Maple Village is a veritable beehive of activity lately. A month or two ago, businesses started moving out of the wing which used to house The Village Theatre. • Radio Shack moved out into a satellite building in the parking lot, as did Sofia's Tailoring. • Panda House moved down into the crook of the L, into a space that used to have some kind of gaming store in it. We are more-frequent-than-we-should-be patrons (love that fried rice) and have been down to the new location a few times now. The new digs are nice, with the take-out and sit-down a little more integrated. There's a nice fountain in the waiting area now, too. • The big project is what's going ...

Second Life Finally gave it a try. I've called myself Mitten Beaumont, which seems like a porn name to me, but best as I can tell that's appropriate to the content. I didn't find adjusting my appearance too hard to do (I now have a grass shirt with flared cuffs), but as a newbie with no experience and no one sitting over my shoulder telling me where to go, moving around and visiting places was completely unintuitive and totally unproductive. I still have yet to find much of anything but porn, even when I tried to search for popular places and newbie places. I'm amused with the weird 'sitting' functions that let you strike a sunbathing pose or kissy pose, but beyond ...

Not as manicured as Santa Anita, but full of history and incredibly friendly people, not to mention some gorgeous horses. Sport of kings indeed!

Much talk from the Twitterati about Pownce, a similar but distinctly different new networking tool. In my brief history of usage, it hasn't really impressed me (although it has impressed some). I can send files to my friends, which is kind of fun, and probably very useful for physically scattered business associates. (Think Basecamp Lite.) And I can create groups of friends so that, for example, I can send a message about meeting up for a beer to just my local friends instead of my broader e-social-circle. But Twitter is still more fun to me; I love the 140 character constraint and the kinds of posts that constraint creates. Add the ability to send/get messages ...

So I ran across Viddler today, following brianshaler's tweet. I'm blown away by their commenting mechanism: you can put comments right on the timeline! So as you watch, you can see other people's reactions to specific parts of the video. It's like Flickr's Notes, but with a time element. You can also tag videos in a similar way. And you can make video comments. I think it's damn slick. Here's the video that brianshaler referred to. It's a contest to win an iPhone.