Off The Grid

This is where I was last night.

I love this particular comment:

Mike Ryan, Friends of the Fells executive director, said he was pleased with the workshop although Friends representatives were outnumbered by NEMBA advocates.
“It was a stacked deck,” he said. “They came from far and wide.”

What he means is “We’ve stacked the deck for years, haven’t let cyclists even join Friends of the Fells, and now we’re sad because we can’t fake being the majority anymore.”

Also let me clarify that bicycles are no danger to the flora and fauna of this park. This is the only public park in New England with such stringent restrictions on bicycles. Restrictions not based on science, but on a vocal minority that think they can have their own private playground.

Legend: Friends= Friends of the Fells | NEMBA = New England Mountain Bike Association.

Wow. (*No flash.)

I laughed hard when I saw this.

This is absolutely awesome.

is an app to view Google Reader more pleasantly on the iPhone/iPod touch. Attractive. (via @jasonsantamaria)

At some point it’ll be redundant to link to everything they put up at The Oatmeal. ‘Till then…

Don’t miss this. Perhaps 15-20% of the time I feel a little iffy about Seth Godin’s stuff. Perhaps it’s just because he does “marketing”. But I never feel iffy about Merlin, and he brings out the 80-85% of Seth I really like. (34 minute audio interview) Seth’s new book Linchpin sounds like a must read.

(note: read into the comments where Calacanis shows up to defend his actions)

I’m with Mike on this one. Calacanis had me going for a few minutes, until I clicked through and saw the totality of his tweets… I don’t follow him (I did once, until I realized I just signed up for the Mahalo hype list) and was only seeing pieces come through the rest of the tech world.

Mike nailed Calacanis’ M.O.—do anything to get attention for yourself. That has worked very successfully for Jason in his life, and I can’t blame him for continuing. However, when you just fill every waking moment of your life with self-hype, that just raises the noise-to-signal ratio for the rest of us. And he was the gall to call out Apple for overhyping the iPad? Seriously? Jason himself talked more about the iPad than they did up until Wednesday. They never said a word about its even suspected existence.

I’m with Mike: build great things and let them speak for you. I enjoy listening to Jason’s thoughts on TWiT from time to time, but it’s clear from looking at the products he’s launched in his career that they aren’t interesting enough to stand on their own without hype. Weblogs, Inc is the last place I want a web search to land because it’s a mine-field of ads and self-links that hide original sources of information and try to fool users into clicking self-links to artificially inflate page views. He’s followed that success with “Mahalo”, which repeats the formula, but feels perhaps even slimier. It would seem that instead of paying semi/pro writers like Weblogs, Inc., they have some form of audience-generated content… I’m not really sure what I’m looking at frankly. It feels like a spam farm.  It is even more ruthlessly tuned to turn up in Google results, though I don’t see that often in my own searches. In the current design, can someone tell me if the top banner is ads or links to other Mahalo “content”? It seems his products, like his iPad meme, rely on duping search engines into links and visitors into mis-clicks.

I think Jason is a smart guy and can do better… both with his own hype-stream and his products. Perhaps the experience of becoming a father will inspire him to start working on other things that truly matter, too.