Rick on Rickrolling

The internet, it is a strange place that is for sure. It has brought us All Your Base, the Star Wars Kid, the Dancing Baby, Chocolate Rain and lots of other memes of varying hilarity. One of the latest memes is the Rickroll or the act of tricking someone into clicking on a link to a video of Rick Astley's 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up."

One enterprising reporter was able to get a brief interview with the Rick-ster himself, and got him to comment on his recent internet resurgence.

The next iPhone?

On the most recent Diggnation, Kevin Rose gave up some (rumored) information on the newest iteration of the iPhone, telling of a video chat option as well as 3g support.

Cookies For Obama

My Thoughts on the iPhone

Having owned an iPhone for a little over two months now, I have come to the conclusion that it is the best tech purchase I have made in recent memory. It's become an indispensable tool in my everyday life, but its the little things that make it truly an asset. From being able to check my email at any time, to having the answer to any question that comes up in conversation, with it in my pocket I'm no more than a tap away from the solution.

The combination of the full-fledged web browser and the ease of navigating said pages with the multi-touch interface makes even the most complicated sites a cinch to access. The only setback is the browser's inability to view flash portions of the sites, hopefully something that will be remedied sometime in the near future with a software update.

One other gripe I have is the slow response of AT&Ts EDGE network, which is not 3G, and is very slow. This is a feature that I believe will be available in the next iteration of the phone, which I predict will come out by the end of the year.

The release of the SDK and the forthcoming application store will greatly increase the software available on the phone and will allow a host of third party developers to release tons of new and useful apps. This is something that I am particularly looking forward to since I chose not to jailbreak my phone and thus cannot access the user created apps that have emerged so far.

Overall, I am delighted with my purchase and would wholeheartedly recommend the iPhone.

Must Love Dogs... and Robots

This video has managed to combine two of my favorite things... dogs and robots into one awesome package. I want one of each.

Stuff White People Like

Stuff White People Like is a blog which documents the habits and idiosyncrasies of the common white person. Very funny stuff, his observations are spot on and many hit quite close to home.

FOWA..... an open future

After attending The Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, I came away with the idea that the future is wide open. There is a movement afoot that aims to open up the information contained within the myriad of social networking sites sprinkled throughout the internet.

Central to this idea is the concept of OpenID, which allows for one set of data (name, location, likes, friends, etc.) to be stored in one place - to be accessible by any site that the user wishes. This means that once you have set up your OpenID, you will never have to worry about filling in another set of online forms, all you would have to submit is your OpenID and the rest would be filled in. Importantly, this means that you won't have to go searching for your friends each time, they would already be filled in on your OpenID page and the particular app can crawl the site looking for who is signed up.

This also makes it easy to stay current, any changes or updates made to your OpenID would be pushed to all the sites which you have authorized to access this information.

Google has embraced this idea of openness and has released an API kown as OpenSocial which will help facilitate the adoption of these open standards.