Jason Clarke

While I’ve been on vacation from the blogosphere, here are some quick hits:

* CNN.com re-designed over this past weekend. There are many fine touches, but I continue to be blown away by how low of a priority video is to big news sites. While the new CNN.com places video above the fold, they’re only small, motionless links to recent stories. They are a major cable news outlet: Where’s the huge, auto-starting video player? The live stream? The special features? The popular videos?

* I updated my own site to display my most recent Flickr photo, as well as a collage of my recent links and Google Reader shared items. Visit the site in your web browser (not via RSS) and look on the sidebar to see the changes.

* Call me prescient but I’ve noticed a major tectonic shift towards Facebook over the past few weeks. It wasn’t all the blogosphere buzz that sealed it for me- rather, my most MySpace-ardent friend recently made the non-ironic jump to Facebook. That’s evidence.

* Retail heads-up: BabyUniverse.com has recently messed around two of my friends. In both cases, the friends ordered car seats, had their credit cards charged, and then were told there would be a long delay for their products to arrive. Then in each case, the friend contacted their credit card issuer, who contacted BabyUniverse. In both cases, BabyUniverse immediately relented and sent out the car seats, despite previously claiming they were out of stock. Buyer beware?

* A quote that appeared on my Google homepage quotes widget:

“No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.”
-Jascha Heifetz

* Former Red Sox closer Keith Foulke is retiring from baseball at age 34. Foulke said some dumb things during his tenure in Boston, but also earned 34 saves in 2004 as well as the final out in the World Series. Thanks, Keith!

* Following in Scoble’s footsteps, I’m now sharing recommended items that I find in my Google Reader stream. My shared items are here, and the feed is here.

* Speaking of RSS, I’m now offering a meta feed of all my feeds- my blog, podcast, links, videos, and shared Google Reader items, all in one big stream. In addition, I’ve got an OPML file of all my RSS feeds if you like it that way.

* You may have noticed a few changes around this blog, or you may not have if you get me in your RSS reader. I recently neatened up my sidebar thanks to the useful “Javascript Tabifer” Javascript courtesy of BarelyFitz.com. The tool creates handy tabs that I use to group my archives and my topics together to shorten up pages and hopefully make it easier for visitors to find the archived content they’re looking for.

* It looks like 2007 will really be the year for OpenID, a public, de-centralized indentity system for the web. The format has earned adoption from a number of big players in recent weeks, including Microsoft, AOL, and popular social news site Digg.

TiVo alert: If you live in New England, tune in to regional news network NECN tonight from 8-8:30pm to catch Chet Curtis interview Lance Dutson about Lance’s coverage of the recent Libby trial.

NECN is pretty good about putting up video of their segments; if they have some of Lance I’ll link it later on.

UPDATE: Lance did a great job. As my TiVo was occupied, I took some grainy video with my digital camera and posted it on YouTube:

I have now been an eBay member for 7 years.

Ascent Amnesia: When somebody rising to power suddenly forgets that power is cyclical.

Yes, it’s cold out here today (although it’s up to 18F right now)…so we’ve got a great big fire crackling here in our office.

Xmas lights 2006,
originally uploaded by jgclarke.

The second annual shot of our house on Thanksgiving eve, immediately after the Xmas lighting ceremony for 2006. Unlike last year, it’s not snowing, but we still have much to be thankful for. Here’s to your own traditions, and a Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, wherever you are.

While browsing my local university’s bulletin board, I noticed this line in an ad for the campus Amnesty International chapter:

If you want to take an active stance against human rights then this group is for you!

* We watched Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. My vote: *** out of 4 stars. Funny, hilarious in places, and slick overall. I am deepy disturbed that they cut my favorite line from the trailer – “I can’t lower my heart rate; I’ve got a cougar on me!” – from the feature film. But all-in-all, this was a direct hit for Ferrell/McKay/Apatow, and well worth checking out.

* I uploaded some photos from our personal archives to Flickr. Included: Shots from December 2004, a highway/mirror shot from fall 2005, and one of a giant tree completely split down the middle on I-95 here in Maine.

Good luck to one of my favorite bloggers, Robert Scoble, who is leaving Microsoft for PodTech.net (whatever that is).