Yup.  It's not a joke.  orbiTouch is a new kinds of keyboard and it has no keys, just two orbs that you move independently in eight directions.  You can read the full review at ExtremeTech or watch a short video clip showing it in action (use the demo button on the orbiTouch home page).

I think I'll wait until there is a Pamela Anderson model because, if I have to pay $695 for a keyboard, I want one that will make me grin like a Cheshire Cat as I type.

Found this nice list of string libraries while taking a random walk on Freshmeat.  I thought some people might find this useful.  To me, it looks like a bad traffic accident that should have been cleaned up long time ago.

Jay Fienbert embraces my Blog Comments, Images, and Audio idea and rocks on, elaborating on it and thinking about implementing it in his iCite.  He wrote:

"The social aspect of all of this is that you will be able to offer your participation with others in richer ways. You can build online resources for yourself and share them with others, or build online resource with others and use them yourself. (In other words, you can build a part that gets used in a larger whole, or you can build a larger whole and extract a part.)" - Jay Fienbert of iCite.net

Marc gets it, Jay gets it, Boris gets it.  Pass it on and let's rock.  Here are links to my posts for your convenience:

• Blog Comments, Images, and Audio
• Micro-Wiki: a blog post as a wiki
• Chaotic Automatic
• Mental Cauldron

I learned a new word today: riffing.  Apparently, it is a common word of sort although I haven't run into the word until now.  Just in case you didn't know either, it means:

1. Music. A short rhythmic phrase, especially one that is repeated in improvisation.
2. A clever or inventive commentary or remark: “Those little riffs that had seemed to have such sparkle over drinks… look all too embarrassing in cold print” (John Richardson).

Thanks to Boris Mann, a Canadian infovore, for using the word in his blog to describe one of my posts.  He seems to be having a lot of fun with stuff Marc and I are rocking on.

CSS heavy web pages on display at CSS Zen Garden look great.  They make you stand up and shout "Wow!"  Now, try to read the textual content.  If you managed to keep your eyes focused on the page after reading the first few paragraphs, you did better than me.  It's like trying to read in the middle of Time Square at night.  In their pursuit of beauty, they succeeded only in catching vanity.

Here is a rare find, thanks to Howard Reingold.

"Lada A. Adamic and Eytan Adar of HP's Information Dynamics Lab and Orkut Buyukkokten of Google applied scale-free network metrics to the social network of an online community, poked the social network in various ways, and discovered juicy stuff. HP researchers created a Friendster-like online social network, then mined it for information about the real-life social networks it reflected. After the online community, "Club Nexus," had been cooking for a couple of months, the researchers asked participants to rate how "trusty," "nice," "cool," and "sexy" every one of their buddies were, on a scale of one to four. The plot thickened."

The 326K PDF can be directly accessed here.  Yummy!  I'll mention a few people here, who enjoy this sort of intellectual candy, so they can find the paper via Technorati.  I wonder if other people are [mis?]-using Technorati for notification purpose like me?

Responding to my Introducing Chaos to Social Software post, Chuck Lawson nails the issue I was wrestling with in his post titled Where's the love, Baby?  He wrote:

"These systems seem like great ideas, but like Don, I’ve found that it takes a degree of effort I’m not likely to make to really benefit from them.  I signed up for “Friendster” awhile back, and after a half-hearted cruise through my address book, managed to get four people to sign up in my network.  I guess they’re not any more gregarious than I am, since they haven’t signed anyone else up.  Since browbeating people I’ve already sent invitations to feels a little bit too much like trying to peddle mlm distributorships, my “social networking” efforts are pretty much at a standstill."

"So, until folks like Don, and aggressive networkers like Marc Canter (on whose site I found the link to Don’s article) work out some sort of automagic system to drag the rest of us introverts into the social network revolution, the best idea I can come up with is to park an invitation here." – Chuck Lawson

I particularly love the word 'automagic'.  It's one of the things I try to strive for when working on UI.  Although I hardly qualify as an introvert, I hate to disturb other people.  Unless I am in midst of my gregarious fit, of course.  When you see me yacking 1000 words a minute, run like hell.  It's worse that core dump after a full meal.