I’ve been playing around with Facebook a little bit — see Jason Butler Facebook — and it’s fun to see how far a lot of the ideas we were implementing at PlanetAll have made it into the mainstream.

I downloaded the developer API, and I’m going to start thinking a little more deeply about how to integrate the social graph into the various projects I’m working on. I wonder if there are interesting ways to map journalism to relationships. Hmm….

Jay Brewer get a nice mention in a Globe article about blogging for dollars. Congratulations, Jay!

Odd: Justin.tv.

Justin has a webcam over his ear. And he never takes it off. Ever. It’s always transmitting whatever is happening in his life. It’s really weird (and a little creepy), but compelling nonetheless. It’s like being dropped into Being John Malkovich.

Wow, so an hour or so after posting my last post, I find out that Tabblo has been acquired by Hewlett-Packard.

Massive congratulations to Antonio, John, Dan, Liesel (all ex-Abuzzers) and everyone else on the Tabblo team.

Tabblo just launched a super-simple way to make a photo cube. I just went and did it, and it took 45 seconds to create and print out the sheet. Incredibly easy. Incredibly cool. Take a look at my quick photocube (.pdf).

More product information from Tabblo. Antonio’s launch announcement.

Our Tom may have gotten himself into a little more trouble.

My search dashboard lit up with Brady searches this morning. My team writes the content spotlights (the “Our picks” at the top of some search results), so we needed to figure out what links would be most useful for folks. For this one, we pulled the original Brazilian site that broke the rumor. Unfortunately, none of us speak Portuguese, so we ran it through Google’s automated translator.

I’m not sure Google’s automated translator is all that accurate:

It will be that it would from there come the so great discomfort with the pregnancy of former-namorada of Tom the Brady, current boyfriend of Gisele?

The next Boston BarCamp is coming up in a couple of weeks (3/18-19). I learned a lot at last year’s BarCamp, and I hope another Saturday invested will be worthwhile.

I love listening to hardcore web folks enthuse about their work, especially those working on projects on their own. Maybe I’ll talk a little bit about the joys of local search. Regardless, I’m glad we were able to kick in a few bucks to sponsor.

p.s., if you are one of those hardcore web folks, we’re always hiring — drop me a line

AirTran Airways asked a Worcester couple to strap in their screaming three-year-old child into her seat. They refused, and the family was taken off the flight, undoubtedly to the delight of the rest of the passengers. Consumerist adds some interesting commentary.

I think I’m with the majority of the Consumerist commenters in agreeing that AirTran did the right thing. Although I certainly sympathize with the beleaguered parents, I think if I couldn’t get Sadie in her seat and strapped in for a takeoff we’d already delayed for fifteen minutes, I would have slinked off the flight in shame. I don’t think the rest of the world has a duty to suffer along with my problems.

[tags]Parenting, AirTran[/tags]

Here’s a pretty insightful argument for how even applications that aren’t trying to be best in the world — internal business applications, for example — are being compared to the interactive design of Google. Developers (and websites) who’ve sailed along might be in for a rude awakening; Internet users’ expectations are rising, and Google is driving it.

The “leading edge” interface and ideas employed by Google, Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo! are suffusing our culture to become the standard user interface of web applications. And programming the standard user interface is a basic job requirement. Learn to love it.

Apple announced the new iPhone today. Good-bye Treo!

June seems like so far away…

I’m building out a development environment in my home office, and I need to build a linux box to mirror my production environment.

I have a monitor; I just need a box. Any suggestions on the best way to get one?

And, yes, more Sadie pictures are coming soon.

[tags]linux, lazyweb[/tags]

Maps of War has some incredibly interesting map-based visualizations, including an overlay of the various empires ruling the middle east and war-dead by political party.

I’m normally not a huge fan of animation on web sites, but these are very effective examples of data visualization.

I’ve had a couple of folks ask me about my podcast-listening habits, so here are the ones I listen to each day (and highly recommend).

The podcast links will open up in iTunes, for ease of subscribing.

Now that I’m responsible for search at Boston.com, I need to keep on top of the industry. WebMasterRadio.FM has put together an excellent group of weekly radio shows/podcasts covering the field. These are all “inside baseball,” but they are excellent listening if you’re in the business.

The Daily Searchcast
Danny Sullivan‘s daily podcast, reviewing all the search-engine news. He covers anything and everything having to do with Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest.

Net Income
Jeremy Shoemaker‘s radio show about all the different ways to monetize your site, including PPC, affiliates, sponsorships and others means. Targeted to small- and medium-sized sites.

SEO Rockstars
“Jammin’ and Spammin’” with a couple of the leading gray-hat SEO practitioners. Hit or miss, but often entertaining.

First and Fifteen
ESPN’s daily football recap.

Baseball Today
ESPN’s daily baseball recap

Slate Podcast
Smart daily podcast, generally reading one of the stories from the day. A special treat is the Friday Gabfest, a roundtable coming out of Washington.

NYT columnist podcasts
Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman.

The New York Times Book Review
Surprisingly entertaining weekly wrap-up of the Times Book Review, often including author interviews. Very entertaining.

Beat the Press
This is a weekly podcast of the Channel 2 Greater Boston show. It’s inside baseball for Boston media news, probably not all the interesting for folks not in the business.

Boston Globe’s Page One podcast.
This is our own summary of the Globe’s front page.

David Pogue
New York Times technology columnist David Pogue reads his weekly column.

American Public Media’s Future Tense
A daily public radio story about technology.

Jim Cramer’s Real Money
Podcast of Jim Cramer’s daily radio show. I’m entirely in mutual funds, but this is still highly entertaining radio.

NPR Business Story of the Day
Top business story of the day from NPR.

On Words, with John Ciardi
This is my little hidden pleasure. The late John Ciardi used to do “On Words” segments for NPR, discussing etymology of English words and expressions.

Dear Internet:

I want to find someone who can plow our driveway (in Holliston) this winter. Google has been useless for this task.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,
Jason

I’ve received some nice comments on my little elephant photos site, so I’ve decided to whip up a couple of more microsites to feature my photography. Today, I’ll point you over to my Niagara Falls photos I took on my honeymoon in 2004.

I put my best seven (out of 50 or so) up there, including a couple of nice ones with rainbows. Check them out, and let me know what you think!

Not a normal day for Antonio and friends: Sprinkler explodes in Tabblo’s offices. I feel bad for them; this will disrupt business for days, if not weeks.

But, I must give them huge kudos for having the presence of mind to record what was happening and make it into a Tabblo. Tabblo (the product) helps people tell stories; Tabblo (the team) used it to tell their own.

Best dog-food eating I’ve seen in a while.

A weblog asks Web 2.0 leaders pointed questions about business models and such.

Question 5: Do you have a marketing plan that extends beyond Digg, TechCrunch, Delicious, and Technorati?…

Rapleaf: we’ve never heard of Digg, Delicious, and Technorati – can you send me their domain names? We’re still focused on Geocities and PlanetAll.

Good enough for me: here’s some link-love for Rapleaf.

Last laugh? PlanetAll and Geocities fetched hundreds of millions of dollars when acquired by Amazon and Yahoo respectively.

Here’s my shill for the week

We just launched a new blog covering MetroWest, complementing the west section of the Globe. The reporters post updates throughout the week. It’s organized by town, so you can see all the Holliston posts if you’d like.

If you want to keep track of Holliston news, you should also subscribe to the Google News search for Holliston. Along the left-hand side, you can click “news alerts” to get emails, or click “RSS” to subscribe to the RSS feed.

[tags]Holliston[/tags]

Over the past few years, I’ve manage to accumulate several decent pictures of elephants, from Tanzania and Thailand. I wanted to try out a couple of things, so I set up a separate little mini-site to highlight the pictures.

Check out my elephant photos.

I always knew this in my heart, but it’s nice to see it confirmed by science.