• Convert images for printing with MagickWand for PHP.
• Ning Bookshelf – This AWS-powered application looks pretty popular, with nearly 700 users. Ning doesn’t report on “most cloned”, which would be of interest to developers and potential developers.
• Writing Tips for Non-Writers.
• Bartleby.com – “Great books online.”
• Bruce Sterling: A Workshop Lexicon – More good tips for writers.

• Windows Movie Maker – Tips, tutorials, forums and more….
• The High Price of Internet Keyword Auctions.
• Strategic Bidder Behavior in Sponsored Search Auctions.
• Guy Kawasawki: How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion.
• Marc Wandschneider: Troubles with Asynchronous Ajax Requests and PHP Sessions.
• How to Find Your Angel Investor.
• HowTo: Animated Live Search.

As I was passing through Chicago O-Hare yesterday, a United Airlines sign offering a Free Treo caught my eye. I wrote down the URL and just visited it this morning. Unfortunately, it looks like the promotion ended in December of 2005 — I knew that this was too good to be true. Suddenly, all of my friends seem to have Treos and I wouldn’t mind having one.

• Six Apart: Video Blogging on TypePad.
• Free Vlog – A step-by-step guide to setting up a videoblog for free.
• Vlog Directory.
• Videoblogging Universe.
• Vlog Map.
• Going Dynamic with PHP.
• Cornell University e-Print Paper Archive – The mother lode of physics, math, computer science, and quantitative biology research papers. Includes RSS feeds, but they don’t seem to work.
• Methods for Scaling a Large Member Base – How to evenly distribute a large, rapidly growing base of member names and accounts across available resources (pdf).
• Ruby on Rails Manual.
• The New Rules of PR.

I’ve got all sorts of interesting conferences on my schedule for this spring:

• Next Generation Web Conference – I’ll be keynoting this conference in Seoul, Korea.
• SD Expo – I’ll be helping out at the Amazon booth, Silicon Valley.
• Mix 06 – I am giving two talks in Las Vegas.
• Best Practices in SOA – I’m the conference chair, and also a speaker; in London.
• XTech 2006 – Closing keynote, Amsterdam.

I’m not very good at writing book reviews, so I’ll make this one short and sweet. If you like good science fiction, I highly recommend Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.

Set in more or less present day times, on one otherwise normal day Earth is suddenly enclosed by a protective shield. The shield blocks out the sun and the stars; an artificial light fills the sky and warms the Earth. Space probes are able to traverse the shield and they discover that it has produced a time dilation effect — one year inside of the shield is equivalent to hundreds of years on the outside. Time passes, and the Sun begins to expand as a prelude to ultimately burning out altogether. The Earthlings decide to terraform and then colonize Mars, which happens (from their vantage point) in the space of a few years. A few brave pioneers make Mars their new home, and one day a Martian returns to Earth with some miracle drugs and a plan to scope out the rest of the galaxy using bioengineered replicant space probes in a von Neumann ecology. Along the way, those Martian miracle drugs are used to turn a few humans into “fourth stage” life forms.

A good read, with plenty of action and just enough science to make it sci-fi!

Since buying my Toyota Scion last fall, my daily commute has turned into a learning experience. Before leaving the house in the morning, I spend 5 minutes or so building my daily list of podcasts. I create a playlist named “-Today” (the – makes it show up at the top of the list), sync it to my iPod, and then plug the iPod into the in-car adapter. Instead of flipping between stations in search of good music or fresh news, I get to decide what I like. Here’s what’s on my playlist right now (these are all direct links to the podcast feeds):

• Daily Source Code.
• Business Jive Podcast.
• Distributing the Future.
• FuzzyBlog.com.
• IT Conversations.
• ScienceCast.net.
• Scientific American Podcast.
• PodTech.Net: Silicon Valley, Technology, Media Infotalk.
• The Web 2.0 Show.

Some of these are very polished and heavily produced; others are a bit rough around the edges. Scott Johnson’s Fuzzy Blog is a great example of the latter. Scott is clearly very busy and very focused, and has decided not to spend a whole lot of time on post-production editing or cleanup. He records while driving or cooking, so there’s background noise, the occasional phone call, and whatnot. I enjoy listening to Scott, even though I don’t agree with everything that he has to say.

The Business Jive Podcast is at the other end of the spectrum. This podcast successfully combines interviews with up-and-coming CEOs with the occasional snippet of rock and roll. I realize that this sounds like it could be annoying, but Judd pulls it off in spectacular fashion.

I don’t listen to all of these every day, and I add in some occasional randomness for variety.

By the way, we’ve been tagging podcasts with the “podcast” label over at Syndic8. Here are the Syndic8 podcasts. I also have some metadata that I could use to automatically identify podcasts, but I don’t do that yet. Each time I update the Syndic8 crawler visits a feed, I calculate a “dominant media type” for any feed that has enclosures. I could also use this to identify video blogs, or vlogs as they are sometimes called. We also use pings to update the Syndic8 podcasts page.

• BozPage – Render a bunch of RSS feeds on a single page. I like the Web 2.0 page Blogs.
• Next Generation Web Conference – Looks like I am the keynote speaker. Seoul, here I come!
• Democracy – “a powerful TV viewer that downloads, manages and plays the latest videos on your computer.” Looks simple and easy to use, yet powerful, and with a good story behind it.

• Jill Whalen: Buying Text Links.
• Google Research Blog – Thanks, Greg.
• Rrove – Ran into this at Mashup Camp earlier in the week. Social bookmarking + geographic indexing, along with a nice API.

• A Guide to RSS Elements: Beyond Title, Description, and Link.
• RSS Playground.
• WitShare – A free, open service for personal or public conversation.
• OpenJSAN – JavaScript Archive Network.