Inside View

My Blog Shortlist

BERLIN -- Unlike some A-listers, I cannot maintain and will not consume a link list comprised of 1000 sources. It's simply better to check the flow through the eyes of seers. So when I open my bloglines to see what's up, I read six site summaries before I finish my morning coffee and I feel I've topped up my morning information hunger pangs.

Berlin Street Art

GERMANY'S CAPITAL CITY has some of the most impressive street art on the planet.

I'm making a point of snapping as much as I see but I know I'll run out of storage space because that's what happened on my earlier visit in Spring 2004. For now, it's fun seeing a city whose municipal workers view grafitti as part of the landscape.

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Image from Loso

art

Blogging on autopilot

I PUT THIS BLOG on autopilot a few days ago because we're in Berlin for New Years.

Some stuff will automagically appear in this space as we immerse in the real world without a blogging distraction. One of our first stops--the Brandenburg Gate at night.

Not feeling safer

DUBLIN -- One hour before boarding Aer Lingus to Berlin and the pre-departure checklists, metal wands and familiar disgorging of pockets don't make me feel any safer. False secuity is bad practise. That's a point made by Bruce Schneier and master thieves like Bill Mason.

Donate

IF YOU BELIEVE in giving a donation to the victims of the South Asia earthquake and tsunamis and you have an Amazon account, you can donate via one-click. One hundred percent of your one-click donation will go to the American Red Cross.

You will receive a confirmation e-mail that may be used as a receipt.

Donate with Amazon 1-Click to the South Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Disaster Relief Efforts here

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via A9 and Amazon

charity

Livehttpheaders

MOZDEV -- One of the things I miss about riding the 69 bus from Citywest to Dublin City is overhearing developers talk about browsers. Some of those Citywest developers are using Daniel Savard's Live HTTP Headers inside Mozilla Firefox to debug web applications. You can also see the kind of web server used by the remote site and see the cookies sent by the remote site.

Technorati needs a superusr hook

AFTER REALISING THE BLOGGING aggregators lagged in spotting the Indian Ocean tsunami I thought it would be relatively simple to fix that--give superuser pings to trusted bloggers.

That way, a single burp from Scoble would become a top 40 item on Daypop. (That happens now, but it takes up to 12 hours to regurgitate in the form of cross-links or trackbacks.) Scoble's ear was on the action but the combination of remote occurrence, low frequency holiday blogging and spam noise did not elevate the information to a top forty item. It needed to be the moment Scoble cited it.

Blogpulse Round-up

BLOGPULSE -- Although many of the citations in the Blogpulse Annual Round-up are predictable, several caught my attention because they affect either college readings or college consumption patterns.

• Genocide vs Homicide vs Torture
• Friendster vs. Orkut vs. The Facebook  shows that Friendster has staying power.
• iPod vs Tivo vs NGage suggests all three complement a consumer's diet for gadgets. As expected, interest in the iPod continued rising throughout the year.
• Planes vs. Trains vs. Boats showed interest in rail events held steady.

Skunkworker

KILKENNY -- Motivate your team and they keep working when the team dies. I used to work as a team member while roaming a beat-up corridor of the Pentagon, rotating between offices near the South Parking Lot and the purple water fountain. In many ways, I was a skunkworker. No one had to write an effectiveness report on me and no one had to monitor me. I just did what project teams recommended, met deadlines, and saw three projects to completion. You can find skunkworks all across every major industry but none is as interesting as Ron and Greg's Graphing Calculator Story. 

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Ron Avitzur -- "The Graphing Calculator Story"
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Watchlist Berlin

KILKENNY -- The URL with the most trustworthy information about Berlin is the Berlin wikipedia. I think it's worth considering the wiki's perspective about the top tourist attractions in Berlin because I've seen most of them and they're stunning.