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March 21, 2006

Watch air traffic on your computer; Google Finance; links of the day

Ants on parade: I've been mesmerized by Airport Monitor:

This is Logan International in Boston. Arrivals are in blue, departures in green; the black ones are "in transit." This is jerky realtime -- everything moves every few seconds. Click on a plane and it turns red; you'll be shown its type and altitude.

Logan's runways, close up. Zoom levels range from 4 to 90 miles.

This is JFK International in New York.

If your first thought was about terrorists seeing this, they do already know there are planes in the air.

Airports offer this Passur product free on their sites to people wondering if weather has grounded their planes, or those they are to meet, and to the surrounding neighborhoods. From the "Top 10 Reasons Why Airports Choose Airport Monitor" page:

Lowering call volume, workload at the noise and operations offices

* Over time, AirportMonitor results in fewer calls for information, explanation or clarification about noise issue, as people become used to looking up the information for themselves

Massport offers a link on the Logan page right under Arrivals and Departures.

Links of the day:

Google Finance: I see financial stories as a list of raw headline links, but Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen sees more.

Opposite? Tip for finding music on Google.

BBC: Pentagon plans cyber-insect army. Truly weird.

The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll: "A new generation of conspiracy theorists is at work on a secret history of New York’s most terrible day." New York Metro.

World's Most Expensive Cars, 2006: Wired, from Forbes.

That's a Swedish Koenigsegg CCR, $540,000.

SXSW to MPAA: STFU. Derek Powazek:

One of the most interesting panels at SXSW Interactive 2006 was The Future of Darknets, moderated by JD Lasica. And while the concept of Darknets - communities using private subnetworks to communicate and collaborate out of view of the larger internet - is indeed fascinating, the panel was not interesting because of the intended topic. In fact, we never actually got to hear much about DarkNets, much to my disappointment, because the panel was hijacked the moment one panelist said, "Hello, my name is Kori Bernards, and I'm from the Motion Picture Association of America."

What followed was an hour-long firing squad as one audience member after another directed angry questions her way. The feeling of pent-up frustrations with the movie biz was palpable, especially as her claims of flexibility and excitement within the MPAA to find "creative new solutions" to the problems raised by the audience rang more and more hollow, the more times she repeated them....

...No one in that angry audience in Austin wants to dupe a movie to sell it on the street. That's piracy. We just want to put movies on our hard drives and iPods, share our mix CDs with each other (just like we used to do with tapes), and mash that funny video with that cool song to produce something new, something we'll give away for free....

Gawker Owner Nick Denton Opens Storefront Headquarters on Crosby Street. -- New York Magazine

Watch bloggers type!

The 'Hotbed of Tech' Times? Dan Gillmor, former tech columnist at the San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley, suggests that Yahoo buy the local paper, orphaned in the Knight Ridder sale.

Back to the good ole days: The Raleigh (N.C.) Times closed in 1989, but The News & Observer reports (A downtown spot to toast the bygone times) that the building lives on:

... The Times building from the '20s is being turned into a watering hole (The Raleigh Times) and a next-door coffee shop (The Morning Times) on Hargett Street.

On Friday night, dozens of Times alumni, including Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, gathered to hoist a few beers and talk about the days when all newspapers thrived on competition -- none so much as The Raleigh Times....

via Romenesko, who's chock full today of post-Knight-Ridder sale news and journalistic soul-searching in its wake.

Trapped in between life and death. Seattle Times:

"When a young Fort Lewis soldier returned from Iraq paralyzed from the upper chest down, it was his teenage brother who assumed the role of roommate and primary caretaker."

Amazing story.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:18 AM | Permalink