The Battery Flashlight: Pretty cool. I can’t think of another example of a product where the battery is actually part of the user interface.

“What is the level of technology that is required to make a foam stick?” — Wham-O Moves to America (The Daily Show)

How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? A great infographic showing how the digital distribution of music has sucked artists’ royalties almost completely dry. People have argued they were never healthy to begin with, but the difference here is major. The same is going to happen to every meatspace product that transitions to digital. The iPad isn’t going to save content royalties.

Dude with ridiculous business-card throwing skills. It’s good to know business cards still have a use. (via tan.gy)

If ever anyone had a look that screamed “potential air guitar champion”, it is Rob Weychert. Watch him tear it up in the 2010 Air Guitar World Championships. I am proud to say this man has slept on my couch.

When Mark Fletcher creates a product, it’s usually transformative and awesome. Bloglines, for instance, changed my life. SnapGroups, his latest project, just launched today. It’s too early to tell how successful it will be, but given who is behind it, it’s something to keep an eye on.

Gina makes a similar point to the one I made in this graph two months ago. Namely that the price/utility ratio of the iPad is simply too high at this point in time for many people (including me and apparently Gina); not including the esteemed Mr. Gruber, however, who stands resolutely willing to sell his left fireball for the chance to organize recipes on this thing (seriously Apple, how does USA Today get an iPad early and DF doesn’t?).

I love the MadLib style sign up screen for the newly announced VaultPress. Why? The main reason (among several) is that the line beginning with “I know you’re planning to charge about $30 a month for this” got me to *not* sign up. I love that they are not wasting my time signing me up for a service that I would never pay anywhere close to that price for. Kudos. Unless of course that’s just Automattic’s idea of cheekiness, in which case, it’s an atrocious sign-up screen.

What Aaron calls a “theory of change”, I’ve always just called “working backwards”, but I’ve used it successfully throughout my career starting some time in high school. I’ve never been big on five-year plans or anything like that; I just enjoy envisioning a positive outcome sometime in the future and working out the steps, backwards, to get there.

“A few days later, Chen sent an explosive e-mail to Hurley and Karim saying: “Jawad, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site, because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.””

I’ve always thought that the creation, growth, and ultimate sale of YouTube was one of the greatest, yet most diabolical, balancing acts of all time. Newly revealed e-mails from YouTube’s founders not only confirm this, but also point out one of my favorite advantages startups have over established companies: a reckless disregard for just about everything that gets in their way.