something from the studio...

...untitled still, but maybe i'll title it later.

Thoughts after something of a pause.

So it's been quite a while since I did any real blogging. I haven't even posted on Frostopolis in ages. This is mostly because I've been very busy with my spiffy new job fighting spam. That and the parties. But in the meantime I've been thinking a lot about art and film and the future of the Web and all those other things. Google bought Writely, to which I say about f-in' time, guys. Writely is the sole reason I didn't create a web-based word processor. They already had one, and it's really good. They definitely deserve their Google payday; I just hope they don't have to work in Mountain View and drink Google-Aid all day. I finally signed on to Myspace and learned a valuable lesson about how little most people care about usability. Yeah, Myspace is terrible, the shame of the Web, and its owners should apologize to everyone and hire Zeldman to un-suckify it. On the other hand, everyone's already on it, so you sorta gotta be too. Myspace is to your online life as Amazon is to an author's: it's not very interesting to only be there, but you can't afford to ignore it. More later of course, and later could be much later or very soon. In the meantime, go read Seth, he's on a roll lately. (Oh, and the coulds are from Paris. Szia Zsolti!)

BlogPulse Trends: Kong Gaining on Iraq

I just found something really fun and somewhat interesting: the BlogPulse Trend thingy. Graph blogospheroid trends (tags?) against each other over time. Just like stock charts. Here's a good example: Iraq, King Kong and Microsoft. The ape gaineth.

Far, får får får? Nej, får får lamm!

I finally found a reason to learn Swedish. No, not the chef; rather, the simple fact that you can say things like: Far, får får får? Nej, får får lamm! Which, of course, means "Dad, do sheep get sheep? No, sheep get lamb!" But you knew that already. My newfound single-sentence Swedish expertise is courtesy of SLAY Radio's Mastering Swedish.

Frostopolis returns.

Following a brief stint in domain-name purgatory, my main blog is back online: Frostopolis.com ...along with some new pictures and a meta-post about the things I've written here (how very bloggy of me). So now I return to the original mode of posting more "serious" things over there, and playing around a bit over here. Hopefully the playing around will be at least a little bit interesting to those of you who might have stumbled across this blog. But it won't be as frequent as my posts here have been in the last week or two. Thanks for stopping by!

Hey Yahoo, what's the deal with you guys lately?

Come on, Terry! You're just down the street from me here in Sunnyvale. If you'd come over to the Bean Scene once in a while for a morning latte, you could run these things by me, and you'd avoid at least some of these embarrassing slip-ups. Like the one where you try to grab my mouse out of my hand. I just blogged that one today under the happy title The Desperation of Yahoo. And now comes this. The last time I saw somebody make it this easy for people to hijack their websites, it was some wanna-be journalist expats over in Hungary. Print media, Terry. They had an excuse, they thought the Internet lived in that little blue e. Hold on to your hats, boys and girls. Here it is: Yahoo Buzz Game Custom HTML. With bonus Custom Scripting. What can I say, Terry? I thought you guys had gotten with the whole clue program... So come on over next time, and save yourself the embarrassment. I'm easy to spot, buddy. I'm the guy reading the New York Times at the outside table. The coffee's good, by the way.

The desperation of Yahoo

Has anyone else noticed the new, maximally-obtrusive ads on Yahoo.com? I use my.yahoo.com as a sort of news-and-information home page. It's nice: I have a few RSS feeds, the weather here and abroad, my currency cross-rates, and international news. Plus a few stocks. Unfortunately, I now also have these gigantic ads that take over the entire page whenever I accidentally move my mouse over the smaller version of the ad. They also suck up lots of memory, and don't always close properly when asked. Way to go, Yahoo. Are you guys really desperate now, or what? I was rather hoping Yahoo's text-based ads might become a serious competitor to Google's. Lord knows we need something better than AdSense, and even though I suspect it'll be Google that provides it, they're obviously done innovating on that front until they get some serious competition. But now, I'm beginning to think Yahoo is slipping back into don't-get-it mode. That statue incident might mean more than I originally thought... It's really pretty simple in the end. This is the Web. The barrier to entry is low. There is a lot of competition, large and small. If you treat your users with contempt, they will not be your users for long. And yes, Terry, screwing with my ability to move my mouse around counts as contempt.