A few days ago, Ian Rogers mentioned that his company, Topspin, is adding “four more rock star engineers in the last two weeks of this month.” At the risk of seeming immodest, I appear to be one of said rock stars. I’m joining Topspin. “Damn. Look out. Look out.”, wrote Ian. Heh… Hope Ian doesn’t […]

This new interactive mosaic, from my Coverpop website, shows the most interesting photos on Flickr, based on Flickr’s mysterious “interestingness” metric, which I assume has something to do with kittens and/or babies… One thing I’ve noticed is that Flickr’s interesting photos tend to look compelling at very small (i.e. thumbnail) sizes, which makes sense, when […]

My latest mashup is an interactive graph that aggregates data from Google Trends for Websites into a single graph which can track hundreds of sites. If you search for a domain you are interested in, it automatically gets added to the graph. Hopefully, over time, a large number of domains will get added to it, […]

I made this graph by aggregating data from Google Trends for about 150 domains, including the Alexa Top 100. The lines are colored according to the slope – red when going up, and blue when going down. The graph is logarithmic, so that low traffic websites can be shown together with high traffic ones. The […]

Are you a computer nerd? Do you like music? I’m quite pleased to report that the hard working web-services team here at Yahoo! Music unleashed a very powerful new Music API upon the music-nerd community this week. This is the same API we used to build the Facebook Music Videos app, reported here some months […]

Some years ago I developed a crackpot idea I call The Theory Of The Precious Object. This theory is based on the following observations: Crows, racoons and other animals are known to be attracted to shiny objects. Many products which succeed in the marketplace resemble the objects which attract these animals. Our attraction to these […]

There was a 5.4 earthquake here in southern California today, and it had a curious effect: All the heavy black areas were knocked off of my Kakuro puzzles. While they are slightly less attractive, I’m told they use up considerably less ink and toner this way, so I guess I’ll keep ’em. I hope you […]

Via this Digg post, I found this awesome image manipulation tool called MathMap, and a Flickr group of photos using Escher’s Droste effect. Mathmap has been around for a while, as a plug-in for GIMP and more recently as a standalone program for Mac OS X. If you want to get a better idea of […]

The Onion reports that the Hubble Space Kaleidoscope finally went online Tuesday, capturing the first images which prove beyond a doubt that the universe is utterly crazy looking. According to the article, the HSK features three fine-guidance optical control sensors, a wide field and planetary camera, a faint object spectrograph, and three primary rectangular plane […]