Hank Paulson’s bailout letter as Nigerian spam:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

…

Not only do we need a well-thought out process and better leadership to get through a time like this – but we also need lots of humor.

“This shot was just fine until that bus drove by and blew up her dress….now it’s perfect”

I’m a fan of all of The Sartorialist‘s work but this one in particular stood out over others recently. I love this capture. It makes you want to pick up a camera and start shooting. It makes you want to dress better everyday. It shows you that you can never blink in New York City. You might miss too much.

E. B. White, Notes and Comment:

“If the world were merely seductive [...] that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

The “Novels in Three Lines” project on Twitter has been talked about a lot in the last couple of weeks – both on blogs as well as over Twitter itself. Some highlights:

• @Twitch: novelsin3lines – the second twitter feed worth following, the first being the Mars rover. Everyone else can go to hell.
• @Condalmo: Blast from the past: “Burning with electoral fervor”
• @Phil Gyford: Very much enjoying Félix Fénénon’s Twitters from 1906 Paris
• @gabrielle: I think @novelsin3lines will be an excellent time waster!
• @itsrob: favorite new twitter user
• @rossh: just to share, @novelsin3lines is really pretty awesome.
• @Mica Scalin: Very excited to follow @novelsin3lines great idea!
• @Dave Mason: I am completely digging @novelsin3lines
• @jenks: someone turned novelsin3lines into a twitter account. Cool idea for a really cool book.
• Noah Brier: My friend Naveen announced a new side project [...]
• ReadWriteWeb: From Félix Fénéon, these tweets are the “poems and novels and novels he never otherwise wrote.” [sic]
• Le Monde: J’y remarque pour commencer, bien sûr, une traduction du merveilleux Félix Fénéon … comme quoi… nous n’inventons rien en ce début de 21ème siècle… ne manqueront pas de dire les plus sceptiques. Et voici d’où semble être venue l’idée de le reprendre .
• Media Bistro: “It’s a brilliant idea,” NYRB managing editor Sara Kramer told me when I emailed her looking for the backstory. “I only wish we had thought of it.”

You can use Twitter search to find more people who are talking about “Novels”.

I was asked a few questions earlier today about Chrome. I wanted to list my first impressions here.

“ClickRank”: Google can/will track your browsing history in a fashion similar to how Web History is tracked. The good thing about this is that Google will have a better idea how people browse and the types of content/pages that matter. It can form a sort of ClickRank. The first benefit to the user is that future search results will be more relevant because this data will be used to organize results and order. You no longer have to go to a “google.com” destination before Google sees your online activity.

Ads: The first thing that pops to mind (and advertisers are salivating over) is ads. Just as Chrome can use your browsing history (“ClickRank”) to deliver better search results, it can use it to deliver more relevant ads. [1] Currently, with existing browsers you can make use of systems like AdBlock to block ads. You probably won’t be able to do this with the new browser.

Gadgets: Google Gadgets will probably move out of the webpage and into the browser. I can see gadgets that keep track of objects across multiple pages. A “shopping cart” system is one that comes to mind. As you browse a couple of different Checkout-powered sites, you can automatically add to this cross-merchant cart.

User accounts (OpenID): With Chrome (and perhaps a custom gadget/plugin system), the browser finally has a chance to make online accounts and logins simpler. One of the biggest annoyances on the web right now is the multiple login problem. You have to maintain a separate login for every site. Current browsers attempt to get around this problem by offering to remember your usernames and passwords. One problem with this approach is that if you attempt to login with someone else’s computer, you have to remember all your details and type them in from scratch. OpenID helps solve the problem of multiple identities and passwords – it maintains a single profile for all of your activity – across sites and across computers. The issue with OpenID is that, although secure, it lacks a clean user experience. (A user is directed from a login site to an OpenID site and then back to the login site. A chance for hijacking or other malicious behavior is great). A browser such as Chrome can step in the middle to help make this process easier: it can use Google Accounts as the single OpenID “provider” to all supporting sites. And it can wrap the entire OpenID authentication process in a simple, secure, browser-based authentication tool. [2]

OpenID, part 2: The good thing about being an OpenID “provider” is that the provider now has access to all your activity (from a login/authentication standpoint). So far with Google’s online reach, they can only track what you do on their site. (AdWords excepted, but that’s not really “tracking”). If they released something like OpenID using Google Accounts, they’d be alerted everytime you logged into an external site, too. This way they’d really be able to see who’s using what and how many more people are using Flickr and Photobucket and Facebook’s Photos over Picasa. With a combination of Chrome, OpenID technologies and Google Accounts, this process finally becomes much simpler. This is a good play, I’m just surprised no other big player has really done this (with the exception of Yahoo!). [3]

Notes:

1. It’s a bit like when Gmail first came out. You have all the benefits of free, secure email without all the hassles that previous email programs like Outlook brought (spam, viruses, …). In return, Google serves you ads based on the content of your messages. In this case, your entire browsing experience has been revised to be cleaner and less malware-prone than with other browsers (Internet Exploder). If you want these features, you’ll have to make do with ads, etc.

2. I think Yahoo’s implementation comes the closest to making the OpenID easier and more secure to use but suffers because the average person does not really know about/understand it.

3. I’m surprised Facebook hasn’t really done this. They already have proper user profile information (which is the most valuable bit of data in logins). All they’d need to do is to implement proper security around profile data (“site A can see my full name and town and website”, “site B can only see my first name and website”) and then give users/developers a way to use it with OpenID.