Andy mentioned something about Imgur’s most popular files based on views, so I figured I could find something for MLKSHK.

So here are the top 20 files from this year based on number of likes received. Note that the first one was our full-page ad in Longshot Magazine that the members of MLKSHK paid for.

1. MLKSHK ad for Long Shot Magazine

   
   Views: 1,804 Likes: 165

2. best wedding pictures ever... scroll down

   
   Views:1,392,030 Likes: 144

3. .______________________.

   
   Views: 1,261 Likes: 136

4. NY Times Crossword

   
   Views: 35,752 Likes: 119

5. I'm done.

   
   Views: 1,732 Likes: 118

6. Lovers, not fighters.

   
   Views: 63,952 Likes: 117

7. Teen TXT Lingo.jpg

   
   Views: 26,735 Likes: 102

8. Beard Slap

   
   Views: 4,889 Likes: 101

9. Trollin

   
   Views: 578 Likes: 100

10. A Sunday Afternoon In The Park

    
    Views: 1,314 Likes: 98

11. New Star Wars BluRay edit.gif

    
    Views: 90,934 Likes: 95

12. Wearing my new favorite button

    
    Views: 2,085 Likes: 85

13. Blue Screen of DEATH

    
    Views: 2,131 Likes: 85

14. Epc Crstms Crd

    
    Views: 2,041 Likes: 84

15. Whale Thing

    
    Views: 1,366 Likes: 82

16. "Chevy wants to put some ads on MetaFilter, check out this mockup of what they had in mind"

    
    Views: 7,211 Likes: 81

17. Anticipation

    
    Views: 554 Likes: 81

18. Last one, I swear.

    
    Views: 2,209 Likes: 79

19. the jesus

    
    Views: 29,936 Likes: 76

20. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West hearing the news from Bill O’Reilly that nobody on Wall St. committed any crimes.

    
    Views: 583 Likes: 76

Huh, this bar is a couple blocks from my house. I missed this news this year: Mad Dog Installs California’s First Self-Serve Beer Table.

If you’re a San Francisco Haight or Haight-adjacent resident, Haighteration published their biggest stories of 2011. Lots of fires, unfortunately.

Saving this because I want my wife to see it. Via Brain Picker comes these illustrations by Sigmund Freud’s niece.

I’m still working out the kinks here, but I am returning to proper blogging. This isn’t a 2012 thing or an experiment, I am returning to share good stuff with you. I hope you like it.

Dave Winer (!) posted some notes about the year and a response to the “golden age of tech blogging” being over.

Is the "golden age" of tech blogging over? Jeremiah Owyang says it is. I guess it's all about point of view. If you think tech blogging was Mike Arrington and TechCrunch, then yes indeed, it's over.

Don’t you wish you had this list before you went shopping this Christmas? Easily one of my favorite sites of 2011. Wirecutter is the place I go first for researching stuff I might buy.

In 2010 I had a project where I only listened to music released in 2010 (except for January 2010: I listened to anything released in 2009 because I mean come on…). It was a fun experiment that introduced me to TONS of bands and music that I still listen to now.

The project changed me a bit. I feel like I can point to 2010 as the year I let go of a lot of shitty music in my past and shook loose a lot of the conceptions I had about what I liked.

There was a story today on the NYTimes about what a shitty year it was for music* but I don’t believe it**. I think it was a shitty year for whatever label-manufactured band that I saw plastered on busses and walls on my way to work, but music is always good. There is always good stuff out there if you look.

To illustrate my point, I am not even kidding, someone just pointed me to an Australian garage band I’d never heard of called “Eddy Current Suppression Ring” on This Is My Jam. Released just this past October:

Isn’t that great?

So yeah, I am doing my music experiment again. This time I’ll blog it here and on This Is My Jam rather than on a separate weblog. It’s hard. It’s fun. But it reminds me that music is always good if you’re willing to look and not worry if some label’s great hope didn’t materialize.

* The worst part is they lead off with the (terrible) return of one of my favorite bands and rhythm sections of all time. I saw Sublime play quite a few times in clubs and backyards (nearly 20 years ago!) before they blew it and Brad died. Stupid stupid stupid.

** THIS GUY knows what I’m talking about

I just watched this video of the $25 Raspberry Pi beta board (via jwatt):

It reminded me of something I wish I could go out and buy right now. I want something the size of my Jambox but instead of an audio receiver and speakers inside, I want a tiny computer that is doing a number of things for me.

The first thing I’d want it to do is back-up files from our computers and then push them (delayed) to the cloud when I am at work or sleeping.

The second would be a web server I could use to develop apps for. I have these app ideas that I want to live in my house rather than on a server someplace I have to maintain. Things like address books and calendaring between my wife and I. Stuff I want to own, not depend on some outside service.

Don’t you want to buy that little box? I sure do.

Since I’m asking, another thing I want is an iPod Touch with everything it currently has PLUS a 3g data connection. I basically want my iPhone without a phone. Who needs to carry around a phone? (More on this later, maybe today).

Two helpful links arrived through Twitter after posting. First @wezm points me to some existing off the shelf boards and @pfibiger points out these are called “plug computers” and gives me a great link to start learning more about them.

“The object of the game is to hit the pig with the bird.” — Angry, Productive Birds by Mike at Stamen is a great look at designing a system to help everyone on the team to learn from their project scheduling and time usage.

Simpleform, the company I started with my wife, is entering its third year. We built some stuff for clients, we built some stuff for ourselves, and now we’re back to building things for clients and I think we might be doing this for a while. In the past two years I have learned a lot: some about startups, but way more about businesses and running them.

This idea of building business systems started clicking in my head about six months ago as we were returning to consulting. When we were 100% dedicated to MLKSHK we were shipping daily, processing bugs as fast as people could find them, working through features, and had between the three (or four) of us developed a tight development relationship. It was a fantastic system for shipping code for our users.

When that ended I felt a bit lost. We had systems for deploying and determining where to focus, but working for clients is a different thing. So…why not develop systems for client work?

For year three of Simpleform I am trying out three things:

1. Open books. Anyone who works here can see what we’re earning and how much we’re spending. If you can push code to the servers you should be able to see how healthy the business is. These things are related and should be signals for making decisions.
2. Meticulous project scheduling. The purpose of our business is first to make money and second enjoy what we’re working on. This does that. I can’t enjoy my time at Simpleform if I don’t know how the business is doing and I don’t think anyone else who works here would either.
3. Continuous business development. We probably never should have switched to MLKSHK full-time. It was a gamble, but looking back I see we should have kept looking for work. It was too optimistic. From now on we will try out ideas but keep the business going.

Another good post by a co-founder of AngelList called Why You Can’t Hire is the other reason I’ve been thinking about a transparent business. I don’t have ten million dollars in the bank and melting servers. I can’t compete for people who want to work at Facebook or the next Facebook. We don’t have perks, we have a water cooler and a nice plant.

What I do have is an offer to be more than just an employee with a half-of-a-half-of a percent of a business and no real connection to it other than a hope for a quick sale and a free hoodie. Everyone who works here is a partner and will have access and a vote for where we go and what we do. We get to tinker and toy with the business—as long as we are successful—and use what we learned to make our business even better.

I’m currently working through my network to find Python engineers to join us. The profile I’m using is someone with enough experience in startups and non-startups to know this is a good deal. I have one person I think is perfect and a few ideas on some other people, but if I missed you pleased get in touch.

A long time ago, when people dialed (as in telephones) into Unix machines in some closet or college campus, they used a command called ‘w’ to see who was also on the machine.

You can use this command now if you’re on a Unix-derived operating system. Open terminal enter ‘w’ and you’ll see your login name and any command line tools you might be running. (Likely just ‘w’.)

In those days ‘w’ was used to not just see who was logged in, but what they were using (pine, vi, irc, ftp, lynx) and for how long they had been signed in.

There was a joke about getting ideas for making new apps in the late 90’s: just pick a random Unix tool.

• Talk and IRC begat ICQ, AIM, GTalk, Campfire, Convore.
• Usenet is at the root of Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, and the multitude of PHPBB communities.
• Finger influenced the creation of weblogs and the idea was further refined as Twitter. (This is a forgotten history of weblogs: video game bloggers were at its birth, they took the .plan and .project updates of people like Carmack and Romero and posted them reverse chronologically. I will fight anyone on this.)

But there was something special about ‘w’ for me. In those days of shared servers I would auto-run a shell script that would parse ‘w’ and highlight my friends and see what they were up to and if they were available to talk. If they were in Pine of course you wouldn’t bug them, but if they were just idle in a shell or working on homework, they were probably up for talking or helping you find some new warez site or want to meet up for a slice of pizza.

This past week, like many of my friends, I jumped with two feet into Path. I’ve been pretty selective about who I will share with on Path because of that 150 person limit, but also because I am drowning in Twitter and RSS subscriptions. I like Path for the ability to clearly see my friends’ statuses in a way that Twitter and weblogs no longer provide.

Path is not a remake of ‘w’. I think AIM had and still has the ability to be the ‘w’ of the modern internet. But Path has done so much right with its latest release, I think I miss ‘w’ a little less than before.

You are drowning in feeds and URLs. You want an email every morning that tells you what was important yesterday: nextdraft.com.

I’ve been subscribed to NextDraft since September and I love it. It is exactly what I need to keep track of stuff I missed the day before. Every day it seems like there were ten must-read things on the web and Dave manages to find them all.

Here is last Friday’s. See? That is exactly what you have been looking for.