Sea of Carts

Sea of Carts - 2942.jpg

Sometimes you have to work for it, and sometimes photographs just present themselves to you. I captured this yesterday at the local big box store while waiting for it to open. They had all of their shopping carts lined up in long rows fading into the shadow under the awning in the distance. It was also raining, which is unusual for San Francisco this time of year. The rain and the soft light made everything look liquid and soft. Enjoy...

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

Coming to NYC This Friday - Manhattan Photowalk on 9/29?

I'll be flying in to NYC this coming weekend for Danny Dubno's wonderful Gadgetoff conference. If you're coming, drop me a line, I'd love to hook up. I've also got an extra day in NYC on Saturday - is anyone up for a morning photowalk in Manhattan on Saturday? Drop me a line at david AT sifry DOT com, or leave a comment here, and if some folks are up for it, we'll get together and have a fun Satuday morning!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Lunchblogging


Had a nice lunch with an old friend and colleague, Liz Westover. lt's nice to get away and explore some restaurants outside of SOMA/South Park, we went to the Presidio and had lunch in the place that just opened in the Letterman building. Not bad (the display was very nice for my salmon salad) but a bit overpriced and difficult to eat - I only had about 4 inches of plate room to pick at my food.:-) The folks at Nokia have asked me to come and speak at their upcoming NokiaWorld conference, and I'm really looking forward to it. It's in Amsterdam on December 4th and 5th. In order to get my head around the new mobile apps that are out there, I've got a new Nokia N95 (they sent me one, so all disclaimers apply) and I broke out an old bluetooth keyboard, and I've decided to take this little baby out for a trial run, see what having all this mobile computing power means, what new applications are available, etc. I'll be posting more as I get a better hang of things.

Looking for a good FaceBook App development tutorial

I've been playing around with building FaceBook apps for a few kicks, and I've got a question for all you FB app developers out there. I've read the wiki, done the step-by-step, gone through the anatomy of an app, installed the Footprints app and played around with it, but now I'm looking for a little bit more - are there any good online tutorials that take someone beyond the simple act of writing your first app? Any recommendations on sites or groups to join? Leave a comment, or drop me an email at david AT sifry DOT com.

Thanks in advance!

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Technorati launches Topics

Technorati just launched a big update to our homepage and new functionality, Technorati Topics. This is the start of a rollout number of enhancements and new features that have been ongoing since the spring to make Technorati more useful and understandable to the everyday person, while also exposing the best of the best of the blogosphere. There's a lot more great stuff to come, it's exciting to see the first fruit of the hard work that has been going on. Kudos team!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

What's the best way from Beijing to Dalian, China?

OK, so I'm a bit of a doofus - I'm all set to go to the World Economic Forum event in Dalian China September 6-8, and I got my flight into and out of Beijing all set. I've got my hotel in Dailan set up as well. My only problem is that I don't have any arrangements set up to get from Beijing to Dalian and back. And this is my first time to mainland China. So I'm asking you, my dear blog readers, to help me out - what do you recommend? Are there lots of flights from Beijing Airport to Dalian Airport (PEK-DLC if I got the airport codes right)? Should I just wait until I get there and buy a commuter flight ticket? Are there good websites I can use while still here in the USA to buy a ticket before I leave? Are there trains or other easy land transport? Any airlines or transit routes to avoid? How realistic is this, given that I don't speak or read any Chinese?

Oh yeah, I'm leaving tomorrow morning, so I'm on a bit of a deadline. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I'm a bit of a doofus. ;-)

Thanks in advance! BTW if you want to meet up in Beijing or in Dailan, I'll be carrying a GSM Phone, +14154122342, drop me an SMS. I arrive in Beijing at around 2:30PM on September 5th, and I'm leaving the country at 4PM on September 8th.

(Updated to fix the typo - it's "Dalian, not Dailan!")

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Hats off to Martin Varsavsky

I just saw the nice piece in Forbes on my friend (and investor in Technorati) Martin Varsavsky. Martin is one of those very special people that I am extremely fortunate to call a friend. By the evening of the very first day that I met him, I felt completely at ease, and felt like I had met a brother, a comrade-in-arms. We've had many visits and conversations since, and I've gotten to know his wonderful family as well. It's a rare thing for me to so quickly bond with anyone since I've become an adult, and Martin is one of those few. I'm looking forward to continuing to learn from him. It's great to see him getting recognized, he deserves it!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Great post on Mahalo from Rich Skrenta

Rich Skrenta's got a great writeup on Jason Calacanis' startup Mahalo. Great stuff in there. A snippet:

At this point though I'm thinking SEO has gotta be dead as a startup business model. It was kind of unknown stuff in 2003 but now the cat's out of the bag. It seems like the last attempt of web 2.0 sites that aren't able to get social adoption is to start flooding the Google index with tag landing page spam or a crappy template page for every restaurant in the country.

I disagree with what Rich wrote about Technorati Tag pages - most people who come to Technorati are coming organically or via blogs, and Tag pages are great way to give your readers a real-time aggregation of all the blog posts, videos, photos, etc out there on a given topic, which is a value to your reader.

But anyway, that's a relatively minor point on an overall excellent post. Go check it out.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,