I make fun of my buddy Bill for workin' there, but those guys at Microsoft are all right sometimes. Take, for example, Photosynth -- their collaboritive project with University of Washington (watch theTED presenation first, then head to the actual Photosynth site). What an amazing application! Can you imagine what it would be like to be a young geography student with an application like this? An architectural student? A history student looking at a much-photographed moment of history?

The one thing I'd be interested to see, based on their reconstructions of real-world, 3-D images based on virtual-world, 2-D images (Flikr, in this case), is how the metadata of "time" would be considered.

Let's say there's a Photosynth approximation of Big Ben. But four months from now, the clockface of Big Ben is destroyed by a meteorite, and stands defaced for 18 months while Parliament allocates the funds to fix it.

In a case like that, how do you handle the metadata entries of time when reconstructing a public place by communal photographs? I assume that Photosynth looks for shared data -- individual pixel sets that are shared in two disparate photos -- and then builds out from there. No problem there. But what happens when an event fundamentally changes an object? From which moment in time do you draw your photos? Some photos will have been taken with the old clockface, some will be taken during the unrepaired period, and others during the post-reconstruction period. Will you end up with a Platonic Ideal of photos -- a Big Ben as it is best remembered (and best viewed) from all angles? ...an image of Big Ben that ignores any temporary damage, spray-paint protests, etc? Or will you have to create different image sets for different Big Bens in time?

There has never been a higher and more noble calling than knitting. If human history were to be viewed as a slowly rising plateau, always stretching onward and upward, then knitting would sit high upon its apex as the grandest achievement of which humanity can lay claim. If 2000 random people were sampled, you would consistently find that the knitters among them would be the sexiest, the most intelligent, and the noblest of purpose.

Knitting: the single greatest thing ever.

...now please stop threatening me with sharp knitting objects. It was just an example about magazines! :)

I happened to walk by a huuuuge newsstand recently -- the kind with 10,000 different magazines on the racks -- and couldn't help thinking: "Do we really need a 'Knitter's Magazine', a 'Simply Knitting Magazine', a 'Vogue Knitting Magazine', and a 'Creative Knitting Magazine'?" Do we really?

Have we reached the point not just of hyper-specialization in our magazine selections, but of just plain ol' fashioned need-a-boot-up-the-rear ridiculousness?

And then my second thought was: "Where the heck is the VC money coming to launch that fourth knitting magazine?" That would've been a helluva pitch meeting to sit in on..... "Ladies and gentlemen, the market needs Creative Knitting Magazine. The market is crying out for Creative Knitting Magazine. Ladies and gentlemen, won't you give us the 6 million dollars to fill that void?"