I’ve been mildly interested in the book Wikinomics recently, because it’s one of the sexy recent non-fictions to appear on my radar, and I’m obsessed with Wikipedia (well, who isn’t). But mildly interested means I haven’t really yet bothered to find out what it’s about.

But this morning I saw an interview with the author, and he basically explained that the book is about how the web will not only promote information exchange, but also collaboration (yawn). What really caught my attention, however, was a very compelling real-life example he used (details very approximate):

His neighbor owned a gold mining company, that didn’t really have a good way of finding the gold on its territories, and he was about to fold it. He decided as a last-ditch effort to share all the geological information he had about his lands on the net, and hold a contest to see if geologists around the world could use the data to find where the gold was. The prize for finding the gold was 500,000$. The contest entrants, using all sorts of methods he was unaware of, found 34 billion dollars worth of gold on his lands. Not a bad return on investment.

The bottom line is, outsourcing to the masses out there may be a very good way of creating value (Wikipedia and Linux are obvious examples). And there’s nothing yawnworthy about that.

I went to work happily thinking about the possibilities of harnessing this and how I could participate in it. Then, a few hours later, a complete stranger wrote to tell me she was writing a story about how San Francisco was banning grocery bags, and could she use one of my photos in her story. Guess she thought of a way for me.

It’s time I owned up to this. I’ve been reading Questionable Content since its very beginning, haven’t missed a single one, haven’t told a single soul. Check it out.

(I highly recommend reading it from the beginning, it’s very rewarding).

This kid put together his own TV ad for his used 1988 K-Car. Fantastic.

I’m no fan of Microsoft, but IE has always worked for me. Still, wanting to increase my system’s security and shamed into feeling like a member of the unenlightened stone-age masses, I gave in and installed Firefox early this week. I made it my default browser and removed all the desktop shortcuts to IE, determined to break the habit.

Overall it’s a browser I enjoy using, but I’m having a few problems. After a week, here are some of the ones I haven’t yet been able to get around:

- Yahoo! LaunchCast, where I get most of my music throughout the day, does not support it. Not really Mozilla’s fault, but not good for me.
- I would have linked “Firefox” in this entry, but I’m using it to blog this, and the formatting and URL buttons in Movable Type do not appear (yes of course I can enter the HTML tags manually but that implies changing the keyboard language to English, etc). There has to be a simple plugin I need to download for this.
- This page looks like shit in it. I shudder at the thought of having to put in the time to make it look right for the two browsers simultaneously (sorry, but IE still accounts for 70% of my visitors).

Step right up…

Read people’s confessions. Horrible in a way, but I can’t look away…

Another cutie from the inbox:

“Cher #FirstName #LastName,

Nous vous écrivons en tant que client privilégié d’Air Canada”

Before going on the trip, I cleaned out my inbox as much as possible, lest it get full and messages start bouncing. In the end, during the trip it never went above 40% of its capacity.

Then on Tuesday morning, I logged in first thing in the morning, as usual, and found out that for no other reason than just providing good service, Yahoo! had increased my mail capacity from 6 MB to… not 10 or 20 MB, but 100MB! I’m truly impressed.

I don’t understand how Hotmail can just go on not reacting. The basic service with Yahoo! provides 100MB of storage and allows you to send files of up to 10MB. The same level of service with Hotmail costs 79.99$ a year! Comparatively, Yahoo!’s premium service costs 19.99$ a year and gives you… 2 GB of storage.

I’m amazed with Yahoo!’s great service, it has to be said. I just don’t understand what is up with Hotmail.

Just fixing this MT database … nothing to see, move along.

Here’s a fun one: the Zombie Infection Simulator. The pink dots are humans. The gray dots are zombies. The bright pink dots moving fast are panicking humans. Press g to turn the zombies green, it’s funnier that way.

Watch the invasion here.

(Thanks Chuck)