“groovy mother...”

I hadn’t thought of this: Apple may have said they’ll let you give away apps for free on the iPhone Apps store, but why not charge a couple of bucks? Your apps will still be impulse-downloads, and you might make some serious cash.

Pretty much inevitable — An app that asked for your GMail username & password was harvesting them. One point to the “Why we need OAuth” party.

My group at RhymesWithNose is hiring. I can honestly say that this is the most fun and challenging job I’ve ever had, so if you think you’re hot stuff, or have any questions, let me know. We’re working on some pretty damned cool stuff.

Stewart Lee’s essay on only needing, or *wanting*, 7,000 fans.

“Anyone producing works of art needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.” Discussed this over lunch today, and could definitely think of a handful of bands I’d pay $10-a-month to “patronize”.

Pitch-perfect parody. One for the NPR listeners in the crowd.

That “open” AIM thing announced earlier? Looks to be more of a club to try and force clients like Gaim and Adium to include AOL advertising. Fuckers.

Fire Eagle has launched — a broker for your physical location, which other applications can use to improve user experiences. It’s really just APIs and geekery at the moment, but the applications that use and enable it will start appearing pretty quickly — I’ve already got a couple of ideas.

AOL have opened up the AIM protocol for reals, documenting the protocol and encouraging, rather than barely-tolerating, third-party AIM clients. I’d rather deal with XMPP, but this is an interesting step forward.

If you’ve ever paid for the popular placebo “Airborne” (or are willing to pretend to to get some free cash), you can claim your money back, since they now admit they falsely claimed they had ever run a clinical study, although this cannot and should not be taken as an admission that it is not effective in any way, shape or form. Lying, profiteering, anti-science fuckholes.

The real reason for Microsoft’s switch to web standards in IE8? John thinks he’s found it.

The way you code a progress bar will do more to “performance” than tweaking the process it’s measuring. “Humans do not perceive the passage of time in a linear way.”

“What’s the picture that emerges from these four impressions?

Smart, normal, curious, not radical, and post-Boomer.

If you were asking me to write a capsule description of what I would look for in the next President of the United States, that would be it.”

Trent Reznor releases a new NIN album as online download with “premium” collectors offerings. Notable differences to the Radiohead “In Rainbows’ download include a) It’s CC BY-NC-SA licensed, so you can remix it however you like and b) The first part has been “officially” seeded to BitTorrent in a shareware stylee.

Did not know there was a LOLDOG meme spinoff.

What happens when the iPhone stopwatch runs for 41 days and 16 hours.