Great blog post. It's not about your friends, it's about their content.

While reading Idealist’s newest idea for coordinating people, I got an idea for connecting volunteerism on the net to people who don’t use computers. Problem: It’s hard to reach people who don’t use computers! Only wealthy organizations can afford bulk mail. Solution: Anyone can post a card to be delivered to an area. They put in the info for the card and any additional information to “persuade” people to deliver it. MailCarriers: Anyone can go to MeritMail and “claim” messages for delivery. They print them out, cut them up and walk them to their neighbors mail boxes. They deliver only to their “block” or surroundings. No postage – messages are printed on home printers, cut in half or quarters and then stuck in peoples mailboxes or front doors. Merit Based – No spam (from the mail carriers perspective) gets through, because volunteers only print messages that they think have merit. Cheap – You are only informing your neighbors so 10 sheets of paper and a little ink. Cost of distribution is distributed across a city, block by block. If you know 4 of your neighbors are on Facebook, then you “deliver” the message that way and only print out 6 hard copies for the others. Opt Out – You can go and de-register an address and the system will advise MailCarriers to avoid that address. Guaranteed Delivery: Ya… no. Metaphorically, this works like the internet does… so packet delivery is not guaranteed. The internet works “100%” of the time (okay not really) because of all the routers and re-sending packets. Only when lots of MailCarriers are participating does MeritMail have a higher rate of delivery. But with one low tech system in place, the network effect would help spread the word and bridge the gap. What do you think?

Reduce environmental impact. Traditional wet shaving with a double edged safety razor uses less waste than shaving with cartridge razors. The only waste is a single metal razor blade and lather down the sink. Unlike today’s razor cartridges, a double edged blade can easily be recycled. The tubes and bowls that most traditional shave creams and soaps are sold in produce less waste than those clunky non-biodegradable aerosol canisters that gels come in.

Treating the web as a giant tiling writable page

Are you somebody who enjoys creativity? We are building you the ultimate playground. We are creating an online environment which will help creative people to thrive. We are here for the creators. The artists, photographers, writers, musicians, and videographers.

Everyone is copying FriendFeed features. I'm all for giving them credit and at the same time, I want the FF features to spread.

Great post on updates to createImageData in Firefox 3.5.

Interesting article about crowdsourcing filter creation

Amazing article by Kevin Kelly about the rise of "The New Socialism".

Today there seems to be a new distribution model that is emerging. One that is based on people’s ability to publically syndicate and distribute messages — aka content — in an open manner. This has been a part of the internet since day one — yet now its emerging in a different form — it's not pages, it's streams, its social and so its syndication. The tools serve to produce, consume, amplify and filter the stream.

MIT Media Lab staff (the Open Ended Group) is working on a new kind of programming tool called Field. It connects everything. Not only various programming modules and components, but also different styles of generating, editing and testing code are provided. For example textual coding with auto-complete, visual coding, timelines, live-coding, flow-management etc.

It’s impossible to start working on a complex system no matter how well you understand it (or more likely, think you understand it). Evolution is the only way. And another characteristic of all evolution (biological evolution in particular) is this:

"Social Actions has created the Open Actions Format, a potential universal XML format to describe rich information about social actions. In the future, we hope many of our partners will take advantage of this format and feed this data into the Social Actions API."

Generate a World File for scanned or faxed paper maps - genius!

Social Actions is proud to announce the Change the Web Challenge!

Social Actions' Change the Web Challenge is about building innovative tools to help people to find and share opportunities to take action on the websites, blogs, and social networks that we all visit everyday.

Mrinal went online during the last economic downturn and started discovering new social networks to learn from. While there was a certain thrill to them, he found that these social interactions online were "becoming like a cat person" and asked, "Are you genuinely connected? Are you making friends or adding friends?"

Bespin is the newest Mozilla labs project. It's aims to be a self hosted open web editor and is pretty freaking awesome.

Thanks to Mark and LIfestream blog for picking up my Sketch of OFace screencast.

New Screencast about "OFace", an experiment in social identity faceting on top of FriendFeed. Check it out and give me feedback. I'll be looking for peeps as I get closer to having a working service. Although it isn't mentioned in the video, this is powered by a (half) built php app, a ubiquity script, and FriendFeed's backend.

Cool post on 8 important guidelines when building a dashboard.