Couldn't be said better than a screenshot...

Thanks.

What type of searcher are you?

Slate distinguishs the seven ways people search using the mistakenly-released AOL search logs of 650,000 members.

Or go to Valleywag to search the logs yourself. Like User 1912452, "a psychiatric counselor looking for a job in Colorado, obsessed with quick weight loss. She's turned to the book of Revelation, the zodiac, psychic schools, private investigators, and Victorian poetry. She (or a patient) dreams about being drenched in blood."

Mashups

are one of my favorite things - synthetic creativity born from the creativity and generosity of open technologists whose works are available on the web to be cross-pollinated with other technologies or datasources to produce brand-new things. It is an ever-accelerating artform in the World Wide Mesh that promises endless Darwinian generative possibilities. Recently the term has been showing up in common culture and the meaning risks dilution. Let's get specific. What exactly is a mashup? Mashups: The new breed of Web app is a new IBM article that provides a great overview of the history and the categories of "mashups" - and bears reading even for Technorati who already get and even contruct mashups.

Just like it says. Check out this amazing tool: http://www.scrutinizethis.com/

Submitted by Brooks Cole

Isn't it fun to come to somebody's house and scan their bookshelves or their CD collection to peer into their souls? It's like a holographic UPC code, the soul signature of a person expressed as an array of what interests them and what you share or don't share. If the library belongs to a potential love interest, you might raise your eyebrows at finding How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad: And Other Spells for Love, Wealth, Beauty, and Revenge or The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

Stephen Colbert, host of "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central, caused wikipedia chaos the other night when he praised Wikipedia for "wikiality" - the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you - it becomes reality.

Colbert then dropped some real truthiness about himself on wikipedia LIVE on the show. (confirmed by wikipedia logs)

Colbert went on to edit more articles (such as George Washington didn't have slaves) and then encouraged his audience to find the Wikipedia entry on elephants and create an entry that stated their population had tripled in the last six months.

Leading to the Wikipedia administrator to block Stephen Colbert's account and locking the entry on elephants.

Image from Wikipedia: Rises seen in the use of "truthiness" immediately after Colbert introduced the word on October 17, 2005

Photography is a great equalizer. Photography has enabled the defense of freedom and fundamental rights, providing evidence to the subversion of law and the trampling of those freedoms for later redress. A photo can shine light upon malfeasance that powerful perpetrators might otherwise lie their way out of.

No wonder those who protest too much about defending liberty, all the while subverting it, are doing all they can to prevent individuals from exercising this fundamental, transparentifying right.

As Bert P. Krages II points out in this fascinating introduction to a newly-released flyer called The Photographer's Right,

We at CivicActions have helped clients to develop "Social Media" websites which enable members of a community to bond around shared media for fun, learning, advocacy and transformation. One of the principal aims of this development has always been the empowerment of individuals and communities to rise above the echochamber of monolithic media channels by accessing wider sources of content and even by becoming the media makers themselves.

Now YouTube, the current granddaddy of Social Media sites in the videosphere, and best known for "America's Funniest Home Videos"-style fare, seems to be growing into a role of crucial and transformative importance: leveling the playing field for presenting disparate eyewitness views of something as profound and inflammatory as the current Hizbollah-Israeli conflict -- unfiltered by editors, advertisers or even production values. It's chaos, but somewhere in the triangulation of a million lens-eyes, we can hope that the complex truths of such difficult circumstances may be brought to light in ways that don't fit neatly in between car commercials.

Who killed the Electric Car? It may have been old school electrical engineering as much as the Petro overlords. What better way to create the next-generation Electric Car than by piggybacking off of the Darwinian race to make laptop batteries ever more efficient? Powered by lithium-ion cells and the backing of PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and ex-eBay chief Jeff Skoll, Martin Eberhard has created Silicon Valley's first real auto company:

I came across this today and really enjoyed it: 95 Theses of Geek Activism. Perhaps it helps that I identify as a hacker in the manner described in the first thesis. Geek Activism is really all about being smart, thinking for yourself and not simply accepting what others say just because they happen to be on TV or run the corporations or government (the differences between these are fading). Read them. Follow the links. You'll learn a little bit more about me - and maybe a little bit more about yourself, too. I'll end with a quote that comes to mind, perhaps because activists are geeks, too (though they may not know it).