Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Famster’s hamster wants to network with your mom

How many social networking sites do we need? I guess you could say “the bubble is baaaack!”

Famster is a Flash based social networking site with a long list of features. Created by Whittier California web design company Ivenue, it’s an attempt to take online social networking mainstream for adults. There’s no clear business model yet and I find the site’s branding a little creepy, but the feature set is staggering and the site is so well designed that it’s likely to win over a lot of people in its target audience.

Features include 1GB of “filing cabinet” storage, 1 GB of encoded video storage, a Famstermail email account with 1 GB of storage, unlimited photo uploads, scrapbook pages, a blog, a simple RSS reader, calendering, to-do list sharing, contacts lists with Yahoo! maps integration, a recipes section with 23,000 preloaded recipes and a place to store your own and several other family oriented features (like family tree mapping).

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the talking dog: August 19, 2006, TD Blog Interview with George Lakoff

Doc Searls introduced me to Lakoff. Great stuff.

August 19, 2006, TD Blog Interview with George Lakoff

George Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior fellow at the progressive think-tank Rockridge Institute, and is the author of “Whose Freedom: The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea” and a number of other books including a multitude of articles in major scholarly journals and edited volumes, as well as books such as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, and Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values, Frame the Debate. Dr. Lakoff’s current work discusses the concept of “framing”, both deep frames representing an underlying value structure; for conservatives, the deep frames revolve around strict father morality, and for progressives, the deep frames revolve around a nurturant family morality, and “surface frames”, which, in Dr. Lakoff’s analysis, are the ideas associated with individual words and expressions and which make political sense only given the deep frames. The concept of freedom is one such case. On July 25, 2006, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Lakoff by telephone. What follows are my interview notes, as corrected where appropriate by Dr. Lakoff.
The Talking Dog: My customary first question is “where were you on 9-11″? I ask that because I happened to be at my then desk at my then job, across the street from the WTC.
George Lakoff: I was at home. I woke up late that day. Someone working in our garden called out “Turn on your t.v. the Towers are down!” My wife and I watched the television; I said “Oh my God! ” and “What Bush will do with this?” I could anticipate what was coming! My wife had the same thought, that the Right would use this to gain overwhelming power.

Source: the talking dog: August 19, 2006, TD Blog Interview with George Lakoff

tags: linguistics, Lakoff, linguistics

"Blinking" problem solved!

Starting yesterday, my computer has been having what seemed to be an unsolvable problem. Every time I opened the browser–either FireFox or IE–the browser address bar, the window that was open, and the search toolbar would start “blinking.”

If I tried to type something into a form or an address window, the keyboard either wouldn’t work or I would press a key and 20 instances of the character would be typed.

I painfully searched Google and MSN and yahoo for forums that would show the problem. No success.

It suddenly dawned on me that the batteries in my wireless keyboard and/or trackball–both logitech products–might be low. I replace the batteries…problem solved!

Whew. This is much better.

tags: browser, blinking, batteries, wireless, logitech