Charlie Rose on Charlie Rose

I love Charlie Rose, and this is a great, absurd, clip of Charlie interviewing himself on all things Internet:

Blue Jeans vs the Monster

I've never liked Monster Cable products. I always feltl like sucker buying such overpriced, over-packaged goods (ridiculous amounts of hard-to-break retail plastic covering makes it difficult to get to the cables).

Then in 2005 I found out about Blue Jeans Cable. Nice people, fair prices, good quality products that just work, no hype, no bs. It's what I use for my home projection TV system.

Today there's a great buzz circulating regarding litigation between Monster and Blue Jeans Cable, regarding Monster's claim of infringement on Blue Jeans' part. Blue Jeans fires back with an excellent letter. I hope Blue Jeans prevails.

The Digg Inside Twitter

Every day there are three sites I'm guaranteed to visit. In no particular order, Digg, Reddit, and Twitter. With Twitter I'll visit numerous times, via desktop browser, via iPhone's m.twitter.com version, via RSS.

Despite the fact that Twitter is supposed to be about "what are you doing now", what a lot of people are "doing" is discovering stuff on the net and sharing it via Twitter. Hence, URLs. Hence, the proliferation of tinyurl.com URLs in tweets.

How different is this from Digg and Reddit? How much overlap is there in terms of popular URLs disseminated via Digg and Reddit versus Twitter each day? Put another way, how many URLs do I go check out via Twitter versus Digg versus Reddit each day? I'd say 40% reddit, 40% Twitter, and 20% Digg.

What's a shame about Twitter then, is that it doesn't DO anything with all of those valuable URLs. It doesn't track them, it doesn't aggregate them, it doesn't let them automatically rise and fall on "popularity charts" like Digg and Reddit. Since Twitter is more of an ever-moving river of conversation, and if you turn your attention away for a moment, you'll miss something, you wind up missing a lot. Way, way more than Digg or Reddit.

It doesn't have to be this way. Twitter ought to consider aggregating the URLs that users are sharing, and proving a view into those URLs. I wanna see what the most popular URLs are being "twittered about" each day.

Think of it this way, Ev, Biz, et al: you guys do this, and I have lots more reasons to stick with Twitter and fewer reasons to keep visiting Digg and Reddit each day.

Whatcha think?

UPDATE 4/15/2008 Looks like someone's working on this . . . Twittlinks....

UPDATE II - 4/16/2008 -- Well, well, well, this is very interesting and along the lines of what I was looking for ---> alphatwitter.com

Finally, Someone's Got Video

One keeps hearing about the alarming, continent-sized "island" of plastic rubbish floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and yet, where's the video? Why hasn't CNN or NBC or BBC or CBS or someone gone out and videotaped the thing in detail?

Well, CBS hasn't but some little outfit called VBS has. Worth watching, albeit somewhat annoying and clueless narrators (8-9 hrs to fly from LA to Hawaii? On what, a DC-3?).

Here's the link to Part 1 of the video (it's 12 parts long).

Gas in La Jolla

I tell ya, years from now when the historians finally dig out the truth of this administration, we're going to find out what I've suspected since day one: it was just about oil, and money, and gaining as much of it as possible. It'll go down as the biggest heist of all time, exceeding in value all other money crimes combined in the history of the world.

The Cord Has Got to Go

Go to Chumby's home page and you'll see some cool pictures of the device. But you'll also notice that there's this line that runs from the side of the Chumby to somewhere off-screen. That's the power cord.

The Chumby is a cool device but in my personal opinion its main detractor continues to be . . . that pesky power cord. This device is crying out to be mobile. The market demographic for this kind of device surely expects a gadget that runs on batteries not power from a wall socket.

The very first time I played with a Chumby my very first reaction was the surprise that a power cord was a requirement. And my second reaction was, why not get rid of the power cord and figure out an innovative way to cause the inevitable and interminable squeezing of the Chumby by its owner to be the generation of power to recharge the batteries?

Heck, it could be a spin on the old "Don't Squeeze the Charmin" ad slogan. Call it "Please Squeeze The Chumby". The more you squeeze the longer the battery lasts.

I still think they oughta give that a try. And hey, it'd prolly be patentable.