MTV finally drops “music television” from its name

Pretty cool visualization showing Twitter’s growth, not through users or API calls but amount of code written

Plupload looks like a really excellent multiple file upload utility

From the team behind TinyMCE, it provides a very rich, almost native OS-level, interface for uploading files to the web.

It’s a little hard to hear, but this is the best answer to any Jeopardy question ever.

“Coach K knows all about this 2005 Johnny Knoxville film, based on a TV series”

“What is Jackass?”

The answer they were looking for was Dukes of Hazard but we all know she was absolutely correct.

UCSF neurobiologist Thomas Lewis claims that if we’re not careful, we can trick a part of our brain into thinking that we’re having a real social interaction–something crucial and ancient for human survival–when we actually aren’t. This leads to a stressful (but subconscious) cognitive dissonance, where we’re getting some of what the brain thinks it needs, but not enough to fill that whatever-ineffable-thing-is-scientists-still-haven’t-completely-nailed-but-might-be-smell.

—

Kathy Sierra thinks Twitter may be too good. As a Twitter fan, some might say apologist, I completely agree that this dissonance is certainly worth paying attention to.

I’ve (lamely) made the point in casual conversation that Twitter seems to kill, well, some degree of casual conversation (so that we end up having meta conversations about our lack of casual conversations), or, at the very least, obviates some of the need for small talk. I don’t think that this is an inherently bad thing, as someone who, frankly, sucks at small talk, but I do think our connectedness is accelerating much more quickly than our macro, societal ability to deal with it. What do you say to someone you meet at a party whom you also follow on Twitter – you already know the answer to the standard “what’s up” after all.

The rest of Kathy’s post, dealing with Twitter as addiction and attention span, is worth a read.

Doreen nails it

Much of the social-media excrement comes from some pretty famous people in my field, or those trying to be. I’m told I should follow them in hopes of getting noticed. But because of the non-stop volume of shit they pump out — retweets without comment or context, never-ending self-promotion, name-dropping — I have a hard time identifying with them. And they’d drown out the cool people in my stream. You just can’t follow webcocks.

So here’s to scarcity. Brevity. Keeping it real. Remember the scene in “Citizen Kane” where Kane posts his “declaration of principles” (yeah, I know, Hearst was a douche in real life)? Here’s mine to you:

If you’re not following her yet, you really should.

What we want from our technology, in its most elemental form, is to make our thoughts happen. Sure, it’s still very much sci-fi in 2010, but what every calculating machine and telephone and computer and phonograph and light bulb and hammer and every tool ever invented is about at its core is our desire, our evolutionary imperative to control our environment at our will. And we’re getting closer and closer to that happening. But there are still many layers between our intentions and our environment. As time progresses, we will strip away those layers one by one. And it’s always disruptive to do so. The reason that any manufacturer of technology exists is to ease each step of the process of tearing away the layers of abstraction between our thoughts and our realities. The manufacturer with the greatest ability to ease the process is the winner. Thus far, Apple has been the winner. That could change, but the rest of the industry is pretty far behind.

Go on, now, read the rest of Adam’s great post.

Great, first owl bullets and now dolphins that fish. [via texburgher]

Could this be the undershirt I’ve been looking for?

I’ll skip the obvious “ribbed for my pleasure” joke and say that I’ve already ordered four shirts from Put This On’s new sponsor, RibbedTee.

They also sell RipTFusion shirts, which I’ll take a moment to remind everyone that I didn’t find to be worth your $60

In some way or another, a line was crossed that should have never been.

—Daniel Brusilovsky, an intern who was fired from TechCrunch for asking for a Macbook Air in exchange for writing a favorable post, offers his weasely “mistakes were made” half apology. He seems to want to blame the whole thing on the fact that he’s a kid, or something, so let me offer some advice: when you fuck up, own up to it.