] The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of
] course that helps. It is not hard work or experience,
] though they help, too. The secret to programming is
] having smart friends.
]
] Once we had a plausible way to ship, Apple became the
] ideal work environment. Every engineer we knew was
] willing to help us. We got resources that would never
] have been available to us had we been on the payroll.

Clandestine Apple Skunkworks.

Skunkworks At Apple -- The Graphing Calculator Story

I've complained at length about TinyURL before, I will refrain from that now. EvilURL is highly amusing.

I would like to note that both services allow recursion, although its much more amusing with EvilURL then TinyURL:

http://evilurl.com/EVILscuzzwad redirects to
http://evilurl.com/deathjobSCUMscab redirects to
http://evilurl.com/twatBLOODfacial redirects to
http://evilurl.com/stabdildoanal redirects to
http://evilurl.com/SHITTYrumpsack redirects to
http://evilurl.com/cuntsluttyburger redirects to
http://evilurl.com/SLUTTYanalSMUTT redirects to
http://evilurl.com/HUMPWADSHIT redirects to
http://evilurl.com/WANKSCUZZCRAP redirects to
http://evilurl.com/PORNSUCKBURGER redirects to
http://www.memestreams.net redirects to
http://www.memestreams.net/topics/

EvilURL - URLs more evil then TinyURL

] If there were a Luther for the internet, he might post
] (presumably on his blog, rather than on a church door)
] some set of theses that seemed to him self-evident but
] that few involved in the church of the day were
] previously prepared to utter. With apologies to the real
] Luther, they might look something like the following:
]
] In the Name of Jon Postel.

The comments in this essay are good, although I do not feel they qualify as justification for services that are far from then edge in nature like Sitefinder. Aside from only several points that could be used very effectively out of a context, I don't think it supported a pro-Sitefinder argument well at all.

Well written fodder. Makes good points, but does so in a real loaded way. As a defense for say new TLDs with different ways of handling things, fine. Justification for significant changes to the way .com/.net work, its well written troll bait.

(I still think that function should be handled by the client, and that it is harmful if done as a DNS wildcard. I also believe that even if ICANN was not there, it still would have been fought off successfully by the Internet community.)

Susan Crawford blog :: Time for Reformation of the Internet

] The ability to have a presence should of course be
] available to anyone; but the ability to act in cyberspace
] - for example, to collect someone's personal
] information or their money - should be accompanied
] by some accountability.

Esther Dyson's take on how to solve the phishing problems. Be sure to read the comments. Tom makes an appearance pointing out that what begins with the DNS system and the location bar, might end with SSL certificates, and better handling of the elements (UI and otherwise) surrounding their usage and certification.

The Accountable Net: Who Should Be Accountable?

] Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for
] scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers,
] theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports
] from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to
] find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers,
] professional societies, preprint repositories and
] universities, as well as scholarly articles available
] across the web.

Another good way to slice into Google is born. I just tossed a few queries at it with various combinations of terms like "intellectual property", "spontaneous sociability", "social capital", "social network", reputation, scarcity, meme, etc. A number of interesting looking papers were turning up that would never have made it into a standard Google search. Much more inclusive and with a better UI then diving into individual repositories like citeseer.

Google Scholar

] This tension in outlook, between 'flame war as unexpected
] side-effect' and 'flame war as historical inevitability,'
] has two main causes. The first is that although the
] environment in which a mailing list runs is computers,
] the environment in which a flame war runs is people. You
] couldn't go through the code of the Mailman mailing list
] tool, say, and find the comment that reads "The next
] subroutine ensures that misunderstandings between users
] will be amplified, leading to name-calling and vitriol."
] Yet the software, when adopted, will frequently produce
] just that outcome.

Another good article out of Clay Shirky..

Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software

] Microsoft is recasting ambitions for its .Net Passport
] identification system, saying the service now will be
] limited to its own online offerings and those of close
] partners. Microsoft no longer sees Passport as a
] single sign-on system for the Web at large, a
] spokeswoman said.

Put this one on the shelf next to Hailstorm.

InfoWorld: Microsoft scales back Passport ambitions

An online database of what switches control what NPAs. Useful if you want to see what company any given number block is assigned to. For instance, if you have a number xxx-yyy-zzzz, you can lookup the xxx-yyy portion and see who its assigned to. Due to number portability, this isn't an authoritative way to tell who is currently using a given number, but it might yield a clue about where it started.

BellMind.net Phreakery Tools

Amazon has created a new search engine. Result ranking appear similar to Google, although it references a number of other sources as well. It also saves your search history and makes it available to you. The interface to all its various functions seems very nice as well.

A9.com

This is a color palette tool for webmasters. Sure to be very helpful for people like myself with very little sense of what colors go together well.

ColorMatch Remix