Wow, BoingBoing has gone all out with the flare. Today I counted 39 ads, ranging from unobtrusive chicklets to full flash-animated nonsense. At least they have a full RSS feed, otherwise they would have lost me already.

A rare Lee Pirsig interview, author of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (via BoingBoing).

I was talking about web appilcations with a friend tonight, about how certain sites hit that sweet spot. What is it that makes their stuff better? What is it that we see that defines the difference?

So what makes them special?

• Google: authoritative answers
• Flickr: inspiration in photography
• Wikipedia: knowledge out the wazoo

The smaller sites are similar too, though with a narrower focus:

• 37Signals: simple life hacks
• JoelOnSofware: interesting software rants
• BoingBoing: compelling wild and weird stuff

It’s interesting that most of these guys are third generation web, and they all eclipsed their competitors by being damned good at their shtick. Being best is far more important than being first, and picking something we all want or need is absolute.

In product-land, the iPod is another clear winner. It does tunes. It does them well, end-to-end. No fuss. Like Google or Flickr, the iPod is clearly the best, with a limited set of features.

You’ll also notice that big success lacks the sickly-sweet corporate fermentation process. You won’t find meaningless mission statements or shallow product vision papers. What you find is clear, pragmatic thinking. Make it simpler. Make it better. Do one thing well. Damn the competition, because we’ll kick their ass.

Could the liquid threat be hydrogen cyanide? . Now that’s a dangerous idea: convince authorities that the goal is to down planes over the Atlantic, and really be planning to kill thousands in airports using the hands attempting to protect us. They’re dumping confiscated liquids in large buckets in public areas. It’s crazy enough that it could happen.

[Boingboing] posted today about how a comic is made, which links to descriptions of a few different methods for putting together a comic. It’s important to note that the tools don’t really matter as long as you find reasonable tools, a sane approach, and you actually work through your inevitable failures.

Avalanche, vapour, and dirty tricks
First of all, I’d like to clarify that Avalanche is vaporware. It isn’t a product which you can use or test with, it’s a bunch of proposed algorithms. There isn’t even a fleshed out network protocol. The ‘experiments’ they’ve done are simulations. (Via BoingBoing)

With great audiences…
With this greater audience comes a greater responsibility. If 100,000 people are reading your words you need to be more certain about what you say than if it’s just for a bunch of mates. I can’t help feeling that Boing Boing has stepped past the hazy mark where it can get away with publishing off-the-cuff posts about events in the world without spending some of the time and money we assume those ads are generating on checking facts. Let’s look at a couple of examples that might have benefited from more research.