onfocus

The Democratic National Committee has a blog (with an appropriately bloggish title): Kicking Ass. [via TomTomorrow] They have a blogroll, comments enabled, and RSS.

Rael talks about why hacking is good, adding more depth to this article about hacking in the Miami Herald: Hack Your System: It's a Good Thing.

Moreover jumps into the business-weblog fray with a weblog search tool. Unfortunately there's no link to the search tool in that story, and no trace of it on their website. And here's a ZDNet UK article: Search tool scans blogs for business.

I'm posting this from the Sacramento airport because I paid for this access time and I want something to show for it, dammit! (Note to self: Never say, "I'll just work at the airport before my flight." You won't get much—THIS IS A SECURITY REMINDER—work done.)

Douglas Rushkoff argues that content is an excuse for social contact—not an end in itself.

Science Presenting Steam and Electricity to Industry and Commerce. More. [via MeFi] There isn't enough anthropomorphizing of abstract concepts these days. I'd like to see an engraving of Ingenuity introducing the Internet to Persistence.

According to Bruce Sterling on his (now) old weblog, Wired is starting up some sort of blogging venture and he'll be moving his weblog there to help out. Keep an eye on http://blog.wired.com/ (not active yet).

Beto was an early Blogger user and he stopped by the office with a video camera one day in 1999. I figured that footage was lost, but he's turned it into a fun little movie: In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History. The beginning of the pseudofilm is hysterical. It's like watching home movies for me, and it's hard to imagine that anyone else would be interested—but the early Blogger users were a loosley connected community, and those were fun times. It's great to have a snapshot of that time and place—just an ordinary day at the office—and it brings back great memories of working with Ev and Meg. Thanks, Beto! [via megnut]

Here's my original post about this footage from 2000.

Amazon Hacks got a nice mention in the New York Times. Scroll down to "Amazon Fun" on that page. (NYT registration required.)

Thanks to Matt, I'm now working in a mixed-OS world where the mouse can flow freely between the machines, and one keyboard rules them all! (Made possible with Win2VNC.) Windows and Macs living together—mass hysteria!

Great idea for a weblog: PR Bop. Tara is picking out the "best" of the thousands of press releases each day. [via several weblogs]

I'm not sure what it means, but I like the sound of it: Schleichwege durch Amazonien. I ran this article from Financial Times Deutschland through Babelfish and standard (mis)translation hilarity ensued: "The US programmer Paul Bausch has himself such offered for its InterNetable Handy built...Perhaps for read rats the best book-tap at present." I agree, read-rats will find this InterNetable book about the Amazon handy-built.