Wario - Ha! This is clever

Watch carefully... (will open in a new window)

Attention! And then some $$ to go with it, please

We're drowning in choices - music, tv channels, web sites. Why does so little truly excite us? And why are so few people making any real money from all that's being put forth?

I think Kevin Kelly is really on top of it, with so many nuggets here:

Where ever attention flows, money will follow.

Maintain an incoming flow of attention and money will follow.

...the fact that something does work or is helpful is no longer sufficient for success. Good, useful stuff is now the minimum standard. I might even make the argument that great stuff is the minimum.

Now anything that lasts has to also maintain our attention.

Getting a quick blitz of attention is a no-brainer. The challenge is maintaining a flow of attention in an environment where you are surrounded by millions of similar things that are good and useful.

The problem for a band is not being "discovered" but remaining interesting.

Time (does) not equal attention. I spend a lot of time in my car but I don’t give it much attention..

- all from Kevin Kelly

and

The challenge for everyone is that we are getting better and better at creating “interesting stuff” but there is a finite supply of attention. Our dynamic range of “interesting” is lessening, as everything in the technium is more perfectly designed to grab attention.

- from Stan James (www.wanderingstan.com) in the comments

Again, here's the piece.

Where is Your Username registered?

Wanna use the same username over a large number of sites?
Check here first.
Note: I couldn't get it to search using IE7, but worked fine for me with Firefox.

100 sites that will make you brighter

So much to learn, so little time.

Quite a list here of 100 places online to get smarter.

A now some words from McCain

A word cloud from Wordle.net of John McCain's acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican Convention (see Barack Obama's a few entries before). "Country" was the word of the night.

God bless the Guitar Man, the great Jerry Reed, who passed away today at age 71.

"Amos Moses" was one of my FAVORITE songs on Top 40 radio growing up. "...knocked him in the head with a stone." BOMP. Classic.

A nice short piece on Jerry from Rolling Stone from 1999 here.

And I've always loved Jerry's take on "Patches," hear it here.

Online storage for those big files to send or share

Using one of these types of sites - list from smashingapps.com - is so much better than sending someone a massive audio or video file by e-mail.

I've used mediafire.com with no problems, and yousendit.com many times, but you have to register.

Here's another list of file storage sites.

And another.

How to do more with your pictures at Flickr

Lots of tips on how you can get more out of Flickr, or get started, with this from ReadWriteWeb.

Word clouds - easy to make at wordle.net

I've seen word clouds around for awhile, but wordle.net sure makes them easy to create. To get a grasp of what Barack Obama said in his Democratic Convention acceptance speech, I made one of his prepared text. "Promise" looms large, but it looks like if "America" and "American" were combined, that would have been the most used word. Click on the image to see it better (wordle.net lets you use their images in about any way as long as you give their site attribution).

Stanley Kubrick, box by box

Boxes. Lots and lots of boxes. A fascinating video look inside the mind of director Stanley Kubrick.

Side note: I smiled that in the film one of the fan letters to Kubrick was noted to have been from Sequim, WA (one of my favorite places in the Pacific NW).

And - quite a lot on Kubrick in his imdb.com bio.

Voice to Text on your mobile phone

Lifehacker has some ideas about alternatives to Jott, now that it's out of beta and most functions are no longer free.

In particular, vlingo works on BlackBerry.

PC Mag's Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites

The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites - Info, Search, and Reference - Reviews by PC Magazine

A WOW cool 360 view of the Olympic Pool

What it looks like high up on the diving platform . Move your mouse to take a look around.


Some nice exterior shots of the Water Cube here.

Plus Inside the Olympics Stadium in 360 degrees

and View of the Opening Ceremonies - Interactive Feature - from NYTimes.com

Make your own iPhone Ringtones with iTunes for Windows

It's for tracks you already own in iTunes.

In-car Wi-Fi. It's here.

Well that didn't take long.

Information Week says: "will deliver download speeds from 400 to 800 Kbps and average upload speeds of 400 Kbps."

Combining this with the voice recognition features of Microsoft's Sync is when I think it's all going to get very interesting.

Thoughts about how this competes with satellite radio here from Motley Fool.

A PORTABLE Wii Screen?

Score another completely gotta have one gadget from ThinkGeek.com! So awesome.

Feist is adorable on Sesame Street

Do you LOVE the video of Feist "counting to 4" on Sesame Street?! Sweet. She's a sport.

Do not trust your ears - you must hear this

Listen (and then listen again) to the amazing Shepard scale.

And check out the Shepard-Risset glisssando (towards the bottom of the linked page).

The "Twilight" books and Stephenie Meyer

My daughter just started in on the "Twilight" teen-vampire books. To get in the loop I found this overview of who's who in the "Twilight" novels from Entertainment Weekly to be handy.

No doubt a road trip to Forks, WA will be in in our future.

Bwa Ha Ha... Chris Brown hit song is a commercial!

Wow, clever these marketers are.

We will no doubt see a lot more of this.