I, and all other right-thinking adults, consider Superman to be an inferior super hero precisely because he has too many powers. But, this morning I realized that for all his X-Ray vision and time-reversing flight velocity, there’s no reason to think that Superman would make a good speechwriter.

If I were Superman’s guidance counselor, here are careers I would steer him towards or away from, based on whether his powers give him any advantages

[Tags: superman]

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Google Calendar looks useful, but it doesn’t sync with Palm, so it is dead to me. With a commodity product such as a calendar, the nits are determinative. (BTW, syncing is not the same as importing and exporting.) [Tags: google palm calendar]

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Ray Kurzweil, who has long pioneered technology for the visually disabled, has announced a highly portable device that combines a 5 megaxpixel camer and a PDA that lets you snap a picture of some text and have it read back to you. This particular piece of the singularity will be available this summer.

Very cool. [Tags: accessibility ray_kurzweil]

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Akismet’s spam fighting power has been getting raves from WordPress users, including the tuneful BradSucks and searchalicious John Battelle. Now it’s available to us Movable Type users. As soon as I get off this train, I’m going to give it a try… [Tags: akismet spam blogs]

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From the blog of Garth Turner, Canadian Member of Parliament’s blog:

“When my great grandfather Ebenezer Bodwell went to Ottawa in 1867 to be the MP for Oxford, he carried with him the trust of all constituents. He knew that once the election was over, they had no choice but to trust him, since Ottawa was a long ways by horse. He rode off to represent them, since they had no other voice. But here we are. Today the work of MPs and government is well understood by everyone. Media bathes us in information and there is almost nothing our political masters know before we do. We are informed, educated, involved – and wired. And yet we still have a 19th Century political system in place in which we vote for an MP, and with that vote surrender our ability to actually get the laws we want…

So, given the fact we are all involved, and getting more connected every day, why can’t we also have more influence over our own country?

(Thanks to Richard Hamilton for the link and the quote.) [Tags: politics government blogs garth_turner canada]

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If you want the scoop on the Phone Jammer Gate (ok, so it’s not going to catch on), take a look at Betsy Devine’s blog these days. For example, she surfaces a good question from John DiStaso… [Tags: politics betsy_devine john_distaso dirty_tricks bush]

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Allan Lichtman has extended his campaign for the Senate into MySpace. I appreciate his willingness to appear somewhat goofy. Seriously. MySpace hasn’t succeeded because it’s so damn dignified. (Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the pointer) [Tags: allan_lichtman politics myspace]

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Jay Rosen makes the case that Murray Waas of the National Journal is doing the job Bob Woodward got rich and famous doing — digging out the truth behind big stories — and that Woodward now is in fact part of the biggest story around these days: How the Bush administration played the press to get us to go to war. [Tags: jay_rosen murray_waas bob_woodward news media iraq bush]

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AdAge has run a guest column of mine trying to explain to marketers why they shouldn’t look at the blogosphere as a good place to “message” people. [Tags: marketing blogs]

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D-Lib Magazine has a special issue on digital libraries. I’ve just started reading it, but so far it’s fascinating. (Thanks to Kurt Starsinic for pointing it out.) [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous EverythingIsMiscellaneous libraries]

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