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With tracking down the torch yesterday, I have to say that I was quite amazed at how well old fashioned lying and deceit, beat all the tricks of technology for people to be able to see the torch.       We keep thinking that blogging, mobile technologies, and this new age of mass information through Citizen Journalism is going to topple corrupt regimes. As yesterday proved, this isn't the case and it will most likely not be the case for a long time. The only thing we have seen from this so far is more information, which is good, yet practically useless by itself. It makes us feel like we know something and are affecting change because anyone with an internet connection can know anything immediately these days.       But knowing and doing are two very different things. This would be the big difference between my generation and my parents'. Where we go forth and learn about everything that's happening in the world, they just went out with bullhorns, masses of people, got in the face of The Man, demanded change, and got a great deal of it.       This is how the city of San Francisco was able to so easily foil the what was probably the largest treasure hunt ever seen. No matter how many iPhones, Blackberrys, and WiFi connections people could pop on to, the simple truth in the end was that no one knew where the torch ended up going. Why? Because the information wasn't there.       This is one of the big misconceptions about our new digital age in that if you have enough people involved in something, the information will just arise spontaneously. It goes to show that the information is only as good as the activity level of those involved in getting it. All of us amateurs ate it when it came to tracking down the torch. The only folks who were able to really find the torch with limited success, were the traditional media outlets because they have the money and people employed to do these things. Those of us in the blogosphere who think that if we just show up to an event and wonk about it when we get home are doing actual reporting, are sadly mistaken. This is commentary. Reporting requires digging in and kicking some ass out there in the real world. No matter how incredible your cellphone, the planet is still and will always be an analog place that requires getting yourself dirty to get the scoop.       In the end, #1 Fan and I were reduced to losing any aspirations of digital omnipotence. We tried to listen in on what people were saying only to find that they knew nothing more than us. We tried to see which direction large amount of police were heading, only to see that they didn't really know either. About the only thing that worked in the end was to watch what the helicopters were doing and once we saw them fly away from anywhere that we were, we knew our chances of seeing the torch were sunk. I still find it sad that our officials consider this a success when the only way you could have watched the torch was on a video feed from a helicopter above it.

I've chatted a little bit about Yelp.com in the past, but a recent article in San Francisco magazine really brought a lot of things home. While I'm not a tremendous fan of SF Mag, this article was quite good and a read I would recommend. Basically, the author asks, what is the future of Yelp? The site works somewhat well in San Francisco, but expansion is a problem. I would posit that the problem lies in the fact that the only other annoying hipster population of any merit lies in New York City and that is a territory heavily covered in all things hipster-related, Vice being one of the more amusing ones. So, expanding a lot in NYC is a heavy fight, while any other city doesn't have much of a market worth pursuing. San Francisco happened to be the best mix of everything and they're pretty much the kings here.       But the fact is that Yelp is probably doomed to failure or a buyout. The site is just too cool for school and has no generic merit to it that allows it to spread beyond the "in" crowd of any particular city. It's part of the reason that while I review on it from time to time, it's gotten to be only useful to me as an online 411 directory. Even if an establishment doesn't have a website in SF, they will probably be listed on Yelp. Beyond that, the reviews are nearly worthless to me, unless of course some place gets insanely good reviews all the time, then I know I should stay away as it will be thronged by hipster masses constantly.       I mean, yeah, we get it, Tartine is great. The 1,000 reviews that are there for it are kinda redundant at this point. But that's the problem. To get in to the crowd, you need to review and to be welcomed by the crowd, you need to love what they love and hate what they hate. Step out of line and the "Yelp Elite" will not welcome you unless of course you can out-drink them and I gotta warn everything that there are some severe fishes in that group.       One last point that I've mentioned in passing to people and the author of the SF Mag article picked up is that it seems like a Google buyout would make a lot of sense. Once I saw that Google had put ratings on its business listings, it seemed like a perfect fit. That and the fact that Yelp's revenue comes from premium placements for business (which several owners have told me are a waste of money) and advertisements, which Google does splendidly. What Yelp could do for Google's ratings system could be what YouTube did for Google Video. I'm sure they wouldn't change anything about the front end of Yelp so that they keep the community that drools over it in place, while at the same time, they'd take the backend and make it all Google, hopefully fixing Yelp's very sporadic image server in the process. After all, Yelp's search system sucks to the core and I always use 'blah blah restaurant site:yelp.com' searches on Google to actually find what I'm looking for, so the fit would be more brilliant than a shotgun with a silencer

I was very annoyed to come across this TechCruch article today. It wasn't because the article didn't really research anything and it wasn't because I'm a fan of keeping around Internet Explorer 6, but it was the fact that I was flat-out ripped off and TechCrunch was there promoting the guys that stole my idea which put my cheese out in the wind.       Sometime back, I created a campaign called, End6!. It was a site that set up a very simple widget that people could embed in their own website to tell those who visited their site that they should really think about upgrading from this very broken browser of Explorer 6. It was simple enough and something that I tossed out in October of 2007 with four different language versions. It got picked up on Menéame and a few other sites. Some people started using it and continue to use it. It wasn't anything that I did to get rich, but just to make the internet a better place.       Now, along comes this group at savethedevelopers.org (no, I'm not linking to them as they're on my naughty list) who have basically ripped me off. Obviously you could say it is very possible we both had the same idea, albeit theirs comes six months after mine. I don't discount this at all, but there are several things that jab me in the eye about this. First, it is really the same idea with a snippet of JavaScript you can link to or download to put on your site. Yes, their JavaScript is built differently, but it does the same thing. Second, there is the language, calling it a "campaign" and saying things like, "a more enjoyable experience on the web" where I say, "Make the Net a happier place". Then there's the domain registration. End6! was registered on 2007-10-13 while Save the Developers was registered on 2008-02-05.       Overall, I'm just ever so pissed on two fronts. One is that I don't get any credit. If they admitted that they took what I did and make it different or better, I'd be thrilled. Second and of most importance is that they're trying to make money off of this. What a load. I built, hosted, and had #1 Fan do some great translation work for the site all for free. Sure, I could have tossed some AdWords up there or a tacky t-shirt, but I didn't. Why? I was much more interested in making the campaign work and making the net better. These guys have got merchandise for sale and I don't care that, "Proceeds from merchandise sales go right back into furthering the Save The Developers program." It costs absolutely, next to nothing to host a site these days, therefore it would seem that the proceeds are going more in the direction of the groups pockets than anything else.       Lastly, I have to say that these guys just really missed the boat. That gif image popping down is 7k and a problem. End6! was designed around being extremely lightweight and fast. Why? Because the people on the old crappy browsers are invariably those who are on old crappy connection speeds. Around 20% of people of in the US are on these slow connections, which "astoundingly" overlaps with the average amount of people using IE6. But, it's because of these super slow connections that people don't upgrade. For instance, the only way I got my mom (who lives in the boonies and can only get dialup) to upgrade to Firefox 2 from IE6 was to bring the updates on a flash drive to her house. So, if your message takes up more bandwidth, like how the one from this group's does, the people who need to see it, just aren't going to.       Anyways, if you buy in to what I'm saying, blog about it and spread the word. Of yeah, you could also install the End6! JavaScript on your site if you're really feeling like being my buddy.       

I was surprised when I visited SFGate.com (the San Francisco Chronicle's website) yesterday and was suddenly presented with a whole new layout. Damn. It was about time. The old look was from a redesign that according to the Internet Archive, it was deployed some time around November of 2001, but it might as well have been from 1995. It was clunky, not very extensible, and just flat. Of course, on the comments for the article on the new home page you'll see that there were a good number of people who preferred the old design. Read in to these a bit closer and you'll realize that the main thrust of the ire is because people now have to learn where things are again, which is to say that people don't like the new look, because they're lazy. Obviously malaise is never a reason to avoid progress and I'm very thankful that the Chronicle redesigned the site, since I get my local news from there.       For those that really don't get it, there is a graphic to show what things do. I find these things about as amusing as the manuals for cars. It's a tool. It should be intuitive enough for people to figure out, just like a car should be intuitive enough for anyone to hop in and drive who has driven other cars. If this is not the case, then something went horribly awry. I think that this was just put up pander to the lowest common denominator given that they're a news publication. I don't know why they bother as people who don't like this will never really like it no matter what you do, short of going back to the old design.       As far as improvements, I like the flyout ('Index') in the upper right menu that gives you immediate access to all the sections in the site. This new layout of the page also allows them to tuck the ads in, in a much more classy way. I realize that for a commercial site, you have to have ads and I much prefer this manner than how they were just stuck on to the far right edge of the site. Lastly, while some people might complain about how "busy" the new site is, I find that it presents the newspaper's information in a much more organized form that is more compelling for me to spend time on. The way it used to be, I would just see an article, read it and go. This has more of a 'wikipedia feel' wherein I'm invited to click around a bit more.       So, good job folks and I know it couldn't have been easy given the endless meetings, committees, and hands that try and get in the mix when it comes to rebuilding a site of this scope. Maybe now your PageRank can climb back up from a five, because honestly, I've got a four and I do this for free!

I dread buying from Amazon. What started out as a pioneer in internet sales, has slowly turned in to a megalithic company with a CEO having as high a monkey quotient as Steve Ballmer and customer service as squalid as my cellphone provider.       Beyond everything else that they do and the fact that despite multiple redesigns, their site is still pretty ugly, it's the fact that they delay shipments that really drives me crazy. How is it that a product with immediate availability takes a week to ship? Simple, they want you to actually pay for shipping, as opposed to using their Super Saver Shipping. So, instead of just having one option for shipping where you pay for your order and they ship it out in the order received, you get all these other options. It's somewhat like sales tax in this country, where the final price isn't the final price if you want to get what you were expecting.       Somehow people tolerate this as Amazon is still around and Jeff Bezos has an ever more smirking grin as time goes on. I happen to not be one of these people that tolerates this and so I just use Amazon and don't buy from Amazon. I encourage everyone to do the same wherein you browse for something, read the reviews and then buy it at a more ethical store. For instance, browsing for books and then ordering them from a bookstore like Stacey's here in San Francisco which is local and fantastic. Doing this benefits you (although should be taken with a grain of salt overall) and wastes Amazon's servers and bandwidth.       Of course where Amazon gets even is that they'll sometimes be the only place I can get something, which is providing the dilemma that I'm in now where I ordered on the 4th and will hopefully get it shipped out on the 11th. It is true that I could get this product (a really well-built electric razor) elsewhere, but that meant getting it from Canada just like I have to do with the Freytag and Berndt maps that I so dearly love. But, given the amount of time I'm waiting, I suspect that Amazon may just be drop shipping it to me from Canada. Those cheeky bastards...       

In honor of our political race yesterday, I would like to present the, iJam. No, it is not that i-jam like we'd say it in English, but actually, iJam with the 'h' sound for the 'j' in Spanish because it is from Spain. For those who don't know, jamón is basically Spanish ham. Sometimes those uninformed compare it to prosciutto, but that's dead flat out wrong since prosciutto is not only Italian, but nothing like jamón.       I have officially begun my descent in to Spanish transformation as upon leaving Spain at the end of summer last year, I began to pine for jamón. It is extremely hard to get in the US (inversely prosciutto is quite easy to get making it suspiciously inferior to jamón.) Maybe it's for the better as I'd just eat it all the time if it was here and get fat(ter). Anyways, because of this, I found iJam site to be incredibly funny as it spoofs Apple and jamón and does it very well.       This rather brilliant advertising firm in Spain called, Shacketon put the whole thing together with little other reason it seems than to have a laugh. Obviously they want to start up some kind of viral marketing to draw attention to themselves, which I'm more than happy to point their way. I saw it when it was still just in Spanish which caused a good deal of the jokes to be lost on me until Number One Fan did some translation. I was even ready to translate the whole thing out in this post so that it could be shared, when lo and behold they put English subtitles on the demonstration video you see a link to from the home page in the lower left. Good stuff. Check it out. If you're ever in Spain, don't taste the jamón unless you want to be hooked.

For those unfamiliar with the word, "domain name", in a nutshell, it's what you type in to get to a website, such as here with hudin.com. I only own the 'hudin' part and can control anything after that, so if I wanted to start michael.hudin.com someday, that would be my business. The '.com' part (and it's actually .com., try it, it works) is owned and controlled by ICANN. They pretty much control everything on the net and decide what new top-level domains (the 'com', 'net', 'org', 'gov', etc.) that will be allowed to be used. This is unfortunate as the group is based, funded, and pretty much controlled by the US. So, internet growth in world is currently dictated by the US as opposed to a world consortium as it should be.       The reason that I'm bringing all of this up is because some interesting things have been happening in the world of domains these days. These aren't earth shattering events, but at the same time, a lot can happen in a country in regards to its name.       Take for instance former Czechoslovakia. When the internet came around, it got the .cs extension, which was then given up as they split in to the Czech Republic - .cz and Slovakia - .sk. The later being still mighty close to Slovenia of .si, so I'm sure email (as is postal mail) gets sent incorrectly all the time. I even mixed the two up when I started typing this and I know better!       So, .cs actually got re-purposed in to the ill-fated union of Serbia and Montenegro. They of course have since split and have become .rs and .me respectively. Ah, but they were also still using the .yu extension from their days as Yugoslavia. So, what's a website owner to do? Simple, either keep .yu or just register .com and not bother with any of it. In theory, they are supposed to be transitioning from .yu, but when I was in Serbia, I still saw signs for bus lines and government offices that had the .yu extension.       This is all something of a mess, except in the case of Montenegro. They've gotten quite a windfall with the .me domain. If they want to (and most likely they will) they can open up registration to anyone and thusly, we'll start to see wonderful sites such as www.do.me (I feel sorry for the person that thinks that is just 'dome'), www.blow.me, and scores of others on the net. It's not dissimilar to countries such as Tonga with .to, Tuvalu with .tv, and most importantly Western Samoa with .ws that gives us the domain for Number One Fan. These countries make a good deal of money through the licensing of their domain and to some degree, what I feel to be their identity. But money is money and these are all small places that can use it, so more power to them in the end.       But, the question of identity on the web is an important one as well as an expensive one. Here in the US, we think of the name before the extension to be the more important bit, because who uses the .us extension? No one, that's who. But, for other countries, that is quite important, yet cost prohibitive. I looked in to how much it cost to get a .hr extension for Croatia and it's not cheap. Most of the registrars that I found who could do it charged $100+ a year. Just a tad more expensive than Go Daddy, huh? But, this explains why there are so many .com and otherwise sites in Croatia. They can't justify spending that much just to have .hr for their site.       Honestly, I think that the .hr or any domain that is specific to a country should be given out on a limited basis at next to nothing to the people who are residents there. Instead of us all congealing into a huge mass of .com, .net, or .org (the big three) domains, it would be a lot more interesting, diverse and useful if we all used our country codes. To a large degree, I wish that the big three had never been brought about in the first place. It would have made much more sense for me to be www.hudin.us and my cousins to then have www.hudin.si so that you knew who you were talking to. Or more useful for things like www.tourism.us versus www.tourism.ca. Of course, www.tourism.cd would never be possible for the Democratic Republic of Congo as they have seemingly lost federal control of their own country domain through some shifty deal.       Russia has weighed in heavily on what it thinks of the whole system of control and has basically given a big fat middle finger with 'фуцк яоу' written on it, to the US ICANN which makes sense. They are really pushing for their own system in order to be able to use Cyrillic. It makes sense and is in line with the fact that .su (For Soviet Union) was supposed to be dropped a long time ago, but they keep selling new registrations for it, not caring what ICANN says. Of course, .ru is supposed to be their main domain name now, even though in Cyrillic, that is, .py which is actually for Paraguay. Screwy, yes. But, ultimately most people would assume that they're not really doing it for any kind of Russian pride, but more to control the whole system within Russia. For, those in control of these name servers are those in control of the web, which is why the US will most likely have to have ICANN pried from its cold dead fingers before they'll give it up.       One last domain that I find truly ridiculous is the new .asia that has been recently approved. So, I guess the fact that white people can't tell where people in Asia are from wasn't bad enough and so we need to have a domain that lumps them all in to one group on the internet, just to make that easy as well? I don't get it, nor why they keep refusing to start up a .xxx domain, but such is the state of domains in the world as it is controlled by a corporation in the United States.

Yesterday was one of those marathon sessions of 15 hours that I thought I had left behind in my 20's, but apparently not. The net seems to not be a workplace for old men...       But, after getting out this monstrosity, which was delayed several times by people having to do the QA after a launch and then a retraction and then a launch again, I found some solace in the following video:              Yeah, I know. I'm posting a lot of videos lately from things that amuse me. Has the web really come to this? Well, yeah. It's either this or more bitching about crippies and art students. Who needs that?

It's a fact that the vast majority of the information on the internet is written in English. Even a site that pulls together all this information like Global Voices still uses English as its main language. This is a shame. It's not a shame because it's using a single language, but that English has become so dominant on the web. It was somewhat inevitable as the vast majority of the components that drive it are in English. I mean, if you look at the code driving any page, you'll see all these English words in there. So, it's a given that to be able to set up sites, you'll need to be able to understand some degree of English.       I think it's this last point that really was excluding a great many people for a good long time. But now that there are so many packages you can use where you don't need to be a native English speaker to have a blog. Tossing up an installation of Wordpress or using a pre-fab system like Blogger or even Livejournal is possible by a great many more these days.       Unfortunately we still come back to the point that English has become so dominant in the world and if you're a native English speaker, you're bound to not know very many if any other languages. So, what do you do if you want to be informed about the rest of the world? Simple. You revert to the method of our ancestors and use pictures. Yes, it's primitive, but still quite effective. It's on this point that I'd like to point out a few blogs that are either wholly or partially photo-based and something that most native English speakers can follow. If not, fire up a little BabelFish and get a funky translation that might see you though.       Фотографоманство ('fotografomanstvo' in the Latin alphabet, which I think just means, 'photomanie') is a very compelling photographic journey by a girl living in Minsk, Belarus. The media is extremely controlled and the people there live under what amounts to an autocracy, so being able to see someone's daily life from the area is really interesting. The girl also has a very good eye and she was the winner of the Best of the Blogs.       A Best of Blogs winner for French, Cédric Kalonji is the life of Cédric in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Again, this is a nation without a free media, so his view from inside the country is quite interesting. Unfortunately for English speakers, we need to either dust off our crappy French skills or hit the Fish as most of it is in French.       Lastly, a friend named Timothée Rolin documents his life in Paris, France. Tim's site is almost completely photos and quite thorough about his life, so anyone can appreciate it and the partying that he seems to do non-stop when he isn't eating at La Fée Verte. If you're any kind of fan of The Real World or other crap reality TV shows, you'll probably get hooked.       Of course, there are a great many more blogs out there that people can follow. These are just some that I got turned on to which you may or may not know about and will hopefully enjoy.

I was pointed to this fun little Flash game. Essentially, you need to trap the cat with dark green circles. It's not as easy as it seems, since the cat goes wherever he damn well pleases, which would be like any typical cat.       This was originally from Afrigator which has a wealth of undiscovered sites in there. It's not nearly as mainstream as Digg or Slashdot, so you can often find new things in there that no one else has heard of and pass their discovery off as your own if you're a cheeky soul.