general

Gawker has this interactive thingy where commenters can tag parts of images. Above is a comment noting the disconnect between Mark Zuckerberg's "cool" hoodie and uncool self.

Regarding the latter, Tomdispatch has this:

This year, Zuckerberg formed a politically active nonprofit, FWD.us, that sought to influence the immigration debate to make it easier for Silicon Valley corporations to import tech workers. There has been no ideology involved, only expediency, in how FWD.us pursued its ends. It decided to put its massive financial clout to work giving politicians whatever they wanted in hopes that this would lead to an advantageous quid pro quo arrangement. Toward that end, the group began running ads in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline (that will bring particularly carbon-dirty tar sands from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast) to support a Republican senator and other ads in favor of drilling in Alaska’s pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to support an Alaskan Democrat.

Here's a slapped-together list of RSS feed readers, posted ahead of Google Reader's impending shutdown on July 1:

Feedspot -- A correspondent described this as "the least bad right now."

Newsblur -- Am getting some links from this -- know very little about it. Update: It's open source (hat tip Jon Williams)

Feedly -- Particularly wired to import Google Reader data - do it soon. You still have to login through Google - still waiting to see how they handle logins after 7/1/13. Update, 9/22/14: Feedly is still forcing you to sign-in with Google. See Yves Smith on the yuck factor of "social logins." Update, 1/21/2016: Feedly finally added email logins so you don't have to use Google anymore to access the product.

Bloglines -- I've used this for years. They seem to have switched recently to requiring a login every time you view (i.e., the "remember me" button is worthless). Update, 9/22/14: Bloglines is still going, under the umbrella of something called "netvibes." You stay logged in, but the site has a penchant to go offline for 1-3 days with no warning or explanation. Update, 1/8/15: Bloglines users had their feeds moved to the Netvibes platform sometime last year, without any explanation of the switch. My Bloglines login continued to work on Netvibes but last week the Bloglines "dashboard item" stopped working. I am continuing to use Netvibes as an alternative to Feedly, but I had to manually re-add the feed URLs. Netvibes is a subsidiary of a French company, Dassault Systèmes.

The Old Reader -- Modeled on Google Reader before it was merged into the Google Plus empire of hell.

Livedoor -- From Japan -- I get incoming links from this.

Bonus: Hundreds of tools unironically wishing Google Reader a happy retirement. All of these comments should say, "thanks for nothing, too bad your attempt at web hegemony failed in favor of another attempt at web hegemony, yours truly, victim"

Update: Go Read explained in a blog post (hat tip Pretzel). "Open source" but Google login required.

Update 2: Naked Capitalism recommends Digg's new feed reader, particularly as an alternative to Feedly and its design in "hipster Brooklyn green." Update, 9/22/14: See Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith on the yuck factor of "social logins," including Digg's.

Update 3: AOL Reader (still in beta) - you have to sign in using AOL's or one of the other big evil spy companies' logins, natch.

Update 4: Layout for tommoody.us as seen on bloglovin'

Have got some dead links to web pages on http://homepage.mac.com/, including Joe McKay's old site and his joke movie review page I used to submit to, "preReview." Was wondering when Apple's attempt at hosting went down, exactly, and found this announcement:

With all the discussion of the Yahoo Tumblr takeover let's pause a moment and think how fleeting web content is. Someone at Apple, in the late '90s, decides the company needs to host Web content to be cool. Thousands of innocent civilians create web pages, and even use the service as their main portfolio location. A few years later another executive decides the site is no longer useful and all those URLs, those investments of energy, go dark. As the above screenshotted post states:

Of course, Apple recommends that customers consider MobileMe Galleries and iWeb as an alternative. You can get the full run-down here [dead Apple link].

The dumb-sounding "MobileMe" (a la Slate's "Me Zines" - the name they were pushing before "blog" took hold) also met an ignominious end. Per Wikipedia:

On February 24, 2011, Apple discontinued offering MobileMe at its retail stores, with MobileMe retail boxes eventually removed from resellers as well. Additionally, Apple no longer accepted new subscribers for MobileMe. On June 6, 2011, Apple announced that a new service called iCloud was to replace MobileMe, sometime in the fall. At the iPhone special event on October 4, 2011, Apple announced it would finally launch iCloud on October 12, 2011, to replace MobileMe for new users, with current users having access until June 30, 2012, when the service would cease. MobileMe was shut down on June 30, 2012, but data was still able to be retrieved for an advertised "limited time", until July 31, 2012, when the site finally closed completely.

And iWeb, home of iCarly? Wikipedia again:

iWeb allow[ed] users to create websites and blogs and customize them with their own text, photos and movies. Users could then publish their websites to MobileMe or another hosting service. In addition to its ability to publish to MobileMe, iWeb integrate[d] with other services, including Facebook, YouTube, Google AdSense and Google Maps. Apple ceased development in 2011.

iCloud is sure to be a winner. But let's concede that Apple makes nice-looking hardware.

USA Today apparently has software that scans the web for stories on certain topics, in this case "Weather Channel." Not having human editors sometimes means the oddball item gets through:

(screenshot from a couple of days ago)

The Weather Channel web page runs video clips from other channels over on its right-hand sidebar.
Currently they have a story called "A Record Breaking Pig."
If you watch with the sound off you never find out what record the pig broke.
Instead, you witness:
A Fox News announcer inside a pigpen speaking into a mic and occasionally patting a pig's back.
Close ups of a very shabby and fat (but not record-breakingly fat) pig, with flies hovering around and landing on its face.
Shots of an owner from rural America also inside the pen, embracing the pig.
Shots of children watching the pig and (in another location) having a party, with a cake that says "Happy Birthday Mr. Chops."
We can infer from this that Mr. Chops is very old, but an intermittent Fox News banner overlaying the video reads: "Pig going for world record." So assuming it's age, no record has been broken, and it's just an excuse to show video of a pig, kids, and some hay.