PhotoOfTheDay
The first one is about Jamie Livingston. He was a New York-based photographer, film-maker and circus performer who from March 31, 1979 through to the day of his death on October 25, 1997 took a Polaroid photograph every day. Livingston’s Polaroid a Day charted his experiences with cancer, and his subsequent engagement and marriage. His photographs in and out of hospital continued up until the day of his death.

Days with my father
An always beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes uplifting site documenting the daily life of Philip’s 98 year-old father who copes with his lack of short-memory. 20 minutes after Philip’s mother funeral, his dad started to ask him where his mother was. After some time Philip figured out that he couldn’t keep telling him that she was gone. “It was killing both of us to re-live her death constantly”.

Love Diary
This is touching in so many ways. Just like the other links here. To tell it with the words of Madi Ju “I met Patrick online in July 2006, then we met in Macau for the first time. he moved from Taipei to Guangzhou, we travelled to Tibet and Nepal, then we moved to Xiamen, a small city by the sea. Our relationship ended after 2 years in Beijing. This is our photo story about our love and passion. Now it’s all the memories.”

WASHINGTON—Officials from the Institute for Somehow Managing to Hold It All Together warned that, despite their best efforts, everything appears to be falling completely apart and “getting way out of hand,” according to a strongly worded report characterized by panic, frustration, and numerous typographical errors that was released to the American public Monday.

“The country today faces a number of pressing issues, including potential economic collapse, the continued threat of global warming, and the decaying national infrastructure,” ISMHIAT chairman Kenneth Branowicz said during a press conference to announce the study’s findings. “And we just can’t keep it together anymore.”

“Furthermore, we just found out that my fucking hot water is being turned off,” Branowicz added.

ISMHIAT, Quarterly Status Summaries

The report outlines a number of disturbing trends, such as a steadily weakening dollar, skyrocketing national debt, the car still being in the shop after three whole weeks, a polarized electorate that remains divided across ideological lines, and the fact that the wife is staying at her sister’s and for all they know may not ever be coming back.

“In summary, we have no choice but to accept that managing these complex and varied crises may be untenable at this time,” the report concludes. “We’re in way over our heads here, people. Oh God. God. What are we going to do?”

The institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank formed in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his Depression-era For God’s Sake, Somebody Do Something Initiative, has issued similarly dramatic warnings in the past. In 1953, ISMHIAT released the now-historic findings on how they had talked and talked until they were blue in the face but they’d had it with these damn teenagers today. And historians still cite its famous 1968 report, a rambling, semi-coherent study titled “The Hell If We Know,” recommending the immediate nationwide throwing up of hands.

This latest warning, however, could be the most alarming and desperate to date.

“Among the new challenges America faces is a deteriorating public education system, a vast healthcare crisis, new and frightening bioethics quandaries related to the privatization of human genetics, and, of course, the whole fossil fuels thing,” the 5,000-page study, which was due in November 2007, notes. “While much has been done to alleviate immediate effects, the situation has become OH FOR CHRIST’S SAKE—I just spilled coffee all over my pants—wait, don’t type that—damn it, we’re out of paper towels AGAIN—Gwen, don’t put any of that last part in the report—why are you still typing?”

Some have criticized the report as being alarmist and exaggerated, urging that the nation should just cool out for a minute until the situation can resolve itself.

“While they have certainly generated plenty of attention, these findings represent an unnecessary overreaction, and should be met with restraint and calm,” said James H. Walloch of the California Center for Not Worrying About Stuff So Much. “It is my opinion, as an expert in this field, that it’s probably not that big a deal.”

Walloch’s agency is not the only one coming down hard on ISMHIAT. Others have accused the institute of shortsightedness and even gross negligence for failing to keep on top of such issues.

“The current state of world affairs is completely unacceptable,” said Dr. Hyram Klemper, codirector of the Sitting Around and Expecting Others to Take Care of Everything Foundation, which has historically had a contentious relationship with ISMHIAT. “We rely on the institute to keep things together, yet, evidently, this bloated bureaucracy is incapable of fulfilling its mandate from the American people. Now I’ve had to cancel my Hawaiian golf vacation to return to Washington and address this issue.”

Dr. Thomas Dyers, of the National Blame Allocation Council, echoed Klemper’s statements, stating that if the ISMHIAT cannot handle its responsibilities, its duties should be turned over to another organization, such as the Federal Fall Guy Bureau, under the supervision of Ed Haversham, the national Scapegoat Czar.

The Onion - America’s Finest News Source

Along with Radiohead, they released their recent albums over the internet and they are using a massive amount of web2.0 tools to promote themselves and reach the audience. Some of the tools they use are Flickr, Facebook, Last.fm, MySpace, YouTube, iCal, iLike, and more recently, Google Earth and Google Calendar.

This web 2.0 tools usage, along with their creative music and viral marketing / alternate reality games (the Year Zero game) techniques, is making them one of the most “3.0″ band ever.

I guess every band (and business) out there should hire this new, emerging figure: the 2.0 marketing expert. Someone with deep knowledge of the available tools and their capabilities. Someone who is able to create mashups and keep contact with fans (customers).

The band (corporate) blog is not enough nowadays. We need to create real connections and involvement.

The second one (24th of May) will be a MicroCamp: participants are limited to 50 and it will be held in Milan too. Main topic will be the microblogging experience.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of those event. I’m interested in the business point of view (how suchs tools are used, the business model, and so on…). Also there will be an interesting technical point of view too (integration, development, features…).

I’ll be documenting both events with my camera (on flickr), on twitter and maybe on my blogs. Stay tuned.

Probably I’ll put a twitter updates widget into my weblog too. Totally useless but I like it.

OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network’s friends and update feeds. By using a common API, developers can extend the reach of their applications more quickly, yielding more functionality for users.

About OpenSocial
OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a “favorite photos” application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common “plumbing” that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.

The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities - everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.

Thanks to the Shindig reference implementation, most websites can have a proof of concept of OpenSocial applications up and running in days. That means websites need only to make this small time investment in order to make thousands of new social features available to their users.

Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING, and others. In time, OpenSocial will unlock more powerful and pervasive social capabilities across the entire web, as developers’ applications can easily reach users across any of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use.

This sounds way too interesting.

Almost every big company nowadays “googles” the name of the possible employee before an hire. Have you ever googled someone? I did.

There are people out there who lost their job because they “left something written online”. In 2002, Heather Armstrong ignited a fierce debate about privacy issues when she was fired from her job as a web designer and graphic artist because she had written satirical accounts of her experiences at a dot-com startup on her weblog, dooce.com.

We leave comments, forum threads, posts, videos. We leave entire pieces of ourselves online. Beware associating your name with what you leave behind you.

The Internet Archive is one of my favorite example: they store and entire site history (check out the Google 1998 page… terrific!).

Personally, I did not like the idea of having my site mirrored with all the old styles, information and layout of this domain. There have been times when I used flipthedolphin.com as a personal homepage with very poor layout and information inside. So I decided to block the internet archive from storing copies of it. It worked and now I’m pretty fine with it.

You should also be aware of what others write about you. Interestingly I have found two articles about Online Reputation.

• Lifehacker - Manage Your Online Reputation
• Read Write Web - How To Manage Your Online Reputation

It’s an interesting reading. If you have a blog or a website, check them out. And remember: never write something you would never say personally.

Today we talk about the “design” part. What’s wrongly referenced as “the web 2.0 style” or the “without personality style”.

Elliot Jay Stocks extensively talks about this in his “destroy the web 2.0 look” presentation. He talked about this topic in the “Future of Web Design” speaking at New York, almost a month ago.

| View | Upload your own

Snap2Object has an interesting post on this too with many pictures of common “non web 2.0″ graphic elements.

Obviously there is also an “Analysis of Web 2.0 Design & Layout Trends” at StyleIgnite. Take a look, you may find it interesting.

How do I get Firefox keywords back?

• Enter “about:config” (minus the quotation marks) into the url bar and press enter.
• Type “flock.favorites.showKeyword” (minus the quotation marks) into the “Filter” bar at the top of this window.
• Change the value to true.

Warning: the Flock configuration window contains numerous settings which, if incorrectly changed, may render Flock inoperable. Please follow these instructions exactly as indicated to avoid this risk

Now you can assign keywords to your bookmarks (err… favorites) and type them in the address bar. I assigned “fd” to my flipthedolphin.com wordpress dashboard, for example.

Get the most out of your favorite social browser, Flock on!

Then would you like to share a VPS with me?

I’ve always been interested in the hosting business. It’s quite safe to start a hosting company nowadays, without way too much money to invest and without too much hassle for tech support and client management. There are tons of cost effective solutions for managed reseller hosting.

But lately I’ve found myself thinking about Virtual Private Servers. I’m not an expert on Linux and Apache but I think that a VPS gives you a lot more freedom than shared hosting. You don’t have limits on how you run PHP or what’s installed on your machine. You can resell whatever you want and manage your own operating system. You are the root user. It’s like owning your own machine… but you can always restore it if you break something.

The only problem is that I’d be the only one managing it. I’m sure I can’t do it all by myself. I need “a little help from my friends” but actually I know nobody with decent linux and sysadmin knowledge. So here I am: would you like to be my Pixelfriend? Are you interested in helping me to manage a VPS? I’d entirely pay for the Virtual Server and we could, eventually, come out with some sort of small business activity. I’d like to do it just “for fun” but basically I need to learn how stuff works. I need to learn how to remotely manage a system and how to setup domains, accounts and websites.

It’s a risk-free activity. You only have to collaborate with me managing the VPS linux host. Maybe we’ll build a very basic business so I will be able to pay you down the road. Maybe it will be just damn funny.

Think about it and let me know