apples and oranges:

i once met a girl. we decided together that she is to keep me from sinking down and i am to keep her from floating away. this worked out very well, until i descended deep enough to make friends with creatures in the mariani trench and she soared high enough to touch the moon.

i’ve been looking for a replacement to compare ever since.

the prettiest girls can get real ugly, the ugliest girls can get real pretty:

and then theres the medium girls. reliable medium.

on tumblr, we are all just sad clowns out looking for our pies:

i, personally, am partial to double cream blueberry.

you:

make me happy, not by things you do, the way you walk, or the words you say, though they’re all lovely as well, but you being so effortlessly being you. every day i think about you. you make me want to talk to you all day until we both agree on nothing. every wikipedia article i digest is for you. you make me want to change, destroy, and recreate the stars, the world, the days, the nights, and to parade them all in front of you to earn your smile. every picture i take is with you in mind.

that’s what you do to me by never having me. don’t stop.

I really hope the entrance into heaven looks like the theater hallway from Mystery Science Theater 3000.

kellyegan:

If I wasn’t already dead, I’d die from awesome.

it’s not. it’s actually designed like get smart. you do spend your days in heaven sitting with robots looking and snarking at bad movies, though. trust.

the future:

i’m watching online, via a gossip-rag turned national-edition zeitgeist-defining web-magazine, clips of the last showing of a traditional television show meant to be a stop-gap variety hour taped in the middle of the day to entertain folks late at night on the cheap with celebrity guests that show up to plug whatever it is they’re pitching recently, two hours ahead before the scheduled broadcast due to eastern time, which in a few decades’ time will inevitably end up as a trivia question to test and befuddle the next generation about watershed moments in pop culture, and all the while i’m thinking: der… television is so sad and inefficient. who do i pay to fix this?

addendum: kids, come gather around. let grandpa al tell you guys about the time he and his friends watched real tv history over the internet.

$50 to see pee wee live in LA?

Dispatch:

Hello, is anyone on this frequency?

All the lights on this street have systematically shut down. There are multiple accidents and I hear sirens in the distance. The radio in my car is fuzzy but it’s warning of tornadoes in the area. Tornadoes. In Silicon Valley.

I am unsure if I am the last man on earth. There are unconfirmed rumors of the half-dead in the vicinity. Without power I can’t tell which house has been infected and which not. I do see smoke rising in the mountains to the east. I fear the worst but hope for the best.

I plan to make way to the nearest walmart to procure survival supplies. If you can see this you should make way to the walmart near the shoreline.

Rest assured, I’ve spent my whole life preparing for this. Godspeed.

I'm glad girls don't have cooties after all.

to avoid doing more dishes than i need to i'm eating my meal right off the skillet in the kitchen:

i’m the sexy and sensitive man your mother warned you about.

here's the cool thing i realized about politics when i was canvassing a neighborhood of upwardly-mobile and affluently-white neighborhood:

they will all die soon enough, and when they do things will finally change for the better. universal healthcare, gay marriage, legalization, end of expansive wars. the only thing holding back this country is your dads. remember to always vote yes on estate taxes.

Something About Beta Males

fek:

Circle one:

[Guys/Bros/Dudes] are [pussies/wussies/sissies]. They need to stop being such [pussies, etc] and start being [assholes/dicks/”men”]. But also, [gentlemen/mature/well-mannered/”guys”]. Whatever happened to [gentlemen, etc]? One time, this guy wanted to [make love to me/read to me/cook me dinner]. I told him to [jackhammer away/go fuck himself/eat shit and die] and he [cried about his mother/quoted Dave Eggers/let me “Cheetah” him] before I ended the night [feeding him tea/spooning him]. Why can’t I get a REAL [MAN/GUY/BRO/DUDE]? They never [leave/come/shut up/share their emotions] when I want them to. They always [leave/come/shut up/share their emotions] too soon. Life is complicated. There are no real men in [New York/LA]. Sometimes, I just want [a cat/cats].

Previously:

Something About Effciency

Something About Social Media

kamer is better at this than i am

lately tumblr goes down faster than a twitter-dispatched 10 dollar hooker in a taco truck

natashavc:

“I have never once questioned Don’s appeal or Alphaness. His emotional unavailability! His mysteriousness that might not even conceal anything interesting! These man-attributes are just as hackneyed as the tactics of The Game, and just as diabolically effective. Also dude is just hot. True, Mark, he’s no Tony Soprano — he is much, much hotter than Tony Soprano. Jon Hamm doesn’t have to convince us, as James Gandolfini did, that his character exudes power and scary sated-animal charisma and so consequently gets to eff secretaries. You just kind of look at him and know.”

—

— Emily Magazine

<3

what’s the converse to this? who’s a hot, sordid, powerful, man-eating, post-post-mo womYn that i can aspire to one day consort with after i’m done fucking secretaries? hillary? michelle? sigourney weaver? all bets are off: i want susan sarandon. i hear she’s into the founders fetish that julia allison was harping about when sarah jessica parker just got done being relevant. i mean, really, igby goes down? no one else saw that?

Facebook stats 2-Dec-2009

taitran:

Facebook’s Own Statistics Show Content-Sharing Increase, New Status-Update Trends, and More

December 2nd, 2009

• Average user has 130 friends on the site
• Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
• Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
• Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
• Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
• Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
• Average user is invited to 3 events per month
• Average user is a member of 12 groups

LA Times Twitter Guideline

• Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job.

• Assume that your professional life and your personal life will merge online regardless of your care in separating them.

• Even if you use privacy tools (determining who can view your page or profile, for instance), assume that everything you write, exchange or receive on a social media site is public.

• Just as political bumper stickers and lawn signs are to be avoided in the offline world, so too are partisan expressions online.

Creative products born from a mountain of data

bijan:

I’m a regular reader of my friend Brad Feld’s blog.

As usual, his post today, I Want More Information, Not Less, got me thinking. I just read it a few moments ago on this flight that I’m on from SFO to Boston.

Brad’s post is about information and data. Brad addresses the typical sentiment about data overflow and how can we manage all of this data. It’s a great post.

Some of my favorite services start by collecting a crazy amount of data. But the reason they are valuable to me is because of the creative products they offer with that data.

Few examples:

Last.fm

When I listen to music on my laptop, sonos or iphone, the history of my music streams are recorded or scrobbled to my last.fm profile. Since I joined the service, last.fm has scrobbled over 19,000 tracks which is about 18 tracks per day. Thats a ton of data.

But that data set isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that if you are a last.fm user and you come to my profile you can see if we have similar listening habbits or not.  Here’s what happens when I goto Mo’s profile on last.fm

Also, last.fm uses all of that data and offers me a personalized radio station based on my friends and my personal preference.

Twitter

There is a ton of data on Twitter. I make best use of all of that data by

a) following people that are interesting to me (some I know personally and some I’ve never met). But I care about what they have to say.

b) Twitter search. At this point, I probably use Twitter search 3-5x a day. Sometimes way more than that. It helps me filter the data for just what I need at that moment.

c) Another way to deal with the data is by the new Lists feature. Robert Scoble has post about Lists today and how it changed his consumption model for Twitter.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a lot of things to a lot of people. The service captures a ton of data about me and my friends. Every single day we ‘check-in’ & tell foursquare where we are at any moment.

There is a fun game play that uses that data by earning badges, earning Mayorships, and scoring on the leaderboard. There is also a real utlitity that comes from that dataset as well. I receive tips from the service and I have a history of where I’ve been that is super helpful to me.

Plus, I get implicit restaurant recommendations because I can see where my friends are dining, etc.

Fitness

My iPhone collects a ton of my fitness information thanks to apps like RunKeeper and Nike+. I’m planning on getting Fitbit to collect even more of my phsyical data. I love the applications that come from all of this information.

Brad is spot on when he says in his post:

I don’t believe the issue is too much information.  This is an independent variable that we can’t control.  For the foreseeable future, there will be a continuous and rapid increase of information as more of the world gets digitized, more individuals become content creators, more systems open up and provide access to their data, and more infrastructure for creating, storing, and transmitting information (and data) gets built.

Now comes the fun part. What other creative products will be born from this mountain of realtime and non-realtime data.

There are plenty of things to do in the world of filtering, analytics, search, aggregation, curation, entertainment, recommendations, and discovery. And the best part is the stuff we haven’t even considered yet.

Long live data.