Let’s just jump right into them…

1. I know this has been keeping you up at night. I know it sure has me staying awake at night. No, it’s not the economy, it’s what does Jupiter sound like?
2. Homeless men help recycle books, stock shelves. I remember some years ago reading about a homeless man who had a business designing websites. He could work on them at the computers at the library. Or was it the local computer network? Perhaps the latter, as that was a story circulated around in the community networking circles. In fact, I think I originally heard about the story through the Seattle Community Network. I wonder what ever happened to the guy?
3. Live and travel rent free. This one made me think of Deborah, whose been sparse around these parts lately. Of course, I’ve been sparse around her blog too, but I don’t travel much at all.
4. I like old ads. Old books too. And old furniture. Old machines. Lots of old stuff. I want a time machine! Anyway, you’ll notice I’ve had an Antiques category here for, like, forever. Oops, no you won’t notice it, as it’s empty. I see it all the time though. Someday. Someday, I’m telling you! By the way, the Library of Congress is now uploading photos to flickr, and they’re hoping you’ll tag them for them. So, we pay tons and tons of taxes each year to support the government, and they still want us to do their jobs for them too, which begs the perennial question, would taxation without representation have been cheaper?
5. Joanne lives in denial.
6. BeatBearing. Make a beat with a bearing ball! Jon might like this one. By the way, you did know that Jon is moving all his photos to a special blog where he’ll have bigger pictures? I think Jon may already be addicted to “Spore,” and it hasn’t even been released yet!
7. Turn a regular lighter into a Zippo. Just don’t try to take it on a plane with you.
8. The design police are out there, and you can apparently join them. I think Pete’s been itching to sign up. You’ll note his probable distaste of Comic Sans here.
9. Cowboy Tacos. Haven’t tried them, but they look kind of good. Of course, if you’ve been eating your tacos at Taco Bell every day, you might want to learn how to blast fat fast.
10. Amanda likes efficiency and schedules. I like free-form blogging. Actually, I prefer whichever method gets me $25,000+ per month blogging. I wonder what John Chow prefers?
11. Actually, yes, you can buy happiness.
12. Mike has a question for creators (those of you that write or make stuff up). I suppose I should have linked last week, but I saved the URL (but didn’t bookmark it!) and forgot about it. Until. Now.
13. Aggression can kill you. So can anxiety. It’s a good thing we’re not at war and that the economy isn’t going down the toilet, or we’d all be so screwed right now. On the plus side, there is now a fast acting cyanide antidote!
14. This is just so wrong on so many levels.
15. The planet Vulcan was discovered back in 1860… NOT! By the way, did you know there’s a new Star Trek movie coming out late this year? Yeah, but apparently it’s a reboot/reimagining/Hollywood-is-creatively-bankrupt thing, so not worth linking to at all. And William Shatner’s not in it either! The inhumanity! That’s not utterly fabulous at all! No link for you it!

    Have I mentioned they’re redoing Knight Rider too? Hollywood is taking this recycling thing too far. Kudos for using an American made car though, but why did they have to pick something so hideously uncool, if not downright ugly, as the Ford Shelby Mustang or whatever that uninspired box on wheels is called?

    Okay, the new Knight Rider link was link #16, but since the car selection is such an embarrassment to much better looking cars everywhere, I’ve decided it’s not an utterly fabulous link, so I’m grouping it with the also unfabulous non-link to the Star Trek movie mention under link #15.

16. Microsoft support returns a call… ten years later. Maybe. From the description (”0″ close to the “9″), it sounds plausible, but did it really happen? Decide for yourself.
17. Dust off your record player, because vinyl records are making a comeback! Could you imagine vinyl records one day outselling CDs! That would be a retro headline, wouldn’t it?

Popularity: 7% [?]

Today, John Chow announced that his blog had reached a new milestone: 15,000+ RSS subscribers. He also wrote that: “RSS is the new bookmark - having 15K RSS readers is the same as having 15K bookmarks.”

In the comments, 365 to Freedom and Michael Kwan both argued that having 15,000 RSS subscribers is not the same as having 15,000 people bookmark your site.

In fact, it’s better.

In response to 365 to Freedom, I wrote:

You’re right about bookmarks. I never even made much use of bookmarks when they were the “in” thing. You bookmark a site because you want to go back, but then you get so many bookmarks, you rarely ever go back to any of those sites again.

And, I always thought of bookmarks as being for sites you don’t visit every day.

Nowadays, if I find something interesting, I can blog about it and link to the site. Then, if I want to find that link again, I just do a search on my blog! I not only have a title to look for but the related content too. A post is more likely to contain multiple terms for the link, so you have many more words to search for than you would with a bookmark.

I haven’t added a new bookmark to my web browser in months, if not years.

Still, John Chow may be equivalently right in his assertion that RSS is the new bookmark. If you’re into terms like “Web 2.0,” then surely adding a site to your RSS reader is the Web 2.0 equivalent of a bookmark.

As I mentioned, I don’t even use bookmarks anymore. And, perhaps linking to an interesting site in your blog is the “Web 2.0″ equivalent of sticking it in your bookmarks. It is certainly easier to find things, unless you’re the sort that dutifully categorizes your bookmarks into well-organized categories with nice descriptive titles. Most people just click “Add Bookmark” or a keyboard shortcut and are done with it.

Of course, there is a good reason to blog instead of bookmark your links. As you may remember, the “original blogger,” Jorn Barger said that a true weblog is “log of all the URLs you want to save or share.” So, why not share? Sharing is good and can be good for you.

Most of us have blogs that cover our interests. If we like gardening, we blog about gardening. If we like sports, we blog about sports. You get the idea. So, we would also have a tendency to be bookmarking sites on those same topics. That, of course, means that the sites we would bookmark would be a good fit for our blogs.

Instead of sticking them away in your bookmarks, never to be seen again, why not blog about them? As I mentioned in my comment, you can search your blog to find a long-lost “bookmark” probably much easier than digging through your bookmarks. Plus, if it’s a good resource (and why would you want to bookmark it if it wasn’t?), why not share it with your readers? You want to be the expert in your field, right? So, blog about those interesting sites! Share them. Then people will be more likely to turn to you first to find new and exciting things in your niche.

The same goes for those great blogs you’re sticking in your RSS reader. Why not share them too?

Mind you, there might be some links you don’t want to share, such as those sites you are spying on. But, other than that, write about those sites!

You can always set them aside and save them for those days you can’t think of something to write about!

Popularity: 6% [?]

We often wonder what an alien civilization, were we ever to encounter one, might look like. Perhaps we might glean some idea from other “civilized” species on Earth.

Take ants, for example.

Take a look at this video, which shows the excavation of an ant colony. You can’t help but notice it almost looks like something from an extraterrestrial science-fiction movie, yet it’s found right here on Earth!

Next, at the end of the same video, you can compare that with a smaller ant colony that lives inside an acorn seed!

All in all, some pretty interesting stuff. And, if you’re a science fiction (or even fantasy) author, there is no doubt something you might find useful in developing your alien cities.

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After managing to keep this blog updated on a pretty consistent daily basis, it’s about time that I begin to show some of my other blogs some love as well.

I’ve started this week with DesignPrintBlog! Just up yesterday is a short post on the Kelsey Excelsior 5×8 Printing Press. Even though rotary presses were available, these were still used as starter presses for many small and upstart printers back in their day. But, even while some ask “Is Print Doomed?,” similar presses are still being made!

I know I won’t have daily updates on there just yet, but hope to get at least 2-3 posts per week to start out. I have an idea for a Friday feature, but probably won’t start that until next Friday, January 25th.

Be sure to take a peek, and also check out the Kelsey press post if you haven’t done so already!

Popularity: 4% [?]