Phil Oye

Lots of great links at Jason Kottke’s site, I guess having three people editing your site really improves signal to noise.

Anyway, first up is Jason’s response to the fact that a post of his about the Matrix: Reloaded has spiraled to 700 comments (or ~125,000 words, or 1.2mb), accounting for 5.3 gigabytes of bandwidth.

Second, we have memes. Hans Nyberg notified PreSurfer and kottke.org about a beautiful panoramic of Mt. Everest. Those two weblogs were powerful enough that the meme spread to 200,000 visitors in 24 days.

But wait, there’s more. The New York Times has an article about “Urban Nomads”. Or as Jason Kottke says, “Gutter Trash”.

Quick digression: I was going to donate a crappy sleeping bag (given to me by Sapient for three long years of hard service) to Salvation Army. Unfortunately, the Salvation Army isn’t that close to my house, so I was going to carry this thing 15 blocks on the way to work. Well, as I was walking through Thompkin’s Square Park, one of these “urban nomads” says “Nice sleeping bag. That’s nicer than mine.” I then thought that giving this punk my sleeping bag would be a decent thing to do. Cutting out the middle man (or in bubble jargon: “dis-intermediation”). Anyway, this jerk doesn’t even say thanks and runs off to tell a buddy about his new sleeping bag.

Alright, back to the task at hand, one more Kottke link to comment on. Apparently, there is a phenomenon called “flash mobs”. The idea, executed with Mission Impossible-like precision, is to create an inexplicable mob in a location for 10 minutes only and then disperse. Wacky stuff.