Thought I had more tomatoes..., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Oh well... I'll get a three or four meals out of this batch anyway.

Lee Semel has build a great open calendar for the NYC tech community.  We talked a lot about how there wasn't a central resource for this stuff and no good way to find NYC tech events.

We didn't like the calendars that required sign-ins or being a member, and so we went for something that was wiki-like in that anyone could just come and check it out.

It just got launched, so we'd love your feedback. 

We'd also like your events!

Tonight, at DeWitt Clinton Field, the Fordham Softball Rams take on the Fordham Softball Marroon in a crosstown, intra-alumni faceoff.

Roommates will face each other.

College drinking buddies.

Ex's.

Gametime is 7:30PM. 

Be there for the softball, stay for the discernment and Jesuit style introspection.

If there is a single softball game I want to win this whole season more than anything else, its this game.

There is ZERO chance it will not rain in NYC tonight.  It WILL happen.  Accuweather says there is 100% chance.

If I were the weathermen, given my track record, I think I'd couch that and just take it down to 90% just in case.  What do you gain by telling us its 100%?  Its just all downside.

Washington Post Reporter Frank Ahrens used Oddcast's Sitepal product as part of his news story.   

Cool!

Wait...  I was so captivated by the avatar, I forgot to read the article.  Damn!   Now I have to go back.

You know her.

Her name is cutiemonica or Krystal or xxxBabyxxx and she has one pic, 250 guy friends, and absolutely no profile bling whatsoever.

And she's the hottest girl you've ever seen.

Oh, and she's got a link to the site where she keeps all her "real pics" or her webcam or where she keeps all her spyware... umm... I mean...  *fun stuff*. 

The best thing about MySpace is that it lets users do pretty much whatever they want.  Paste 3rd party code?  Sure.  Link off the site?  Sure.  Auto redirects to porn?  Absolutely.

The worst thing about MySpace?  It lets users do pretty much whatever the want. 

MySpace has gotten so huge that it has spawned a whole community of bad guys that are trying to game the system.

And just like Friendster before it, MySpace seems to be having some trouble as of late keeping up.  I get bursts of friend requests in bunches of 20 from spam profiles, and keep waiting for the day the guy who hosts my free layout decides to switch it out for some animal porn. 

That's what is going to threaten MySpace, not the "MySpace isn't cool anymore" factor.  Because, MySpace is us...  it lets users express themselves however they want..   and more and more users are putting videos, pictures, and yes, even avatars, through other services, up on their page.  MySpace doesn't need to be "cool" because we're cool enough and it reflects us.  Combine that with a database of indy music events that aren't even located on venue music pages and from a content perspective, I'm not worried. 

I'm just worried about getting a virus from having unprotected layout swapping. 

As a company looking to enable our users to take our services with them to MySpace's open platform, we have a vested interest in doing whatever we can to differentiate ourselves from the bad guys.  On many other platforms, this means being a part of an authorized developer network.  I'd love to see a developer network for MySpace.  Why wouldn't we want that?  Check us out, make us sign stuff... tell us exactly what our code needs to look like and we'll comply in exchange for not having to play "catch up" when security fixes make our widgets do weird things and require code updates.  Heck, we'll even give you a blood sample...  but we swear, we didn't know that stuff Barry gave us was anything more than a vitamin supplement.

Right now, there's no page of updates for us... no resource to check to see if our stuff is "MySpace compliant."  Its just figure it out as we go, and to be honest, bad guys are always better at playing cat and mouse.  So let's smoke out the FraudRequest folks and band together to fight evil.

Click here to get Justice League HTML.  :)

Or something like that...

Sean Johnson is taking the "next" concept out to the Windy City and starting nextChigago.

The nextVirus... spreading across America.  :)

Seriously, though, its an open source brand, just like BarCamp.  In fact, a lot of us here at nextNY think of our group has kind of like BarCamp on a listserv that actually includes going to bars and meeting regularly.  So if you'd like to get some young people in tech together in your area, here's what I had in mind as the principals of nextNY when I set the ball rolling.  Keep in mind none of these principals have ever been approved or officialy endorsed by anyone.

1. No membership or membership criteria.  While I've tried to have the group clump around young people in tech, there's no official criteria.  All we keep doing is talking it up by using terms like "up and coming" (not young... I try to avoid age terms) and running the kind of events where my peer group would show, like Startup 101 for new entreprenuers or bar outings of lots of other "up and comers".

I just added a list of the most recent comments on the sidebar...   maybe that will encourage the chatter.  Here's the code for MT/Typepad:  (Thanks Elise)

<div class="module">
<h2 class="module-header">Recently Commented On</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<ul class="module-list">
<MTComments lastn="10" sort_order="descend">
<li class="module-list-item">
<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$> on <MTCommentEntry>
<a href="<MTEntryPermalink>#c<$MTCommentID$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
</MTCommentEntry>
</MTComments>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>

From Eric...

"Computers, and especially games, may also play into this generational shift in attitude. My generation was among the first to really have games around our entire lives. What does that have to do with anything? Unlike children of previous generations, who were presented with unyielding eternal institutions like school and family and even Little League, games gave my generation a chance to create our own worlds, our own institutions. Life was just another realm in which we could play with the rules. 

I wonder whether this sort of game playing and this sort of experimentation with institutions from an early age is what contributed to the massive rise of entrepreneurship we have seen over the past decade or so. Instead of being locked into a world where institutions were king and where the goal was to be a company man, my generation realized that institutions could be brought into being, that starting a new company was like starting a new game. (Okay, the massive drop in capital costs to start a company also contributed, but I’m trying to make a point here)."

Brad and I have been chatting about link density and depth.

I don't know exactly what I want to say about this, but there's an interesting progression in here somewhere.

Craigslist.org, or at least the home page, has high link density.  Almost everything on that page is clickable.

However, it doesn't have great depth.   You click on New York, now you get all the New York catagories.  You click on Missed Connections and then you get listings.  Click on a listing, and that's it.  Dead end.  No more clicking, save for going backwards via the top menu.

Del.icio.us does one better with half its listings.  There's just as much link density on each page as the Craigslist frontpage, but here, half the links bring you to equally dense pages.  Clicking on a tag or a screename will get you yet another Del.icio.us page full of links.  So, as long as you stay on those links, you could go around and around forever.

Even better is IMDB...  lots of links, and every movie has a list of clickable people, each of which brings you to a person with their own set of movies.  And, each of those movies has more people.  Person, movie, person movie.

What more degrees of freedom?  Try Baseball Reference.  Everything, and I mean everything, is clickable.  Years, teams, players, awards, etc.  You can go from David Wright's page to the '94 Mets to Richard Hildago to the 1997 National League page to Andres Gallarraga to Ted Kluscewski to voting on the 1950 MVP award, and so on and so on... colleges, towns, days of debut of final games, birth death... circles and cirlcles and every page is as dense as the last one, and every page infinately deep.

I like the idea of pages where everything is clickable but each click takes you to a new page of clicks...  and we were wondering whether or not that only works with certain kinds of content.  Can you do it with news?  I mean, certainly, news pages could get more link dense and deep... since right now it seems like the most you ever get are like 3 or 4 related articles and like two keywords.  Recipies would be a great one.  Strawberry cheesecake?  Click strawberries and strawberry martinis, too...  and other drinks, or drinks that go with other food... round and round.  What else? 

I just got a MySpace friend request from Status Q Billiards.

Status Q isn't a person, of course... its a pool hall in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

And you know, I pass it all the time, but I really don't hangout that much by my apartment, so I haven't gone in there in ages...   

... but someone over there was smart enough to notice that I had "pool" as a hobby in my profile... or maybe they were just adding people in the local area and they asked to be my friend.

No matter what kind of business you are, setting up shop in MySpace is brilliant.  I'm happy to be friends with Status Q and now it makes me want to go in there...  especially now that I can see who else might be playing there by checking all of the other people who are friends with Status Q.  They've turned marketing into community building.

Leave it to a little pool hall in Brooklyn to understand Web 2.0 guerilla marketing better than most big corporations.

Ignition just funded SecondSpace.  I like the guys over there so I'm curious what the company is up to, but they're being very secretive.

The website says this:

"We have the opportunity to build a groundbreaking new online service that helps consumers get the most from their free time."

Its from a group of people who "have impressive track records building global online brands and services such as Internet Explorer, VeriSign, Microsoft FrontPage, Classmates.com, Quicken Loans and others..."

So what is it?

MySpace for grown-ups?

A porn site?

A great new ajax web calendar?

Submit your guess and I'll buy the best guess (As voted by the audience in a couple of days) an Original size Jamba Juice of any flavor.

My guess is that it will be a site you stare into and get hypnotized into thinking you actually had a great time on the site, but what you really did was randomly click AdSense ads for seven hours.

Someone gave Joshua a zebra plant with some lucky Chinese coins in it.  As del.icio.us flourished, so did the plant.

When he left for CA, he left the plant with USV and it continued to grow.

That is, until we gave him back his lucky coins...  I really only wanted the plant and the lucky coins were meant for him.

I think its too late to ask for the coins back...

Does living in a borderless world mean that you increasingly need international specialization or that having "cross-border" expertise matters less and less?

So Henry Owens made his major league debut the other night.   Threw gas.  Anyone up for keeping this guy in the bullpen a little while?

Pelfrey goes tonight.   This guy is a real stud.  Dare I say Gooden-esque?   I'm sure he'll probably get clobbered or something tonight, but that's ok.  I'm sure he'll have a long career here and I'm looking forward to seeing how he does.  Hopefully, if nothing else, it means the end of Lima Time. 

Lima Time really sucks.

BTW.... Jose Reyes?  Didn't you watch Jeff Kent growing up?  Baseball 101.  Don't slide into first base.  You always get their faster running through it.  The only reason you slide anywhere else is to avoid a tag and because you can't overrun other bases.  Lifestyles of the young and not so bright. 

Critical mass of broadband penetration+inexpensive digital cameras+social video site+ripped off TV content=

Crazy DELICIOUS!

Remember that SNL Narnia video?

Try the reduxes...

I'm sorry, but this is UFR.  (Utterly...  Ridiculous).  Friendster just won the patent on social networking.

The idea of interacting with people you know and with people they know is called networking and it has been around long before the internet.  The idea that it is patentable is a farce.

Frankly, if Friendster, who lost the social network battle by being slow, closed, and failing to provide user value, actually goes after anyone or takes a dollar from anyone in licensing after getting awarded this patent, that's like winning the World Series on a balk.

Technically, yes, you're allowed to, but if I was managing a team that won the World Series on a balk, I'd turn around and say, "No thanks, we decline the balk.  We're not winning that way.  Either we actually drive that guy in from third on some sort of actual bat to ball contact or we'll go home, thanks."