baratunde’s internet scratch pad

To be clear, this year's list is not a "power and influence" list. It's a list of people in the NYC digital community who did really cool stuff. So if you're powerful and influential and you're wondering why you're not on the list, maybe you just spent the year sitting around on your powerful duff.

 

Well this is a nice surprise. Here I am working my ass off on some really cool stuff, and I find out I've been honored on a list of New Yorkers doing really cool stuff. We'll I'll be...

It's always nice to make a list of some sort, but it's actually nicer to see who else made the list, and while it's heavy on the testosterone, there is a diversity of TYPES of people that's nice to see. Here's the full set, and here are some highlights that got me really stoked to share a pageview-boosting slideshow with them

• Daily Beast founder Tina Brown
• Soraya Darabi, formerly of the NY Times
• Dennis and Naveen who lovingly built Foursquare, the app I use to run this town every night (h/t Rihanna)
• Square founder Jack Dorsey whose invention will finally let me live out my dream of operating a cashles s brothel
• The betaworks guys whose products (chartbeat, tweetdeck, twitterfeed and bit.ly) have changed my life
• Jason Calacanis who is the best pitchman TWiT will ever have
• Kenyatta Cheees & Ellie Rountree of hit show Know Your Meme which is one of the best shows ever in the history of sh and ows
• Dan Allen, who I haven't seen since college. Congrats dude! This list is like Facebook all over again. 
• Avner from Boxee, the service that allowed me to ditch cable, which I later had to add back to see my own show on Science Channel which is how I made this list in the first place. Ah circles. Life. Things!

and so many more kickass people and companies like blip.tv, aviary, tumblr, mediaite, makerbot, chris hughes, nick billion. ok it's nick bilton, but i think he should have a stage name, and i think that stage name should be nick billion.

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Baratunde Thurston, Heather Gold, and John C. Dvorak

Farmville is bigger than Twitter, behind the Crunchpad drama, and is a living room on wheels in your future?

For additional show notes, visit the wiki page for this episode. Links to stories we covered (and then some) are available from Delicious or in our Friendfeed Room.

At the twit.tv link above you can listen, subscribe, click on ads and generally be a quality person supporting quality media. This week was one rowdy good time, and I'm really loving my guest appearances on TWiT. I get to geek out with smart and very different geeks. Much love to the rest of the hosts.

Until next time, another post about TWiT, is in the can....

[cue music]

The technology is nice, but I'm most interested in the soundtrack. Google makes real time search sound like a mystical adventure involving lots of running through neighborhoods or even entire worlds. In fact, it's more like a point-of-view camera tracking the flight of a bird. Oh, and I can envision lots of sparkly crap and near collisions.

What's missing is the inevitable dark section where the music slips into a minor chord (think villain during Inspector Gadget theme song).

In conclusion, Google is magic.

All we can say is "wow" at this point. The Genachowski-led FCC has been relentless in its effort to disrupt the status quo. In office for six months, Genachowski and team are drafting a national broadband plan; working on net neutrality rules; fingering companies like Google, Apple, and Verizon; dealing with spectrum reallocation; handling the nuts-and-bolts of white space device deployment; threatening to extend neutrality rules to wireless networks; and considering the transition from traditional circuit-switched phone networks to a full-IP communications network. Now, we can add "shaking up the cable industry" to the list.

Looking at the topics taken up so far, each is big-picture, disruptive, and pro-network openness. None are particularly radical; indeed, each idea simply develops programs and policies decided on by earlier FCC administrations, some of them Republican. Network neutrality builds on the Internet policy statement, open access rules on wireless follow from the open access rules on the 700MHz spectrum auction, and the new TV initiative builds on the decade-old CableCARD push. The National Broadband Plan, which is new, was mandated by Congress.

So Genachowski doesn't seem to be a radical, but he does appear to be both relentless and ambitious in his quest to see these ideas carried through to their maximum potential for disruptive innovation. And he's not above irritating just about every major incumbent with a network to do it.

great report by Ars Technica on what's happened with CableCARD specifically but also the FCC's approach generally. go disruption!

And if you're lucky, it will turn your life into a series of time lapse still photo cutout animation sequences. So is THIS how China takes over?

I love this city.