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This new-to-me service, Green Dimes, will drastically reduce the amount of junk [snail] mail your receive by diligently and comprehensively removing your name and address from lists large and small that are bought and sold by and to marketers. They automate much of the process, and when a signature is required send you a self-addressed stamped postcard to sign and send. They have a staff of 20 working full time to discover new lists to remove your from, while as the same time providing tools to ensure you still get catalogs and charity mail you desire.

By getting less mail you save some of the 100,000,000 trees consumed by the direct mail industry. Better yet, Green Dimes will plant trees each month in your name, helping to repair a bit of the damage already done.

Pretty good value proposition for only $4/month. Sign yourself up or send a gift membership to family and friends.

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Here’s the trailer:

I can’t wait!

A video called “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” is an engaging and enjoyable 4.5 minute non-verbal documentary taking us from ‘pencil’ to ‘Web 2.0′. It adds context to the advances that got us here, and suggests what might yet be in store. At about 03:40, highlights from an August 2005 Wired article, “We Are the Web,” are used to suggest that we are “teaching the machine.” I’m afraid that that notion is still inadequately understood and appreciated.

Perhaps the so-called “social web” isn’t about connecting people (not about helping people socialize), but about information conservation: If a person chooses to do something — no matter how small — it’s inherently interesting, precious, and valuable. We’ve barely started to figure out what to do with this second-generation information. Where we have it’s been exciting, useful, and successful: Flickr’s Interestingness and Clusters, the notion of “watching” on Upcoming, the newer “people who looked at this ultimately bought that” in Amazon, and of course Google’s PageRank. The idea isn’t new, but it’s still under appreciated.

Here’s the paragraph from Wired that surrounds the words used in the video:

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we’re already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

Here’s the video, which was created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University:

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In addition to pointing to CNN debunks false report about Obama, I wanted to summarize it. I struggled a bit, but luckily a great new magazine GOOD summed it up well (emphasis mine):

A conservative magazine started a rumor that Obama attended a madrassa in Indonesia that taught fundamentalist Islam. Then they falsely sourced Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the tip. This might have been a pretty ingenious campaign smear a few years ago, but these Rove-like tricks don’t seem to work anymore. CNN did some good, old-fashioned journalism and quickly debunked the story. Republican strategists should denounce these tactics if they want any chance in ‘08. The American public is finally wise to it.

Let me reiterate their conclusion: this shady business won’t fly in the ‘08 election cycle.

(If you’re not familiar with GOOD, take a look and consider subscribing (100% of your subscription money goes to an organization of your choice.)

Microsoft alum Alex Hopmann writes today about creating XMLHTTP (which is the basis of “Ajax” for my less geeky readers). “XMLHTTP actually began its life out of the Exchange 2000 team. … That weekend I startup up Visual Studio and whipped up the first version of what would become XMLHTTP. The first verison (sic) didn’t have async support hooked up and was pretty crude, but it was enough to help Jim and Bob… .”

It’s an interesting read, both from a historical perspective interesting to those of us that pay rent based on work derived from it, and also to those interested in what makes a particular technology flourish.

Towards the end (it’s a long 2000-word piece), he shares this insight which I think it broadly-applicable:

“The lesson to take out of this thing is to appreciate the importance of shipping and having the patience to let something succeed. It feels like [people] measure [a new platform] by how many apps have adopted it on the launch day. That is just crazy and it doesn’t get the basics of how big a shift these sorts of things can be and how long it takes to move the mind-set, learning, and deployment of a big new platform.”

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Interesting new this morning: Second Life (Viewer) in now an open source project. Though I’m not active in Second Life, I’m intrigued and think this development says good things about its future. Very interesting.

They only open-sourced the Viewer, but in many ways — almost by definition — they world/environment is already open-source. I guess the laws of physics for SL are not yet open, but that doesn’t bother me.

Releasing the source now is our next invitation to the world to help build this global space for communication, business, and entertainment. … [W]e welcome the inevitable with open arms.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick asks, in a paraphrase of WeBreakStuff, if the open-sourcing of the Viewer is akin to the early WWW days when “the early proliferation of browsers made the web much more usable.”