./emilychang blog

I wanted to take a moment and thank the following bloggers and sites for including me in their recent lists of top/favorite female bloggers. I don't tend to pay the most attention to lists and rankings. There's always deserving people that don't get included and the general nature of lists is subjective. That said, I appreciate the recognition, the time it took to put together these lists, and I'm honored to be included among many of my own favorite female bloggers. It's a good reminder of what blogging is all about - sharing your own voice and ideas, whether it's to an audience of ten or ten million. Read more...

I've been tweaking the design of my site behind the scenes for the last few weeks and made the changes live tonight. Of course, there will be continuous tweaks, but I feel purged! Overall, I've tried to reduce clutter and simplify the structure and presentation - a proper cleansing. It's an evolution but also a return to an earlier version with less density. Read more...

Shouldn't there be a free trial period for paid iPhone apps? Read more...

I came across Goosh.org yesterday through someone's tweet and I'm in love. Goosh, a "UNIX-like command-line interface for Google," combines the search functionality of Google with the simplicity of command line. It brings me back to the days of using Pine for email. Read more...

Tonight browsing Plurk, I saw heyitskenn's plurk about the service being acquired by Pheltup . Read more...

I really enjoyed O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo this year, which took place in San Francisco on April 22-25. The Expo is a companion event to the Web 2.0 Summit, and "an expanded, inclusive gathering for the technology and business communities through a combined conference and tradeshow." Read more...

It still strikes me as fascinating that the iPhone and the OLPC (or XO) laptop were both released in the last year, and yet they're such radically different "computing" and communication devices and concepts. I've spent some time playing simultaneously with the iPhone, the XO or OLPC laptop, and my regular computer combo - an Apple slim keyboard and MacPro tower. I thought about the emotional attachments I've formed based on user experience. Ignoring the discussion of their obviously different markets and functions for a moment, I wanted to share my experience of using each. Read more...

Botanicalls is a project by students at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program. It's "a system that was developed to allow plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics." Botanicalls Twitter DIY is a version for Twitter so your plants can send Twitter updates when they need water, or send you their thanks. Read more...