s coverage of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote. I’ll post about things heard later on tonight (I hope).

One of the neat things about Google Maps is the way that people can adapt it to make new services. Two that have come across my plate recently are a map of the Toronto transit system and a pedometer that lets you track where you walked and see how far it was after the fact.

(Hat tip for Toronto map: Transit Toronto)

Last night’s shuttle launch was scrubbed on account of weather, citing concerns about “cloud thickness and ceiling” over the launch range. I don’t know whether this is a concern for launch safety, or for a possible RTLS abort contingency. Scheduled plans have NASA planning to try again Saturday night at 8:47:34 PM EST.

One of my first memories of seeing things on TV is seeing the constant coverage of the disintegration of the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986. While some part of me must have realized that the rocket taking off into the sky and suddenly becoming engulfed in a fireball wasn’t what was supposed to happen, it nonetheless fascinated me. I drew pictures of what I’d seen for quite some time after that.

Over time, I eventually became a fan of The Way It Usually Worked­™. Combined with an introduction to the world of Star Trek a few years later, I became intensely interested in human spaceflight.

Later on, my family purchased a C-band satellite dish (the old ones, the big ones — this one was 8 feet in diameter) because we were too far out of town to get cable. With the dish, we were able to pick up NASA TV — live video from Florida for launches, from Mission Control in Houston, and often from the shuttles themselves in orbit. One of the coolest parts of having NASA TV was being able to watch video and photos sent back by Voyager 2 when it passed Neptune in 1989.

To that end, continuing developments in online media and interaction have made it possible to view NASA TV online. Click through to the NASA TV page to watch live video of tonight’s launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-116 at 9:35PM ET, and on through the next two weeks for ongoing mission coverage. For additional news and updates (often updated faster than NASA’s own site), check out Spaceflight Now, and their STS-116 Mission Status Center.

(to borrow from Slashdot: from the suspension-of-disbelief dept.)

I’m a few weeks behind in watching Jericho, so I’m using part of the weekend to catch up.

This episode is too old to be much of a spoiler issue, but I’ll cut it just in case.

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