Matt's Blog

Michael Kwan announced today that he would cease to be a Freelance Writer, and would become a writer at The New York Times. He had this to say about his future work at the NYT:

As much as I enjoy the relative freedom of being a freelance writer, the opportunity was just too much to turn down. The New York Times has offered me a permanent full-time position as a technology columnist, focusing primarily on consumer electronics like the Apple iPhone, Asus Eee PC, and Nintendo Wii. I guess it helps when you leverage your reputation, because the NYT found me through my work on such sites as The TechZone, Mobile Magazine, and FutureLooks.

Sounds believable enough, but the NYT would never hire Michael I don’t think Michael would stop doing Freelance Writing for a newspaper job.

The Web Standards Project has announced a new initiative to tag people who may be harming the web, through old knowledge, or just holding onto the old web.

Following on the heels of the highly successful Street Team bookmark initiative, The Web Standards Project is pleased to announce a new opportunity for you to spread the good word of Web standards to the people around you. It occurs to us that books don’t build crappy Web sites; people who read crappy books build crappy Web sites. While marking books was a great first step, we need to move beyond that to get at the root cause of the problems in our industry.

Now, leveraging the very latest in hyper-localized social tagging, you can help alert others to the people around you who are hurting the Web. Simply download the official WaSP Warning Labels, print them out, and you will be ready to tag the people around you who have yet to see the light. Whether it’s the stuffed shirt in your project meetings who keeps putting off talking about accessibility because, “No blind people use our site,” or that developer who still refers to a dog-eared copy of Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.2 in 14 Days, you’ll be able to tag them all.

You can download the labels here and start tagging people that may be harmful to the web.

Nice April Fools joke. It’s actually original, too!

Google has now announced a new feature for Gmail called Custom Time, which allows you to change the received time for the recipient of your email. You can even choose if it’s read or unread.

How do I use it?
Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

Unfortunately, it comes with some restrictions:

Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?
Yes. You’ll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk.

How come I only get ten?
Our researchers have concluded that allowing each person more than ten pre-dated emails per year would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time, thus rendering the feature useless.

I think Gmail’s April Fools joke last year was better…

Google has just announced that they have partnered with the Virgin Group to create Project Virgle, an attempt to create “the first permanent human colony on Mars”.

For thousands of years, the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world’s every last nook, cranny and subdivision.

An invitation. Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

Actually, this is pretty funny. Especially the Application to Join Project Virgle and the error page. It’s a little too similar to a previous April Fools done by Google awhile ago, which was to put a Google headquarters on the Moon.

Is ShoeMoney’s April Fools joke this year just simply a Video titled “Making 1000 in 1 Hour“, where the audio is inaudible in all the “right” places? Pretty weak if it is.

Although, maybe this is link bait to get him an extra 1000 hits in an hour? Or maybe for him to make an extra $1000 indirectly from the video by just putting in 1 hour of work on it? Probably not, but it’s quite possible.

Video’s posted after the break.

Click here to view the video »