We Didn't Start the Fire

Billy Joel set to Google Images by someone with too much time on his hands.

Longform.org

Sign up at instapaper.com then head over to longform.org and re-discover reading a good article that's longer than a blog post. This is seriously what makes the iPad a killer device.

Now THIS is Web2.0

TripIt: You email it reservation confirmations (flights, hotels, car rentals, etc) and it mashes up an itinerary for you, publishes it as an iCal feed, alerts you to people you know who live (or, if they use TripIt too, people who will be traveling nearby), and suggests sights to see. Via.

Best Rube Goldberg Machine EVER!

It's also a music video for OK Go's latest. Via.

Perfect Timing

On the heels of yet another annoying Facebook re-design comes Google Buzz, which is like the Facebook feed without the time-wasting games that people of weak minds (like ours) are so easily addicted to.

Sell Your Used Gadgets

Turns out iPods hold value pretty well. Smartphones, not so much. NextWorth.

Could airlines directly post any changes in departure time or expected delays to passengers' twitter accounts rather than announcing them at the gate area? In our experience, each such overhead announced spawns 200 phone calls that all sound roughly like this: "Hey sweetie. I'm at the gate now. We're supposed to be taking off at 7:20, but they just said we'll be delayed 20 minutes... Is that junior? Hey boy-o! Daddy'll call you when I land!... Oh, wait, they are making another announcement. Gotta go!"

Gadget Obsession

The iPhone is hot, sure, but we love the QWERTY keypad on our Treo. Also, it only does one thing at a time--can't chat without interrupting whatever else you're trying to do with it, for example, or pull up a webpage while talking on the speaker phone. Enter the Palm pre. Other than the dumbass name, it has lots going for it: it fixes all of the above shortcomings of the iPhone, and adds magic-level synchronization of contact info, calendars, email, and so on. That alone is worth the price of admission.We're getting one as soon as they hit the shelves.

For Free Culture, Please Send Money To...

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales breathes a sigh of relief now that 6 million dollars has been pledged, PBS style, to keep the free online encyclopedia afloat until June--but please send more. Even better, if you try to donate a few bucks, you'll find that the suggested minimum donation is $30.

The Wiki project does not lend itself to the usual kinds of advertising:

[Even] companies like YouTube have had serious trouble trying to monetize user-generated content through advertising, and it's not hard to see why; what big-time brand wants to take a chance on appearing above unvetted and potentially libelous entries that could, at any moment, have key words replaced by terms for genitalia?

The obvious solution is to allow people and corporations to write their own entries (and have them protected from editing) for a fee, which hasn't been working well to-date. Or you might charge people for the right to edit, may $30/year or $100/life. Anyway, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

MacBook Air is Best Notebook Out There.

Computerworld agrees, just in case you were wondering. 

EverNote

EverNote--scrapbook/notebook/external brain. Like OneNote, but available over the web, on your desktop, and on your iPhone (as soon as we get one, that is).

Firefox 3 Available, Too!

Probably matters more than the game--esp. since the game didn't load up on our machine--but Firefox 3 is up and running. If you still use IE, STOP!

Moodstream

Not entirely sure how to describe this. Nor are we sure what to do with it. But it is worth seeing, because, well, what else should you do with the Internet? via Fimoculous.

Apple's Seventh Inning Stretch

Apple's new Boston store is rounding the bases, looking for a grand opening on May 16. Seems like that would be a party worth crashing, so if you know anybody... According to the web rumors, it will be the largest Apple store yet. More pics at Gizmodo.

Hi-Res Wallpapers/Desktop Pics

At InterfaceLIFT. Some very good photography there.

Another Aggregator

Alltop.com. Mainly to find new blogs--news aggregators = info overload.

Egalitarianism in the Early Days of the Web

was an artifact of the lack of organization on the Internet in the late 90s and early 00s. And it tricked webheads into thinking that the Internet was some kind of egalitarian utopia. Now that organization has come to the web, so has The Man. From the dustjacket of Access Denied:

The Web provides everybody with access to information. That makes those in power nervous. Transparency is the best defense against further narrowing of information access and the starting point for rolling back existing barriers. Access Denied provides the definitive analysis of government justifications for denying their own people access to some information and also documents global Internet filtering practices on a country-by-country basis. This is timely and important.

--Jonathan Aronson, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California

Easy File Conversion

Dorky, but it scratches what itches: Zamzar. What it does is this: You send it a file. It sends your file back in any format you want. Lets you turn that weird guy's Word Perfect into Word files, etc. Also does every audio and image format we've heard of. Way more flexible than Adobe's pdf to text service. via Cool Tools.

Apple's 32nd Anniversary

April Fools' is also Apple Day. We were Mac kids before it was cool, and as soon as we're grown up, it'll be an iMac on the desk and a MacBook on the road for us. Nice roundup of Apple's high points at Ars, and for those who remember pre-OS X Macs, here's a shout-out to Clarus the Dogcow. Moof!

Download Anything

The Orbit Downloader.