Nicholas Francisco, an old acquaintance from web design circles and forums like Dreamless has been missing in the Seattle area since Wednesday. Have you seen him?

• info from livejounal community
• Seattle Times: SeaTac man’s name entered in U.S. missing-person database
• KOMO-TV news video

The NHL season is now in full swing — and though the ride has been a little bumpy the new season has brought some new or upgraded hockey web sites and game coverage.

• MSG online has beefed up its online coverage including their Game On blog with postings by on air personalities like Stan Fischler and Deb Kaufman, as well as regular video clips from post game interviews and other coverage that doesn’t make it on the air.
• NY Post Rangers blog, from the Daily News there’s John Dellapina’s Blog and from the Journal News there’s Sam Weinman and Josh Thomson’s blog.
• Joe McDonald and the rest of the writers at New York Sports Day continue their great local hockey coverage. They also host a couple other great blogs like My Blueshirt Heaven.
• Hockeybird forums are dead, long live Rangerland. The long time favorite home to Rangers fans has closed in the offseason and many of the regulars have set up shop at Rangerland which had opened last season

Did I miss anything? Post your favorites in the comments.

Things are getting a little old and dusty around here as a result of me being quite busy with work as well as contributing more elsewhere on sites like flickr, ma.gnolia and newsvine.

To honor its crusty-ness I’ve aged the site’s color palette some, like a fine, aged, um, newspaper? Enjoy.

Aside from the typical case of the blues that follows a few days without sun I wasn’t hit by the flooding rains the latest storms in the area. But many areas around me were, and new style media and news site launched a few months ago by some staff members at the Star-Ledger, TV Jersey has gathered up a number of videos [mostly from youtube ] from flooded areas around the state.

• Flooding in Manville
• Flooding in Bound Brook
• Flooding in Lodi
• Flooding Time-Lapse
• Nor’easter Blazes

As for TV Jersey, while the site isn’t tying to do much or be real busy, it often touches on local sports clips and other events that might not get attention elsewhere. In doing so makes an interesting case study on how to gather the news when there are so many different people capturing it.

I’m pleased to announce the release of my latest little hack for adding microformats support to NetNewsWire (not lite)—Extract Microformats v0.5.

This little script is actually a combination of theme files (css) and applescript to bring a bookmarklet like option that uses Technorati’s microformat services to save hCard or hCalendar data found in the content of feed items. After installation (just copying some files) saving events or contact data is as easy as 1, 2, 3… er… 4.

1 – Find an item with microformat content. Here I’m using a feed from Eventful with items containing events with embedded contact data.

2 – Activate the script

3 – Select what to do with the data

4 – Copy the saved data to your favorite app

A week or two ago I posted some comments about working with CakePHP for an upcoming project. Well, I’m happy to announce that that project—Place Name Where?—is up.

Place Name Where? is a personal information aggregator that tries to reverse the trend of decentralized content contributions that seems to be one of the core features of “Web 2.0” sites.

Web 2.0 is great, but at a certain point one can feel too distributed. You’ve got news stories here, pictures of your pet dust bunnies over there, and in the cellar you keep your favorite wines. Each service is kind enough to provide ways to include the content you added to their site back into your own site, but typically this is limited to a presentation that doesn’t go further then “hey, look at the last 10 things I did on this other site”.

The site works by regularly grabbing several feeds associated with my accounts on the selected services and then permanently storing a copy of the data on my end. Once I’m free of the restrictions of RSS feeds, APIs or JavaScript embedding techniques I can build much more elaborate views on the data like displaying recent activity across all services or looking up all things tagged with nhl regardless of the type of thing it is. I dubbed it a “Web of Web Things” after the discussions of similar tagging and aggregation of real world Web, or Internet of Things (call them spimes, blogjects, or whatever you’d like) by Bruce Sterling, Adam Greenfield, and others.

This aggregator isn’t intended to be a stand alone site forever—though it does work fairly well as such. I need to find some time to spend working on design and integration issues, but I hope it won’t be too long until the ideas behind Place Name Where? are integrated into this site and appear both in place of the current “link” lists as well as integrated into tag lookups and maybe search results.