I must be living under a rock. I use MapQuest often to get driving directions. And I know the directions one gets from MapQuest are sometimes flawed, but it is very convenient when it works, which is most of the time.
I knew that you could have the directions "synched" with your PDA, but I hated doing this because it takes too much time. Well, last night when my wife and I needed directions to someone's house that we had never been to I logged on to MapQuest and started writing the directions down. My wife, who is ostensibly less tech-savvy than me, cast a puzzled look and suggested the easier alternative of having the directions emailed to my phone. Great idea. (I had no idea you could do that.).
Apparently, Yahoo Maps has the same feature. This will be saving me a bit of time in the future. If you didn't know about it give it a try. You obviously can have the directions emailed wherever you want.
Martin Schwimmer reports on a milestone in his life as a trademark lawyer:
"It was ten years ago this month that Adam Curry registered the domain name MTV.COM in his own name and all hell broke loose. My old firm represented MTV. I was thrown on the case because I was the only attorney who owned a modem (maybe 14.4 but I don't remember). I saw mtv.com the first time using a text-based browser called Lynx, downloaded from my then-ISP (Mindvox)." [via The Trademark Blog]
It's interesting that both Adam Curry and Marty Schwimmer wound up in the blogosphere, using the same blogging software. But there is a third person, not directly involved in the MTV dispute, who is also connected to this story.
Rick Klau was a law student at the University of Richmond, and started the first online law review in the country (which was a prescient move). One of the first articles in that online journal was about the MTV dispute, as is discussed in this interview that I did a while back with Rick (I had forgot about it until now, so this is the first publication of the interview). Read the part about the MTV dispute, and how much more timely the coverage of the MTV dispute was from an online law review.
So there you have a wonderful vignette: Marty (the lawyer whose computer skills were superior to his collegues') and Adam Curry (whose computer skills prompted him to harness the power of the web while working as a Veejay) and Rick Klau (who was driven to use the web's power to put legal information out in a more timely way) all pushed together. Years later, they all wound up with popular weblogs. Perhaps not really surprising, when you think about it. But still, somehow, amazing.
Yep, the web is a powerful publication medium. And, what's most amazing, is that we have only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible. Stay tuned Loyal Observers of Social Change, the best is yet to come.
