TailRank is another site that tries to bring us interesting news from blogs and other places (competes with Digg and Memeorandum). They just did a pretty sizeable redesign and, boy, does it make a big difference!

Dave Winer: the wonderful world of Apple RSS.

There’s a group of community members tracking what Microsoft is doing with its Live initiatives and are now publishing a blog over at LiveSide.com. Subscribed!

Having a great cell phone with a nice screen changes your life. And your usage habits. Most of what I use my data plan is data too. Why? Getting nice RSS aggregators for phones isn’t easy and they aren’t well known yet. Plus, there aren’t enough apps like Microsoft Research’s traffic application (that, I learned tonight, shows you live traffic camera pictures, that is so awesome!)

Anyway, all this is to point to Russell Beattie’s post about a Nokia presentation about how people use new cell phones. Russ is so right and we are so clueless about the usage that’s changing.

Steve Jobs says that the world needs a new kind of power cable. That sounds really cool. But I wanted to try to replicate the ability for a laptop to be pulled off of a table by its power cord. I’d never seen this kind of damage before. Remember, I answered all the phones and email for NEC’s mobile solutions group. I’ve seen some strange things done to laptops and Tablet PCs over the years, but usually damage comes from liquids. I even had one guy who ran over his with his car. You’d think that if anyone would have seen or heard about this kind of drop damage it’d be me.

So, anyway, I have a few laptops here. An old IBM that has a broken screen (it wasn’t dropped, either, but I won’t tell the story of this laptop to protect the guilty. Heheh). A Toshiba M200. A Toshiba M4. And a new Lenovo T41.

I’ve been trying this on a few different surfaces. A glass table. A kitchen counter. A work desk that we used to use at UserLand. A dining table with a smooth surface. And the same table with a table cloth on it.

I’ve done hundreds of yanks and I can’t get my laptop to fall. Slow yanks. Fast yanks. Yanks from the side. Yanks straight on. Nothing gets my computers to budge more than a centimeter or two.

The cord keeps popping out of its socket. I should do video. Or we’ll replicate this Friday when we’re hanging out with Chris Pirillo and Dave Winer at MacWorld.

We could call it “the great cable pull contest.”

Has anyone pulled a laptop off of a countertop by its powercord? I’d like to hear about how you do that cause it’s not working here.

OK, I found one way. Put the T41 on a top of a paper towel on a glass surface and yank to the side slowly. If you do it fast, like if you accidentally tripped on the cord, even then the cord pulls out of its socket and doesn’t pull the laptop off of the table.

I don’t do Plaxo.
I don’t do LinkedIn.
I don’t answer Flickr messages.
I don’t grant Orkut requests.

Sorry.

Why not? I’m simply overwhelmed and am not paying attention to things that force me to go somewhere other than my email client or my blog tool.

Emails left to catch up on: 59.

Anything you won’t do?

Engadget is reporting that the new Mac will only run Vista. There’s other discussion on Memeorandum. I don’t know the facts, and am trying to find out. I’ll certainly be asking around on Friday when I’m at MacWorld. Nate Mook over on BetaNews is reporting the same. More discussion on Memeorandum.

Oh, and Apple has a new blog from its .MAC team. What’s up with the partial-text RSS feed, though? Unsubscribed!

Squash rails on Memeorandum and the closed blogosphere. Squash’s theory? New people can’t get discovered because of sites like mine and Memeorandums.

Listen, it’s real easy to get discovered. If you’re interesting. Just leave your URL here and we’ll all go visit. I especially like blogs about technology. Are you a Java programmer? Leave a URL. C#’er? Leave a URL. Got some new Web site that you think is cool? Leave a URL.

By the way, how old is TechCrunch? PodTech? They didn’t exist in my mind a year ago and now they are must reads. Heck, even Memeorandum is less than a year old. I love how fast things turn “old school” around here.

Move over boys and girls and make room for some youngins! :-)

Me? I’m swamped today, so just go over to Memeorandum/Tech and read all about MacWorld, among other things.

Cory Doctorow, in Boing Boing, points out that when it comes to correcting the record it’s easier to correct Wikipedia than it is to correct the Register. I’m not gonna fight this battle. Why? Cause the Register has far more readers than I do. What’s the old PR line? Never fight with someone who buys ink by the gallon? Or sprays pitas of pixels? Heheh.