thisStrangeEngine.com

One of the things that surprised me when I was at SxSW Interactive last year was how all these people, who’s generally personally and professionally invested in “new media,” practically lived and breathe Twitter. While most of my friends, generally considered to be normal everyday people, never heard of it (at the time, it seems yet even more ubiquitous now). I can kind of understand why. A regular person probably looks at something like Twitter and says, “What’s the point?” It’s true that it doesn’t seem like much at first, but it was like my first experience with MySpace when it just got off the ground. I signed up, but I knew no one on it at that time, and thought “What’s the point?” Once you get a small network of friends on it, it’s appeal becomes much more apparent.

ANYWAYS, I said all that to say this: here is a neat little video explaining Twitter in Plain English. I think it’s part of a series of videos that explain web phenomenons to regular people (which, clearly us internet people are NOT).

Tags: twitter

To my surprise today, I discovered that the GoogleMaps Streetview people have apparently visited my home town of Nacogdoches. Those Google people are serious about this stuff.

Look, it’s my old house. The interesting thing to note is that they actually didn’t go any further south down the road.

And look, it’s everyone’s favorite hang out spot.

Pretty neat.

Tags: google, nacogdoches

Hey gang, I’ve been at the SxSW interactive festival for the past several days. This is the first time I’ve come back to the conference since 2005, and it’s both bigger and more fun than I remembered. I’ll talk about (maybe?) in more detail when things settle down. In the mean time, I have to say I’ve been inspired to perhaps hit the reset button on my technological presence with this site and others. This site is down about 50% of the time due to my faulty router’s port forwarding issues, so it’s clear no one’s going to miss it much if I take it down for a little restructuring maintenance. First thing, of course, would be to replace that router…

Tags: sxswi

I’ve decided that thisstrangeengine.com is finally too cumbersome even for me. The main portion of the domain is seventeen characters long, and in addition can be tricky to spell since it all runs together and the last letter of the each word is the same as the first letter of the next. I’m looking for something short (~ 10 characters or less) but memorable, and quirky is always good.

I already have some candidates, but I could always use suggestions.

During today’s World Wide Developer’s Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that both OS X Leopard and iPhone are on schedule for they previously announced release dates, but also a dropped a small bomb in announcing the release of the Safari web browser for Windows. Apple claims that the Safari browser is faster than both Internet Explorer and Firefox in loading and page rendering. From it’s initial release on the Macintosh platform many years ago, Safari has been held in high regard the web design community for it’s adherence to web standards, and it is now a welcome addition to the Windows space. A beta version is currently available.

I can’t help but look at this as sort of a throwing down of the gauntlet by Apple. Long ago, Microsoft created an Internet Explorer for the Macintosh OS, thereby having a significant presence on both platforms. When Microsoft announced that it would no longer develop IE for the Mac, Apple then released the Safari browser to much critical acclaim…and now making it available for Windows sort of smacks of “turnabout is fair play.”