Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

My favorite links, photos, and videos from the past week on my Tumblr blog.

Kottke.org - The business blogging bust

As businesses go, blogging is a lot like shining shoes. There are going to be very few folks who own chains of shoe shining places which make a lot of money and a bunch of other people who can (maybe) make a living at it if they bust their ass 24/7/365. But for many, shining shoes is something that will be done at home for themselves because it feels good to walk around with a shiny pair of shoes. Everyone else will switch to sandals (i.e. Twitter) or sneakers (i.e. Facebook) and not worry about shining at all.

Improv Everywhere's High Five Escalator




Bud Caddell tells a story about Sam Phillips, founder Sun Records, and the remix.

As the story goes, in 1955 Sam was forced to sell Elvis Presley’s recording contract to RCA for the princely sum of $35,000. Sam was forced to sell because he had to pay down the losses he suffered from a major copyright lawsuit where he was found guilty of plagiarism.

I like this guy's shirt.





Jonah Lehrer on the psychological differences between friends in real life, and friends online.

When the person is a virtual abstraction, an impersonal representation on a computer screen, the brain treats them accordingly, and seems to invest them with less agency, emotion, etc. Perhaps - and this is a big perhaps, since nobody has done the scanning experiment - we make social decisions concerning many of our Facebook acquaintances using these "impersonal" brain areas. In other words, we might push a Facebook friend off a footbridge, but we'd never push a real friend.