Ahh, Mena Trott must really have a headache today cause Time Magazine just released its list of 50 coolest Websites.

Aaron Brethorst gave me a nice compliment when he wondered why I wasn’t on the list (I don’t belong, Aaron, but I appreciate your thought!).

I just read over on O’Reilly’s Linux blog that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad has a blog but is spreading malware with it, albeit only to IP addresses that come from Israel. Amazing, but guarantees that Silicon Valley will continue gaining a steady stream of good developers and technical folks from Iran. The Iranian community here is quite large and very influential.

Update: turns out this story was false. Sorry for passing along a hoax.

OK, I just purchased a Mac. A 17-inch MacBook Pro. I was forced into this by HD and wide-screen video formats. Windows Movie Maker doesn’t do it (it does on Windows Vista, but I can’t use beta software to run my business). Apple’s software does do HD today. I don’t even need to wait (there’s a reason why Microsoft’s Channel 9 and On10.net aren’t wide-screen or HD and it’s spelled Movie Maker). And, anyway, most of the video community here uses Macs (I learned a lot from watching Eddie and Ryanne edit their videos about FinalCut Pro). So, I’m going along for the ride. So, why am I posting this? Cause I just read about Dave Winer’s crashy experiences with his Mac.

Last week on the way home from Montana Ryanne was editing her video on her Mac. The app just suddenly disappeared from screen. In my book that’s called a crash. I found that to be very strange cause the hype on Macs is that they never crash. But, those commercials are so strong. The hype is so strong. That I believe that the Mac is perfect.

Ahhh, are the Mac faithful is Patrick Scoble ready for me getting a Mac? We’ll find out. Irina started calling him “lemming” because all he would do is talk about how cool Apple is all week. It does get tiresome, doesn’t it Irina? Maybe I’ll join Guy Kawasaki’s evangelistic hoardes.

Don’t worry, this post was typed on a Tablet PC. All is not lost for the Windows faithful.

I’m on the phone with Rod Edwards and he’s the sole person involved in BlockRocker. This is a cool mashup — all based on geotagging, which is the use of location data. For instance, I could stick my photo on a map by using geotags. I like how he built some cool tools for people who want to add geotags to their posts, it’s really easy. You just find your location on a Google Map that he’s embedded in his page and it spits out the HTML code that lets you geotag your posts. Here, his tool created this HTML code:

See this post’s geographical context.

I just copied and pasted that right into WordPress and have an instant geotagged post.

Anyway, Rod is the kind of guy I like to get calls from. Passionate about doing something cool on the Web and builds tools to help other people get into his world. That’s great evangelism.

OK, OK, I’ll take the bullet for the Google lawyers. They aren’t evil.

TDavid doesn’t understand their behavior this week, though.

Oh, T, They just live in an alternate universe to the one most of us humans live in.

See, in a courtroom things happen differently than they would on a street corner. On a street corner if someone tried to steal my name I’d just hit them over the head with my Bogen monopod (trust me, that’d hurt).

But in a courtroom a judge will ask “did you defend your trademark?”

If you didn’t defend your trademark it could legally be used. To a judge “defend” means “did you send threatening letters out to anyone who used your trademark improperly and can you prove that they were sent?”

Imagine a world where Bill Gates would be allowed to call his search engine “Microsoft Google.” Now you can start to understand why lawyers for brands like Google, Xerox, or Kleenex have to defend their trademarks.

Every journalism school student, though, learns that the lawyers are generally just going to email badass sounding letters out, but aren’t willing to make the PR mess of taking you to court (not to mention that it’s expensive and most of the time they just need the copies of the letters to convince the judge they are defending, not a full-blown trial). I got a bunch of those cease-and-desist letters for using things like the word “Kleenex” in my stories in without capitalizing it or putting the usual “TM” after the word (we never did that, mostly cause we were too lazy to look up the symbol inside QuarkXPress).

Translation: cut the lawyers some slack. If they weren’t sending out stupid letters like this they’d be doing something far more evil with their time.

I notice a general trend looking through blogs, TechMeme, and Digg. There aren’t many coders anymore.

Five years ago the discussions were far more technical and geeky. Even insiderish. When compared to the hype and news of today.

It makes me pine for ye old RSS vs. Atom geek flamefests.

Anyone else notice this trend?

Anyway, thanks to Mike Gunderloy for helping keep technical blogs around.

What brought this on? Last week at OffTheGrid we had a “language war” that spontaneously broke out. I filmed part of it. Not sure I learned much that I didn’t already know, but it was fun to hear some of that old developer passion break out in a fun way.

Anyway, tonight over on Digg I see that Pirillo and Laporte are bringing back TechTV. Hey, wait a second! You wanna bring back TechTV but you want ME to do all the work? I didn’t sign up for THAT! Heheh.

Elsehere on the blogs, yes, I did tell On10.net at BlogHer that Maryam was my #1 Maryam. But it helps that she’s #1 on Google too.

But, back to geeks. Jason Perlow, contributing editor of Linux Magazine is one and gives PodTech a preview of LinuxWorld, going on this week in SF.

Oh, and Richard Stallman who is almost as geeky as Shelley Powers is on the decidedly not geeky geekentertainment.tv talking about borscht. I love how Irina gives him some heck. You know, sometimes people gave us Microsofties crud cause Steve Ballmer would say or do some outlandish things (developers, developers, developers!) but if I still worked at Microsoft I’d just send Richard’s video to everyone and say “this guy makes Ballmer sound normal.”