AWESOME: Meebo on the iPhone : nearly awesome. Would it have been too much to include a state-handler on their servers so that when I switched from Safari, or I switched tabs, it maintained my connection state and just updated when I brought the app back up? Not too difficult.

Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph: this is super cool and smart. Social graphs get more complex if the edges of the graphs have the ability to connect. Imagine if there ways of doing directed edges between different social networks, and a universal RFC’ed API that allowed us to tap into, correlate and manage the graph that emerges from that. I’m joining the group, and will have to write more on this later.

In the meantime, I think there are a few important things to get from this:

• Social graphs are dependent on having enough complexity to make them self balancing, but not so much complexity that scale-free networks can’t emerge.
• All social graphs that we manage should have the ability for us to explicitly say which and how the edges connect out of network, as a means of mitigating the privacy concerns that are inherent with any data that is correlated directly to people.
• Spontaneous or machinic intelligence can and should emerge given the ability to “feed” the graph into various algorithms and systems to get some sort of emergence of order or collective intelligence.
• A social graph API would let any new service be about features, intelligence and behavior and leverage outside API’s to do collective social network analysis.
• This would be ideally suited to Drupal.

It’s not journalism - Los Angeles Times: A study in history here. I worked for the Orange County Register, which is/was the second largest newspaper in California, but always played second fiddle to the LA Times. The OC Register was the Gizmodo to the LA Time’s “Engadget.” We tried to be hip and relevant, but in the end it was always predicated on reaction to our neighbors up north.

That isn’t to say OCR wasn’t a good paper. We had great writers (most of whom have left since), and a really strong technology arm that was hugely innovative on the Internet (most of whom have left since).

Anyhow, I read this article in the LA Times and it was deja vu to conversations that we had at OCR back in 1996!

“We don’t need a discussion forum, people shouldn’t talk back to us.”
“We are reporters, the readers can send comments to the ombudsman”
“You mean anyone can post?”

Most of this came about from implementing this site, and the predecessor to this, which we called “Dialog.”

Newspapers are clinging desperately to the pedestal of their ivory tower. They have operated for hundreds of years now as the bastion of what people should know, and the filters of how they should know it. The morphology of their very being was to enforce the hegemony of the informative elite: I couldn’t make a paper on the scale of the LA Times if I tried.

But I could make a site on that scope.

And so could Google.

And the users could be back in control because the actual morphological construction that enables the information to BE is the same manner of construction that enables people to BE.

Its being of and through text, and when people and information are of and through text, that whole notion of hierarchy and hegemony dissolves into nothingness. That scares newspapers, just as it scares musicians, actors, artists, producers, writers and others who are dependent of the construction of an Us/Them wall.

The LA Times editorial is not surprising. Its the smug, blind and irrelevant commentary you’d expect from an old oligarc nearing the end of their usable lifespan. Let the LA Times and their ilk sit on their towers, and spit their pearls of “wisdom” to the populace at large.

And in the meantime, we have Newsvine, Digg, Google News, Techmeme, TMZ, Perez Hilton, Weblogs Inc, Gawker Media, BoingBoing, etc, etc to provide the noise from which we can filter.

The great future of journalism: BLOGS! Masters of fact checking!

[From TripAdvisor Acquires Facebook App Where I’ve Been For $3 Million]

This is one of the most patently retarded arguments I’ve seen in a bit.

[From Compiler - Wired Blogs]

I was commenting at Gnomedex that Technorati was next to useless during the event, whereas last year it was entirely useful. I found Twittter + Google Blog Search to be more useful.

[From Death of Blog Search Part 2 - Sifry Leaves Technorati ]

We’re hiring in our office there a full time contractor Web Developer. Its in the heart of Music Square. Position reports jointly to me and their tech guy out there, but working with the same technology as we do out here in Burbank.

Full-Time Web Developer needed.
Responsibilities- Coding, primarily PHP, MySQL, Javascript- Work extensively with designers & directors to prototype and build new websites- Maintain, analyze and deliver improvements to all sites
Requirements- Strong portfolio of web design & web development work- Strong PHP skills- Clean HTML/CSS Markup- Familiarity with XML- Familiarity with Subversion/CVS- Familiarity with Drupal - Knowledge of Flash & Actionscript- AJAX- Apache configuration- Basic Design skills- Adobe Photoshop- Ability to work within a team- Deadline oriented
Please submit links to current work along with code samples, resume and desired salary. Interviews will be setup with those who meet the above requirements. E-mail to jobs [@] brkstn.com