A good sampling of Seattle's current tech scene.

I remember the CRX HF. Didn't know it ran on a 58 horsepower engine!

Rob Enderle is apparently under the impression that iPhones will cause accidents because of their lack of keyboards and that will lead to class action lawsuits. Rob Enderle is a tool.

I feel like an idiot. I always thought the Dvorak keyboard was a product of *John* Dvorak. Hence, I've always rejected it outright.

This is great news. We're looking into supporting OpenID here at Newsvine as well and have wanted to for quite some time.

Planned is such an ephemeral word, and doesn't mean anything. For instance, I have plans to date Ms. Universe.

Jeremy lays out a convincing case for why Snap.com previews are the evil popunders of 2006-07. If you're running these things, shut them off.

Confusing title... interesting blog entry.

Apple and Cingular are apparently already acting bigger than each other. I don't like this at all. Cingular: back the hell off please... you're not the one bringing much to the table here.

Cisco Systems filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Apple, claiming rights to the iPhone brand.

If you've ever wondered how it works, this is how it works: I don't call Steve, Steve calls me. Or more accurately, someone in Steve Jobs's office calls someone in my office—someone at a much higher pay grade —to say that he has something cool. I then fly to the metastasized strip mall called Cupertino, Calif. where Apple lives, sign some legal confidentiality stuff and am escorted to a conference room which contains Jobs, some associates, and some lumps concealed under some black towels. I stare at what was under the towels. Everybody else stares at me.

All I can say is, when I log into Second Life, I usually see twenty people crowded around a stripper, a gigantic elephant with letters on its body, and some other avatars asleep in a chair trying to scrounge up a handful of Linden dollars.

Mossberg's a few months late in this review, but he hits all the important points. $799 is tough to swallow for a DVR, but the superiority of the Tivo makes it worth every penny.

There is value in the mob, but the mob needs to have principles. They need to be disciplined before they can really lead to intelligent choices.

Alex Bosworth covers the risks and rewards of letting users do "too much" with your software or in your digital community.

We've all been at the brain bandwidth breaking point for the last five years. Email is out of control. IM'ing sucks up half the day. And how can we not read our RSS feeds, post to our blogs, and check our stats? If my Cingular cell phone sends me a MySpace alert and I'm not there to get it, do I exist? But email, IMs, social networking, and blogs are nothing compared to the thing that may finally cause time as we know it to cease. I'm talking, of course, about Twitter.

There appears to be a bit of a flap over at Kevin Burton's place in regards to a guy going around sending DMCA notices for content he doesn't own. This opens up all sorts of questions about DMCA notices, perjury, and what people who don't want to get involved (e.g. Six Apart, Newsvine) should do.

Nick Denton's take on why Jason Calacanis left Netscape.

An overview of Chris Anderson's follow-up to The Long Tail... a concept he is calling The Economy of Abundance.

A nice article by Nisan Gabbay, formerly of Sierra Ventures, covering the early success of Digg and what their current valuation might be.

"If we're completely wrong and you completely screw up the entire music market for Mac owners, the sandbox is small enough that you really won't damage the overall music industry very much." That was one instance where Macintosh's [small] market share helped us.

Eric Meyer wants to see the W3C run on an endowment instead of membership fees. What do I think? I like the plan a lot.

As many know, AOL purposely exposed millions of search records to the world last week, putting at risk the identities of its entire user base. Today, comes an investigation from the New York Times which identifies one such person, merely by analyzing her searches. This is scary stuff. Really scary stuff. Probably the worst thing AOL has ever done in my opinion.

The big news in the blogosphere/vlogosphere today is the apparent departure of Amanda Congdon from the popular video newscast Rocketboom. While this could easily be a publicity stunt or a situation that is quickly repaired by the two Rocketboom co-founders, things look pretty grim for the show right now.

I'll withhold most of my feelings about Rocketboom as a show because frankly, it's never been my bag and almost everyone I've ever asked feels the same way. I've always been under the impression that Amanda's hotness (see bad pun in article title) is a big reason why 250,000 people watch the show. I could very well be wrong, but that's just the impression I get. Neither the writing nor the delivery can hold a candle to say, Ze Frank's The Show.

I'm more interested in the business and industry implications of this breakup. Firstly, unless the Rocketboom founder's agreements were written abnormally in a way to really screw over Amanda, Amanda is by far the better-off party after this. Get fired and still own 49% of the company? Sign me up! If Amanda was smart, she made sure ahead of time that if a situation like this occurred, she would maintain at least most of her equity, if not all of it. There is, of course, a chance that the papers were written to strip away equity in this situation, and if that is the case, wow... it's a stern reminder to always consult your own lawyer when dealing with employment contracts. Hopefully, information about the equity implications of this breakup will emerge shortly.

The second interesting aspect of this is any non-compete clauses in the Rocketboom employment contract. If I were Andrew Baron (Rocketboom's other co-founder), I'd have written this in from the start, and it's not an unreasonable thing for Amanda to have agreed to, but who knows what's really in there. If there's nothing in there, Amanda will either sign on with a big TV network, an upcoming video podcast, or strike out on her own. Either way, she'll make out very, very well and still own a large percentage of Rocketboom. It's a huge win-win for her and a huge lose-lose for Rocketboom. If there is, however, a non-compete, then something will perhaps be worked out where Amanda gives up a percentage of the company in order to get out from under it. Again, interesting to see what happens here. If it's three months, I probably wait it out if I'm Amanda. If it's a year or longer, I'm probably at the negotiating table right now.

Another interesting thing to watch will be who lands on their feet sooner. My money is on Amanda, as is probably most of the world's. Rocketboom has about a month to find a suitable replacement, but if Andrew didn't already have one in mind before "firing" Amanda, then he's really dropped the ball here. Matthew Ingram suggests Amber McArthur, who in my opinion, is even more suited for the job than the woman she'd be replacing, but who knows if she'd even do it. If I'm Amber, I'm aiming higher than that right now. No one wants to be another Deborah Norville. In any case, go Amber Mac!

With all of the negativity surrounding this Rocketboom announcement, there is still a chance for Andrew to really prove his mettle here. If he's able to find a great replacement and the show gets even more popular than it is right now, he deserves a lot of credit. He's got everything to lose here: money, momentum, existing contracts, and reputation. It's a ballsy move. We'll see what happens.

Looks like Uncle Bill is moving on to less-stressful pastures. This was announced to Microsoft employees just a few minutes ago and so far the stock price is unchanged After Hours. That makes me wonder if MSFT's precipitous stock drop in May was due to some knowledge about this.

An ultra-portable Powerbook is my dream device. Please be true.

A good overview of why Wikipedia is not as flat as it seems and why that's an important factor in its success.

An interesting article suggesting that people generally participate out of selfishness and not altruism.

An interesting discussion about how exposing popularity metrics affects popularity itself.

First one to solve this issue gets a gold star.

A BusinessWeek writer's account of life in the massively multiplayer game "Second Life". I need to check this out.

John Grohol discussed the finer aspects of growing and maintaining good communities online.

For those looking to test your sites in a new buggy browser but still maintain a launchable version of your old buggy browser, this quick method worked pretty well for me.

Via Kareem: This interface is damn cool. Useful? Maybe.

The Wolf opens up a discussion about stopping the piracy of Mint. What can be done in cases like this where source code is provided openly to customers?

Joel Spolsky on why great tech employees are infinitely more valuable than good tech employees.

The NeXT User Group is no longer! Which reminds me, I need to get that Vic-20 group set up already.

Lots of lessons to be learned here. Particularly, don't make users do too much.

I can't wait for the E70 to come out. Hurry up.

Gladwell, Dyson, Moby, Shirky, and O'Reilly discuss what lies ahead for society.

What is a mashup? It's the blending of two or more technologies to create something greater.

EMI says its copy protection will work on iPods. Apple says no so fast.

Turns out people were registering domains way back in 1985.