Check out Digg. Here’s how they describe themselves:

Digg is a technology news website that gives editorial control back to the community. Most technology websites allow users to suggest content by submitting links or stories to an editor. If the editor believes the story to be relevant to the masses, he or she moves the story to the homepage. With digg, users also submit links for review. But rather than allowing an editor to decide which links go on the homepage, the users do.

So I guess you’d call it a social news network. Kind of cool, however, pretty basic at this point. I can see a lot of potential especially once they make the hierarchy a little richer. That is, they only have “top level” categories like hardware and games. Once they have sub categories like hardware/Mac or hardware/video cards I think it will be a lot more useful.

Anyway, something to keep an eye on.

Well, this totally sucks…

Update: 2005-07-02
I was finally able to download and install Google Earth. It’s a lot like Google Maps in a client version. However, the road overlays look a lot better in Google Earth than in the satellite view of Google Maps.

I missed President Bush’s speech on Tuesday, but I really wanted to hear it when I got home later on Tuesday. I now see that they have a video of the speech on the official Whitehouse.gov site, but on Tuesday evening, they hadn’t posted it yet.

I skipped the usual suspects for search (i.e., Google and Yahoo!), because they are pretty much useless for semi-realtime information. Unfortunately, Technorati was not working, so on a hunch I tried Instapundit — one of the more popular political blogs. Indeed, Glenn Reynolds had this link to the speech video. Right on!

While fixing dinner, I listened to the speech through my hella-cheap home theater system hooked up to my Dell Axim PDA. Not too bad… it only took me about five minutes to find, download and get the speech playing. You gotta love the web!

Jacking the Bush speech into my A/V sytem

ifyoucantreadthisyouareprobablytaggingonflickrnotdelicious

Tags are great, but a large list of multi-word tags can become almost unreadable on services like Flickr. For example, I have just a few tags on the Zoinger Network Flickr site, which currently are: Audiovox, Audiovox SMT5600, camera phone, power supply, SMT5600, Thermaltake W0014RU and www.zoinger.com. More specifically, that’s what I would like the list of tags to look like. Unfortunately on Flickr, they don’t allow characters like dashes or periods or even capitalization in their tags. So instead of a nice, readable list of tags, you get this mess:

If you didn’t know that Thermaltake was a brand of power supplies, you probably have trouble decoding the tag thermaltakew0014ru into Thermaltake — the brand manufacturer — and W0014RU — the power supply model.

Fortunately, del.icio.us does allow dashes, periods and most other QWERTY characters as well as capitalization in their tags. In the ZoingerPosts del.icio.us account that archives all the newer Zoinger posts, I’m using non-letter characters and capitalization to help make the tags much more readable.

For example, I’m using periods to separate individual words in multi-word tags as in tagged.bundles. For product names, I use the dash to separate the brand name from the product name as in Audiovox-SMT5600. Obviously in the previous example, del.icio.us allows me to capitalize the A in Audiovox as well as the SMT portion of the model number. To separate a person’s first name from their last name I use the underscore character as in Jon_Udell. And finally for WordPress categories, I prepend cat:: before the category name as in cat::Del.icio.us

I may end up changing this scheme as time goes on, but so far I’m very pleased with the improved readability of the tags. It’s quite simple to pick out product names from a long list of tags by simply looking for dashes in the tags. Humans are very visual creatures (hence our color eye site and relatively poor sense of smell), so we’re fairly adept at picking out dashes, periods and other characters on a page. I’m hoping that as more and more services start using tags that they allow users to create methods to make tags more readable as del.icio.us has.

Today I tried to download a song from my Yahoo! Unlimited subscription service. Unfortunately, the service wouldn’t let me. As a back up, I thought I would try to stream the song so at least I could listen to it. No go.

Uh… hello? I am a member you stupid machine.

Giving up on that, I tried to find a link somewhere within the Yahoo! music client to get some help. No go. Then I foolishly wasted some time searching on Yahoo!’s site to try and get some help. No go.

Well, this is one way to save on customer service — simply don’t offer it. It’s one thing to offer free services without customer care, but quite another to offer for-pay services without customer care.

Fortunately for Yahoo!, the problem will fix itself, since you’ll simply end up with no customers to match the non-existent customer care center. But whatever, who needs a brand that users can trust these days anyway?

P.S. I did find the “cancel” button for the entire service. I guess if the problem doesn’t fix itself soon, I’ll just cancel the whole service. Hum… CDs are starting to look better and better.