Rob Horning: 'Pinterest, since it discourages self-promotion and relies entirely on the appropriation of someone else’s creative expression, turns curation into passive consumerism; it allows for the construction and circulation of a bland sanitized “Stepford” identity.' 'Pinterest invites us to view all the images the internet offers as advertisements, in effect.'

"For many ordinary citizens, dual passports still seem dodgy: a convenience for the cosmopolitan few or a sop to the menacing many, rather than a natural feature of a migratory world." The fact that this seems so weird probably means that I am part of some sort of "transnational elite", then.

"Someone should build a site that instead of pulling in just links, or pulling in recent content (recency is so boring) pulled in my top rated content: highest rated Tweets, most interesting photos, highest rated Quora questions (oh wait, they don’t have an API, never mind), most linked blog posts, etc." A nice twist on person aggregation from Kellan.

"In the comic books, it took Stark 40 years to make this move. For Superman or Spiderman or Batman or virtually any other superhero from the prior century (save some like the X-Men) their secret identities were their most sacred possessions, the keys to their undoings, and they fought as hard to protect them as to save humanity itself. But in the 21st century, Tony Stark’s approach to privacy reflects how Millennials now think of the concept."

Looks a lot like Tom's Shelf, but in Firefox. Which, thinking about it, might have been an easier place to start.

'Google now supports the "Hybrid Protocol", combining OpenID federated login together with OAuth access authorization.' Looks like this might end up with a usable, open competitor to Facebook Connect.

From "the online resource for visual arts": [[ The new BR programme does in fact implement one of the concluding remarks made in the opening article in the special railways issue of DESIGN (171/43-44): "Looked at overall, perhaps the basic feature which is still lacking is a universally applied house style of a high standard" ]]

More on aggregation from Phil, complete with pretty pictures.

'Some people love this ["river of"] aggregation. Good for them. I, however, am human and my eyes glaze over when trying to comprehend a chronological stream of equally-weighted events, a format only robots could love.' Phil on integrating comments he's made into a deeply aggregated site.

'A little Facebook window pops up to confirm that you want to connect via your Facebook account. One more click – and you’re done.' '“You have seen the competition; it is Facebook Connect. That is the new bar that we must meet.”' Hmm. (Shame I had to trim the clever headline.)

"you won't catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information [to Facebook] now that he knows the politics of the people behind [it]" a nice attack on the politics and philosophy of west-coast technoutopians.

Tom's at it again, this time with an experimental (Gnome) Dashboard style application to get some sort of personal context around your current item of attention (web page, email, that sort of thing). Nicely done, even if the architecture needs work.

"a BBC journalist entered the UK twice on fake and stolen passports"