Local Flavor

Hi folks -- for my last entry today, a little local flavor:

* DC-focused group blog DCist has a nice little feature on the dissection of a SmarTrip Card, which is an electronic card that you can use to pay for your trips on the DC Metro system.

With a little acetone and judicious cutting,
they unearthed the guts of the card -- it's a Smart Card (that stores
information on a chip) with an RFID antenna. If you take it apart (at
your own risk), you can then repackage it to a handy keychain
form-factor. Quite handy if you really need to lighten your wallet.

* The Washington Post's ombudsman had a column Sunday outlining the differences (and similarities) between the Post's dead tree and online editions.

The Post's online edition is doing a lot of neat stuff that I've been meaning to write about -- they're experimenting with mashups (which is a very Web 2.0 thing, another thing I've been meaning to write about) -- it's basically means building things in an open way, so that other folks can create stuff around it -- similar to what Google Maps has done (you may be familiar with Frappr, which is kind of a roll-your-own mapping service.)

One example is the NewsCloud,
which presents Post headlines as a cloud of keywords (where the most
popular keywords are bigger). It's an interesting alternate way to
navigate the news (although honestly, I prefer the traditional format.)

Anyway, the Post has a blog where they talk about this kind of stuff: Post Remix.

One thing I missed, though, from the ombud's column, which was picked up in this Blog Herald entry, was that some of the Posts dead-tree reporters don't like how the online version of the stories features links to blogs (by using Technorati searches) that are talking about that story.

It was  just one item in the column, though, so I wouldn't go around with the pitchforks and torches just yet.

Talk to you later. -- Joe