Today's links 

Doc Searls remembers summer heat in New Jersey before air conditioning.

Dan Gillmor discusses a new Google News feature that's on the right track, but not the right implementation. Google should just buy Technorati (Note to Sifry: 1 percent please), and get it reliable, and use it in place of this new human-intense feature. Let the people discussed in news articles get blogs, Google can even host them. Let the readers sort it out. Much better than depending on employees.

Gabe Rivera notes that Google News doesn't allow sites like Techmeme to crawl Google News, but they depend on other sites being open to make Google News possible. The news organizations should offer blogs to everyone who's quoted in their articles, btw. Should have done this a long long time ago (I suggested it to the NY Times in 2001 and to the SF Chron earlier this year). Instead Google does something lame, and beats the whole news industry. Some days it seems the whole world is built on cowardice and fear.

TorrentFreak reports that Google filters torrents out of search results.

This appears to be an article about RSS, in Hebrew.

Flickr-to-Twitter, day 3 

I added another user, Fred Wilson of A VC.

He successfully posted a picture this morning. He asked that I add a feature that uses the title of the picture in the Twitter post. Of course, makes total sense. Done.

Now this new feature, and TwitterGrams, suggest that perhaps Twitter should have the concept of attachments for status messages, esp if they're posted through the API.

There would be two parameters:

1. A content type, like image/jpeg or audio/mpeg.

2. The bits of the attachment.

For a small set of types, Twitter would know how to display a "thumb" -- in the case of an image, it would be a tiny rendering of it. Click on the thumb to see the full picture. For MP3s, there would be an inline player.

People are kind of repulsed by the urls I'm dropping into the feeds, on one hand, on the other, I'm getting a hundred new subscribers a day, so people are attracted to it in (much) greater numbers. Rich media in Twitter posts makes a lot of sense. A much prettier UI is possible, but this is something they have to do.