Stackoverflow.com

Today marks the public launch of Stackoverflow.com, the new programming Q&A site started by the famous Joel Spolsky. So far it looks like it's shaping up to be a very good resource for developers; and I agree with everything they said about Googling for solutions in this post. You can look me up on the site.

Beyond the site itself, which I think will become an oft-used resource for me, I also really like their badge system. I think a similar system could be a huge boon to any forum, social networking site, or other community site. Game developers learned years ago that people will be more active in an area they already enjoy if they can be recognized for their activity. The same idea applies just as well to community sites. I think it's brilliant, and I think we're going to be seeing similar implementations a lot more often.

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: "Google." Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100.

Not a bad article, despite him being an SEO guy.

Foreign Perspective on the State of the Union

The American hostility towards Iran

"One of the notable features of President George W Bush's State of the Union speech was its hostile attitude towards Iran."

This is the title and tagline of the BBC's article analyzing President Bush's State of the Union address last night. And it's not off base. Bush may manage to drag America headlong into the third middle-east conflict of the Bush Administration. It's no wonder the entire rest of the world thinks that America is destructively stupid on an epic scale - it's true.

I, Cringely -- When Being a Verb is Not Enough: Google wants to be YOUR Internet.

From TFA:

I spoke recently with an old friend who is a bandwidth broker. He buys
and sells bandwidth on fiber-optic networks around the world. And he
told me something that I found not completely surprising, but I
certainly hadn't known: Google controls more network fiber than any
other organization. This is not to say that Google OWNS all that fiber,
just that they control it through agreements with network operators.

I knew they'd been snapping up fiber en masse for years, but I didn't know they'd managed to control more fiber than anybody else. That's a hugely impressive feat... I dunno if Cringely is right here, but I'm just as curious as he to see exactly what they're up to.

Giving in to the Deliciousness

That's right - I've finally given in and started a del.icio.us account. I've been resisting it since they started to get popular a couple years ago... but, in keeping with my ongoing attempt to "join in" on this whole community-driven internet deal, I'm jumping on the tasty bandwagon. Who knows - maybe I'll be using Digg a couple months from now (perish the thought!)

Anyway. I've added my del.icio.us feed to the right-hand pane of this site, and it's further accessible here.

10 Business Lessons From a Snarky Entrepreneur

10 Business Lessons From a Snarky Entrepreneur by Steve Pavlina:

As a companion to 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job and 10 Stupid
Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed, here are 10 positive lessons
I learned from more than 12 years as an entrepreneur. A few of these
are rehashed from the 10 Mistakes article, but most are new.

Fantstic article; I also highly recommend the two noted articles (10 reasons not to get a job, 10 stupid mistakes), as well as pretty much everything he's written on business, including 10 myths about self-employment, and how to earn $10,000 in an hour. I've been wrestling with the idea of entrepreneurship for the last several years, picking and choosing from the array of ideas I come across on a daily basis, trying to decide what will work and what won't and how much it'll cost to get it off the ground; his blog has convinced me it's high time I just picked one and dove in whole-heartedly, and make it succeed. It's not about the planning, it's about the doing, and it's time for the doing to be done.

Wish me luck.

Brace yourselves...

Seriously. Brace yourself. Make sure you're seated comfortably and securely. Put down anything liable to spill. Steele yourself. You're about to witness the funniest thing on the entire Internet. Like so many things, it's funny because it's absolutely, horrifyingly real.

Ready? Are you sure? Okay... but don't say I didn't warn you.

Prepare to be Seasoned On Impact.

Timothy McSweeny's Open Letters

Through the glory of Hyperlinks, a question about the FCC led me to Timothy McSweeny's archive of Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond. These are downright hilarious, and well worth the time to read. To cherry-pick a few favorites:

• An Open Letter to the Occupants of a House on the Nintendo Game "Paperboy"
• An Open Letter to the Cat, Who Pushes Glasses Off the Kitchen Counter While We're Trying to Sleep (my cats do this with our stash of laundry quarters.)
• An Open Letter to a Guy I Work With Who Always Comes Into My Office to Tell Me He Sent Me an E-mail Right After He Sends Me an E-mail (I used to work with this guy)
• An Open Letter to the Human Resources Department of the Superfriends
• An Open Letter to Shrink-Wrap
• An Open Letter to Penguins

But don't stop there... heck, read them all.

"Learn to say 'I don't know.' If used when appropriate, it will be often."

Appropriately, About.com is running a toplist of Rummy quotes. There are some real gems in there, too:

"I don't know what the facts are but somebody's certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know."

"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty."

"Needless to say, the President is correct. Whatever it was he said."

"Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."

Oh, just go read them all.

Bush Moves Toward Martial Law

An article on Toward Freedom details a bill signed into law recently by President Bush which removes restrictions on his ability to declare martial law within the United States. It leaves me wondering what's left. I've seen laws rewritten, removed, bent, and broken - eminent domain, habeas corpus, and now martial law; I've seen rights and privileges eroded - education, health care; I've seen treaties ignored - the Geneva conventions, which we signed, and the Kyoto treaty, which we did not; I've seen our government trick and corrupt the United Kingdom and the United Nations. Even if we manage to oust the Republicans from office, I'm beginning to wonder if it won't already be too late by the time we have the chance - in two years, will we have any rights left? How many enemies will we have by then? I worry too that we may face a time very soon when our greatest fear is no longer international terrorism, but terrorism from within; the terrorism peddled by the White House, the Senate, and the House; terrorism peddled by MSNBC and FOX News; terrorism so insidious we don't even realize it's already happening, and it's already having a deeper impact than any bomb ever could.

My girlfriend recently flew to Los Angeles on a business trip. On this trip, they searched her bags, and found some prescriptions (in her name, of course), and some makeup (under 3 oz). They wanted to take the medications until she called in a manager to verify that the GIANT SIGN in the terminal was correct, that she was in fact allowed to keep her prescriptions. But the original security examiner, upset that he had to call his manager, and upset at having been proven wrong, instead confiscated the makeup, which he had been ready to let her take aboard. Purely vindictive.

I will say this: they have, more or less, the right idea: it isn't the Al-Kamirs we need to worry about, it's the Smiths. It's not furriners, it's 'mercans. But what they have wrong is that terror isn't in your makeup or your meds, it's not even in your luggage: it's in your mind. When we carry ideas around the country - wrong-headed, mob-mentality, un-thought-out, angry, fearful ideas, we land with a bomb in our heads, a bomb that goes of slowly, over hours and days and weeks, a biological weapon that infects everyone we talk to and everyone we judge and everyone we persecute, a weapon more powerful than a nuclear bomb, a weapon sneakier than a stealth bomber, a weapon more accurate than a laser-guided missile.

Ideas are the most powerful weapon of all - and the most powerful medicine, the most powerful defense, the most powerful single thing in the world. So many of our ideas today are dangerous, they're weapons of terror inflicted upon ourselves and each other every minute of every day. But just as these ideas have been given to us to use on one another, so too can ideas be passed around which save us from the terror, ideas which mend the wounds of propaganda, ideas that can save the country and save the world.

So please, please, I beg you - have a good idea. Do it today. Do it now. And when you've got it, share it with everyone you know and everyone you see.

It's the only thing that can save us now.

Prosper: P2P Loan Agency/Network

http://www.prosper.com/

"The online marketplace for people-to-people lending"

Very interesting. I kind of like the idea - it's somewhat like the stock market (well, more like the bond market), only with real, genuine, honest-to-goodness people. My only concern is over Prosperity's trustworthyness in terms of their fees and their criteria for borrowers. It looks like a good system, though; I may just try it as a lender to see how it goes. Or maybe I'll take out a loan to fix up my ailing PC.