As ███████ who █████ for a ███████ ████ ██████, ████, and ████████ the ████████ and its ███████ ████████, it is █████ ████ we ████ ████. ████ ████████ ██████████ of the ████████.

████ me in ██████████ ████ ███████████████ and ███████ ████ ████ we won’t █████ for ████.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately for one reason: this would make an incredible diary of my life. I’m not the first to think this (just read the Wikipedia article I linked to — people were thinking about this in the 1990′s), but it’s something I’ve found myself becoming obsessed with.

When FriendFeed was announced in 2007, I thought, “this is perfect!” It aggregates data from nearly every web service you can imagine. I happily started plugging things in and letting it archive all my data. It ended up being awesome for a number of reasons.

“Oh, man! What was that thing I tweeted about 2 years ago, about some guy bunting a home run?” Well, Twitter search goes back about 7 days, so that was useless. FriendFeed to the rescue! I could easily search for things I tweeted about (and [website-verb]ed about) from the moment I started importing things.

In August of 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed and proceeded to let the site rot. Since then, there’s been no easy way to export your data, and their search function eventually broke, making the site useless for searching archived data. To this day, FriendFeed is happily pulling in everything I do on the internet, but sadly, I have no way to search for it.

Earlier this week, I found a brilliant PHP script by Claudio Cicali. It scrapes your FriendFeed profile and saves all your data to a JSON file.

After accumulating over 3 years of data, I ran the script (which took an entire evening) and it scraped something like 300K different things I’ve done on the internet in the past few years. The resulting JSON file is over 300MB (now I need to work on a way to parse the data and feed it back into a MySQL database). Incredible!

Sadly though, I don’t think this is a tenable solution. It’s great for fetching all my past data, but who knows how long FriendFeed will remain around. I’d like something more permanent, open-source, and that I can potentially run on my own server.

Locker sounds like it may be what I’m looking for, but it still has a ways to go. Momento on the iPhone sounds exactly like what I need, but you need to manually kick it off (and it won’t pull in data too far in the past).

Anyone have any ideas or thoughts on this?

So, which is it: GIF like a present or GIF like the lube?

“It’s embarrassing because you don’t know if it’s Mr. Gick or Mr. Jick,” lamented William Labov, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As Dr. Labov explained, in modern English, no hard and fast rule exists for the ‘gi’ combination. Some words take the hard sound, others take the soft sound — it depends on the word’s specific history. Compare gift and gin, for example — same ‘gi’ combination, different ‘gi’ sound.

The Atlantic has really been nailing it lately and is quickly becoming one of my favorite publications.

This week, we rolled out a new feature at gdgt that allows users to embed their gadget lists onto their own personal website or blog. It’s a pretty awesome way to show off what gadgets you have or want, and even foster new discussion about the technology you’re passionate in.

We previously had a flash widget (ugh) that was designed by a third party — fortunately or unfortunately, they’re going out of business and shutting their service down. So, the team took it upon themselves and designed our own widget in house. It uses javascript, is completely cross platform, and looks dead sexy!

Check it out!

A hilarious take on some of the tweets from the fake BPGlobalPR Twitter account.

Also, for your enjoyment, there is a Firefox plugin that will modify the words “BP” in your browser.

This totally sums up how the internet is ruining my life…

[via Georg Pedersen]

Seriously! The sky above San Francisco just decided to open up. My Twitter timeline was, let’s say “flooded”, with thoughts about the storm.

The latest in single serving websites: It’s twenty-ten, not two-thousand ten.

Where Do You Go is an interesting mashup that shows the areas you most frequent in a city, using a heat map layed on top of Google Maps. The data is derived from your Foursquare checkins.

The above image represents the areas of San Francisco I most frequent, based on nearly 400 checkins with Foursquare over the last year. Red / white are areas visited the most, while blue / green (and grey) are areas I visit the least or not at all.

This is a pretty fantastic use of one’s geo-location data and it’s something I’ve always been curious about. Just where exactly do I go all the time, and what areas do I frequent. This sort of thing might help plan further adventures to parts of the city that I neglect. I just might have to reinstall Foursquare on my iPhone after all!

Of course, when I do finally reinstall Foursquare, what happens?

Go figure.

I’ve also included an awesome little LS logo in the sidebar, to advertise my love for these guys. They’ve done a fantastic job hosting Geology News.