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Obit. [Naturally, Meat Hook Reality has a link. Update: Jeff Rowland has an unusal take: “Also I hope that Hunter S. Thompson is not regretting his decision at this point, and hopefully is feeling better.??? Update 2: Doonesbury.com has a tribute in the form of reproductions of Uncle Duke’s 1974 appearance in the strip.]

It’s been a rough week, so here’s something calming for Sunday night: Rosemary Mosco’s bird dreams.

Erin catches up on ‘Alias’ episodes. “The upside of this season’s lame lack of plot is that each episode can by synopsized in under 10 minutes.”

mysql> delete from wp_comments where
comment_approved = '0';
Query OK, 95 rows affected (0.01 sec)

*sigh*

Mac users: I’ve compiled a version of uControl which allows it to operate (with scroll wheel support) under 10.3.8. Get it here: ucontrol_fix_10.3.8.zip. The bug (and the fix) are described here. Update: The official uControl version 1.4.6 now includes this patch (and requires OS X 10.3.8).

O’Reilly Network: Stewart Butterfield on Flickr.

So, partly for those reasons and partly because using the social network you can give people permission to add metadata to your photos, 71 percent of the photos have some kind of human-added metadata that was added in Flickr. That’s extremely high, even compared to software like Adobe Photoshop Album, which is designed from the bottom up to facilitate the adding of metadata. When you’re doing it for yourself, it’s like a chore, its drudgery. When you’re doing it as part of a community, in a collaborative way, it can still be a little bit of work, but the payoff is so much larger.

Salon writes about Flickr, del.icio.us, 43 Things, and the Force-like glue that binds them all together: a global namespace of user-defined tags.

What 43 Things does for personal goals, the bookmark-sharing site del.icio.us does for everything its users are interested in on the Net. Here, what people are looking at and saving from the Web becomes the basis for learning new things, and making connections with each other. “It’s like Friendster for knowledge as far as I’m concerned,” says Howard Rheingold. “I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they’ve tagged … And isn’t that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful — and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you.”

Read on: Steal this bookmark!