Pancake City

I need a Web 3.0 widget that will let me create Web 2.0 sites with a minimum of effort, which happens to be the maximum amount of effort I am willing to spend on making a web site. Two ideas I thought of last night:

1. “Best 10 Minutes.” Almost every town hall meeting or Q&A like the candidates’ visits to “the Google” has been uploaded to YouTube. There is a lot of good, in-depth information in these videos that one can’t find on traditional outlets like the news, newspaper web sites, or the candidate’s web site.

YouTube’s system for rating and recommending videos works pretty well, but I think a web site dedicated to just videos of candidates discussing philosophy or policy would make them easier to find, and save people the time of digging through hours of video to find the best parts.

I would (I don’t know what verb tense describes ‘action that I wish I could take but I never will’, so “I would” will have to do) set up a web site that would allow users to nominate 10-minute or less video snippets that best capture what they like about their candidate.

Each candidate would have their own section. I am guessing but don’t know that YouTube allows you to embed a clip of a video using time codes, so only a link with relevant time codes would have to be uploaded. People could vote what effect the video had on them (positive, neutral, negative) and clips with the highest combination of votes and positive ratings would be featured under each candidate’s section.

Yes, there is potential for abuse in a voting system like this. I’ll be sure to install as many safeguards in the voting system when I don’t make this web site.

2. “Pork Patrol.” I am so disappointed that PorkPatrol.com is already taken. At least it doesn’t go to a porn site. It redirects you to Citizens Against Government Waste, or CAGW. Yes, that is much catchier. If you want to remember what Web 0.7 looked like, be sure to pay them a visit.

At his Google talk, Obama says he wants to “Googlefy” government (my word, not his). Make bills fully searchable, attach Congress member names to earmarks, and so on.

If these changes were made, the next step would be to create a web site where people could search bills and mark each item in the bill (e.g. separate earmark, proposal for funding). If someone saw a questionable project, they could flag it, where it would appear in a public area for a certain amount of time. People would then be able to ask questions about the project, share information, and rate the earmark.

Every week, the Congress members with the top 10 negatively voted earmarks (for example) would be contacted by the site and given a chance to respond. There would be a new voting period, and then a determination would be made to publicly shame the creator of the earmark, start a phone campaign, or drop the matter and move to a new issue.

I think limiting the number of earmarks, bill language, and so on that would move on to the next stage is important. A limit would make people more judicious when voting and selecting parts of a bill to complain about. If only x items were highlighted a week, it would encourage people to focus on only the most expensive and egregious waste.

Since many earmarks are added at a last-minute and often without a vote, and a web site like this would actually encourage that practice, perhaps there should be a public comment period of 2 weeks after every significant bill so public watch groups like this site could at least bring a bill’s shadier parts to the public’s attention.

What makes this idea great in my eyes is that it’s not even possible to do yet, so I don’t feel guilty about not creating the web site. Also, I barely know anything about the minutia of the legislative process, so I am blissfully aware of whatever huge holes there are in my idea. But if budgets were made fully searchable, accountable, and indexable, a site like this would be the logical next step.

I posted a link to this site a few years ago and forgot about it until now. It’s Strip Creator, a web site that allows the creative and artistically untalented to create their own comics. This one is mine:

Wanting to stay single

This one isn’t mine, but it’s funny.

I just found a web site that will likely waste weeks of my time. It’s Planet Feedback, a collection of complaints, compliments, and suggestions people have sent to almost any company you can think of.

It’s a perfect mix of light voyuerism and comedy. Some of the letters are hilarious. Here’s a collection of some of the best ones about movies: (links open in new windows; you can also hold shift while clicking to open a link in another browser window.)

“You have done our Country a great favor.”

Fahrenheit 911–another opinion.

Make this man a movie mogul.

The funniest one of them all.

“Superman or Gooberman?” Comic Book Guy speaks.

Rance is a blogger who has become an Internet celebrity in the past few months. You see, Rance says he is a celebrity…but he won’t tell us which one!

So, many of the fluff news sites (AOL, MSN, etc.) and a few of the non-fluff ones have written articles on this amazing mystery.

To me, the mystery is simple. One, it’s not Ben Stiller. He’s too busy appearing in 43% of the summer movies. And it’s not anyone really famous because they have people to write their blogs for them. So who’s a well-known actor that is only moderately popular and has the free time to tell people about his life?

I’ll link to the answer so you can try to figure it out for yourself, but the clue is in his name, Rance. Or, if you add an F, France.

I hope Rance is just a regular guy playing a prank and posts a message like this one day:

“Hey all you fools who have been reading about what groceries I bought and how many times a week I do laundry. Well, guess what? I wasn’t folding celebrity underwear. I was folding my own underwear. HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

New is better! New is always better! Shiny! Pretty! Four blades! Now with odor-destroying racing stripe! IT’S NOW 33% MORE ABSORBENT, MOTHERFUCKERS! BETTER TO SOAK UP YOUR DROOL AS YOU MARVEL AT ITS NIGH-MAGICAL ABSORBENCY!

Blogger released a series of new templates that have a lot of new features that I don’t know what they do because I saw “New Templates” and I switched with the urgency of a man aware that he can suppress his rationality for only so long. I’ll be playing with things for a few days. I wish I had one of those 1997 “Site Under Construction” signs with the silhouette of a man digging and giant apostrophes hovering above his head because, evidentially, stick figures sweat apostrophes half the size of their heads. Wouldn’t that image make a great T-shirt?

Hey, check this out. I can make a block quote.

Blah, blah, blah. I’m Mr. Block Quote. I’m the diva of paragrpahs. Get away from me. I need two feet of space at all times.

Some jackass directly linked to an mp3 on my server and set his web page up to play the file every time someone visits his page. As you can guess, this is a slight drain on my bandwidth. So I replaced the file with another one. You can hear it on his web page, or, if he has taken it down already, here.

…in spite of this spotlighted bit of wisdom on the parent site’s main page: “Jobs are created when the economy grows; the economy grows when Americans have more money to spend and invest.” President George W. Bush

(okay, I added the underline).

It’s nicely designed though.

Newstoday is kind of like FARK for graphic artists. They have a public broadcast section where you can usually find links to sites of talented computer artists and Internet randomness, like this Halloween costume.

It’s the type of site that’s good because not a whole lot of people know about it. Go ahead. Fill in the joke. (Hint: It has something to do with my five visitors a day.)

To celebrate Talk Like a Pirate day, here is What’s Your Pirate Name?

-Fat Frank Skinner

A young Iraqi recently started a blog called Badghad Burning. Whatever your ideology, it’s worth reading. What she says is much more illuminating about the Iraqis perception of the fallout after the war than the scattered one-sentence quotes from Iraqis that have made their way in newspaper stories or the nightly news.

The Gender Genie says it can guess your gender based on a sample of your writing. I entered a passage from my blog. The program said I was a girl. I tried a few more entries. Female, female, female. Time to rig the result. I wrote, fifty times: “I have a nutsack. It is large and hairy.” Female.

Passages from several other blogs? All female. Washington Post article? Female. Passage from Maxim’s web site? Female. Comedy Central’s description of “The Man Show”? Female.

Frustrated in my failure to find a selection of writing this algorithm finds manly, I decided to pull out both of my NRA-sponsored shotguns and write this:

Mmmm. Steak. I like football. And shooting things. Like deer. I can crush a beer can on my forehead. But it hurts. Long sentences suck. You know what else sucks? Your mamma. Ha ha ha. Alpha Phi rules!

So, what do you think? Female or male?

There is this awesome web site called Cockeyed.com. Essentially, it’s about a guy who has a lot of fun with life. One of the best sections is “Incredible Stuff I Made”, like this Halloween costume.

I found out that an old friend of mine who I lost contact with moved in the D.C. area recently. I also found out that she’s still very funny. Her web site is called Beta Kate. Actually, it’s called Cyanotic Copy, but I don’t know what cyanotic means, so I’m calling it Beta Kate. Also, her name is Charlene.

There are hundreds of cool tricks you can do with a Zippo.

I’m putting this link up for two reasons. One, putting the link up falls under my extended definition of nepotism: family members, friends, friends of family members, family members of friends, and monkeys with lipstick. Friends of friends, and monkeys who don’t take the time to look pretty, go screw yourself.

The site is Zruwkcab, the blog of my friend Dan’s younger brother. The second reason I’m putting it up is that Dan Jr. is a talented, funny writer who, although only 16, has yet to succumb to the temptation to make cheap monkey jokes. How many of us could say that when we were sixteen?