It’s interesting to see that the new Fast Company social networking feature is using the open-source package Drupal to power it.

Their logo is a bit unoriginal though. Being familiar with Linux, Drupal, and the other open-source CMS packages, I quickly recognized it as a mashup of some other logos. Here’s the steps it took to make the new logo:

Step 1: Take the logo from competing open-source CMS package Joomla:

Step 2: Rotate it counter-clockwise 90 degrees:

Step 3: Cross-pollinate it with the Ubuntu Linux logo:

Step 4: Some minor tweaking of shade and positioning, and ta-daa!, new logo:

Update:In the comments, reader “bloggo@bloggo.com” notes “The logo to which you are referring was created when Fast Company debuted their original reader’s network, the Company of Friends, in November 1997. Unless those other logos are almost 11 years old, most likely they copied Fast Company, or else it’s a coincidence.” The earliest link I can find in the Wayback Machine shows this logo as of July 5, 2003, so I’ll assume they are correct about the 1997 creation date (screenshot below). Thanks for setting us straight.

I just finished watching the movie Bullitt on DVD. What a great movie, best known for it’s “one of cinema’s best car chase” scene. This swingin’ 60’s movie has a great jazzy soundtrack, and is peppered with…one curse word…, when Steve McQueen, as Frank Bullitt, tells the dirty politician exactly what he thinks of him and his plans. It’s dramatic, and it stands out, as Frank tells him “Bulls**t”. Ahh, gone are the days of one-curse-word cop films, and plotlines that involve the bad guy carrying a loaded handgun in a shoulder rig onboard a San Francisco to Rome flight.

But I digress. While watching Bullitt, I almost leapt off the couch, never knowing the tribute that Michael Mann had made to Bullitt in one of my all-time favorite movies, Heat. See for yourself:

1968’s Bullitt

1995’s Heat

I’ve been reading Valleywag for the past couple months, and enjoy their mix of humor and commentary a great deal. However, they have one habit that I find extremely annoying. Take a look at this post. For some reason, when they mention a company or person, they feel the need to link that mention to their internal page about every story that is tagged with that person’s or company’s name, rather than to the person’s blog or company URL itself. So instead of going to the company they are talking about, I click on the link and get another Valleywag page with stories about that company, then I have to go on a scavenger hunt to find the real page for that company. Annoying!

Jack Dorsey of Twitter and the L.A. Times Travel Show “How Will Travel Change You?” guy:

Yahoo’s upcoming You Witness News will allow user-generated photos and video to be uploaded to the service, to be used in news stories that will be posted on the site. Natali Del Conte’s post about this new service runs happily along until smashing headlong into a brick wall in the last sentence. She states that “As long as they’re just soliciting art and not writing, I’m okay with it.”

I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that because she’s a writer, she wants to protect her little corner of the world, and let the photojournalists fend for themselves. To not stand up for other professionals, especially those so closely tied to syndicated/published writing, seems incredibly shortsighted to me. If the aim of You Witness News is to devalue well-constructed art, it can only be a matter of time before they will attempt to devalue well-constructed writing, and she will have then sold herself out.

We have said it time and time again on The Podcast Brothers that when negotiating the value of your content, you owe it to yourself and the podcasting/user-generated content community at large to make sure your content is not undervalued by those who would attempt to undervalue it in their own self interest. It seems Natali could use a bit more of this attitude, rather than throwing her photo-taking counterparts to the wolves.

At best, her attitude is selfish; at worst, it is a slap in the face to those who have an eye for “the shot”.

I just finished installing Internet Explorer 7, and noticed something interesting during the installation screens:

Notice anything interesting? I’ll give you a hint, here’s the IE6 home page at Microsoft.com (red rectangle inserted by me):

and here’s the IE7 home page at Microsoft.com (again, red rectangle inserted by me):

That’s right, up until now, Internet Explorer was called “Microsoft Internet Explorer”, meaning “The web browser that is created by Microsoft”. Now, Internet Explorer is called “Windows Internet Explorer”, meaning “The Web browser that belongs with/is intended for Windows”.

Here’s a couple more screen snippets, from the browsers themselves:

IE6, a.k.a. Microsoft Internet Explorer

IE7, a.k.a. Windows Internet Explorer

See the difference? It’s a subtle shift in Microsoft’s strategy in the ongoing browser wars, which I believe is meant to stop the advance of Firefox. For the technically savvy, Firefox will always be an option, but now, for the uninitiated, Firefox won’t look as attractive as “the browser that was meant for Windows”.

Edit: Ok, so I’m a little slow…Wikipedia’s entry on Internet Explorer first notes “Internet Explorer (known as Windows Internet Explorer in Windows Vista)…” on November 24, 2005

I received an SMS message on my cell phone today, informing me that Cingular (my carrier) had a free phone for me, all I had to do was stop by my local Cingular store and …. etc. It also nicely told me to reply with ‘STOP’, and I would not receive marketing messages from them anymore. I did so, and was instantly sent another SMS message informing me I would “no longer receive marketing messages from Cingular. Please allow 10 days for your preferences to be updated”.

You have to be kidding me. 10 days? Nothing takes 10 days anymore, especially when it comes to updating my SMS preferences. In 1860, the Pony Express got someone’s ‘preferences’ (mail) from Missouri to California in the same amount of time.