IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
xkcd has updated their map of online communities
Caption: Best trivia I learned while working on this: 'Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the WORLD?' Then you wait for the listener to do a double-take.
Gina Trapani former editor-in-chief at Lifehacker has posted an excellent article over at lifehacker (where she still posts from time-to-time) called "Google Wave First Look." I highly recommend reading her post to geek a feel of what Wave can do, that is, if you haven't already watched the demo video from the I/O Conference from earlier this year. Gina also makes this excellent point which everyone who is lucky enough to receive an invite should keep in mind:
Wave is only as useful as the people who are in it, so if you get an invitation and the privilege of giving out invitations, do use them very wisely.
Remember, you only get 8 "nominations" initially. If you blast these out to 8 of your closest friends, 6 of whom are really geeks and might not really use it, you've just run the risk of detrimentally affecting your initial wave experience because you now have no one use Wave with (unless you want to go out on Twitter and find random strangers to try it out with). Be selective with your newfound Wave granting powers :)
All my bags are packed and I'm ready to go.....
I'm heading to the airport (Reagan/National) in just a few minutes to catch my flight from DCA to Houston, to Austin for the spring break of geek conferences, SXSW. I'm incredibly excited at all of the panels that are going to be available for me to attend in addition to all of the conference parties that happen each night (especially the Bigg Digg Shindigg).
Nate Silver of fightthirtyeight.com is the keynote speaker for Sunday.
Merlin Mann (43folders.com) and John Gruber (daringfireball.net) are doing a panel together on Saturday, called "HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility".
Gina Tripani of Lifehacker will be sitting in on a panel called Curating the Crowd-Sourced World.
One of my personal heros, Lawrence Lessig, will be doing a panel called "Politics, Technology, and Pop Culture."
These are just a few I'm most looking forward to. I could go on and on, listing the 20 or so on my personal conference schedule, but names such as Andy Baio, Daniel Burka, Brian Cain, Andy Carvin (NPR & local DC techie), Ana Marie Cox, Jonathan Coulton, Felicia Day, Tara Hunt, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Merritt Kevin Rose, Alex Albrect, Robert Scoble, Christina Warren will be sprinkled throughout the panels over the course of the conference. Representatives from all of the major web companies/orgs/presences will be on hand to meet with, talk to, discuss, etc.
Now can you see why I'm excited? Well - look at the time. Off to the airport!
The New York Times has a completely awesome timelapse map of the US and words people were twittering all through the Super Bowl. Very neat. Check it out.
I always love tag clouds. They're a very good way to get a visual sense of the content of a speech. Just in case you do not know, a tag cloud is an array of words in an image, or textual display, where the words that are said most often are listed in the center, and in bigger fonts. There are many tag-cloud generators across the net. If you plug the transcript of Obama's speech into a tag-cloud generator, you will get an output like this:
