Everything in Boston is a little smaller than its New York counterpart. Boston has shorter buildings, a slower subway, and much... much smaller art exhibits. The Somerville Gates.... more

Blog pioneer Jason Kottke hopes to be the first blog artist, writing his ad-free blog full time with only the support of donations. He's combining the concept of micro-donations (proven by the Dean campaign to be a powerful by-product of... more

I saw this at the bus stop last week and I found it rather amusing. First of all, while there are some hospital shuttle buses around Boston, there's a pretty low probability of a heart doctor standing around in the... more

Lessig reads his column aloud to introduce himself to podcasting. I just got my March copy of Wired, and I'll probably skip that column and listen to the live version. This is part of the broader movement to record and... more

I just finished reading The Power of Many: How the Living Web is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life by Christian Crumlish. The basic idea is that the web has enabled social groups to form and exchange knowledge, meet, form... more

The Baby Name Wizard Voyager is simply amazing. There are three reasons for this: (1) We've had great data on name popularity for a long time through government records. (2) People are interested in names (a necessarily essential aspect of... more

Google maps are slightly better than other online map services. I'm waiting for them to layer Keyhole images over the maps so the user can see a birds-eye view. Mapquest used to have an option to view satellite images, but... more

I got a note the other day from Afro-D, one of the musicians that performed in front of the Adidas store in Harvard Square last December. Apparently the performance was entirely improvised, and none of the musicians had played together... more

Amazon is taking a novel approach to search engine competition. Instead of trying to make a better website search than Google (which is near perfect already), they seem to be thinking up things to search. Books were an obvious place... more

The Software Freedom Law Center launched today. The Center will offer pro-bono legal services to open source software developers. It has an impressive Board of Directors and has been funded initially by Open Source Development Labs ("home to Linus Torvalds,... more

Cathy Gellis, a BU law student and blogger asked for my opinion of whether the BU law school should support a blogging infrastructure like Harvard's. I thought I'd answer that here rather than in an email. I think every school... more