It's Steve (now in blog form)

I filmed this happy river otter in Stockholm. Not much else to say about this one.

Happy Swedish River Otter

While I was in Stockholm I saw something amazing enough to warrant it’s own post.  Built in the mid-17th century, the Vasa was one of the largest sailing ships of it’s day.  Nearly 70 meters long, it had three gun decks and would have been a powerful lever for the Swedish in their long war against Poland.

Unfortunately, ship design was far from scientific in that era.  As the tallest ship attempted by Swedish shipwrights, they underestimated how top heavy it would be.  Fully laden with cannon, dignitaries, and women and children, it foundered only minutes after first deploying it’s sails.  It took on water and sank in one piece in 150 feet of water.

Here’s where it gets really cool.  In the late 1960′s a hobbyist decided to find the shipwreck.  This mainly involved dropping a sharpened pipe on a line over the side of his rowboat and seeing if it reeled in with any wood in the pipe.  After a few years the lucky Swede found it.  A massive salvage effort was undertaken which was successful in raising the Vasa intact.  It was pumped out and managed to float to the docks on it’s own keel after 333 years under the sea.

The Vasa museum is really amazing.  The ship is housed in such a way that you can get to every angle from below the keel to above the rigging.  On entering, you can’t help but be struck by how enormous these ships are.  I’ve been a fan of naval technology for a long time, but I don’t know that I’ve ever grasped how immense they really were.  It certainly makes a lot more sense how meso-american civilizations would assume they brought gods ashore.

The other amazing bit is how perfectly it was preserved.  The northern seas aren’t salty enough to support the types of ocean parasites than normally consume wooden shipwrecks.  This isn’t just a skeleton; even the ornate decorative carvings and the canvas sails survived.

Check out the pics. They are really amazing.  This definitely made up for the lack of the aurora borealis on this trip.

I’m on the long flight back from my Nordic wanderings and thought I’d put down a few fun bits for you all.  I didn’t get to see the Northern Lights unfortunately, the timing was just all wrong on this field trip. But I did end up going to Helsinki and Stockholm.  That was a super cool expedition.  Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of my field trip.

Reindeer are delicious- One of my goals on this trip was to pet a reindeer and then eat one.  It turns out that it’s way easier to eat one than find one to pet (Sure, they sell full reindeer pelts in the airport, but they’re not quite so cute when they’re dead).  Anyway, the restaurant we went to for reindeer was amazing.  Here are a few of the highlights.

These are onions flavored with tar. Yup, tar. Finnish cuisine seems to be mostly based on a dare.

This dish was aptly named “Hungry like the wolf”. Reindeer and moose meat abounded.

I met a Laplander

Windmills are cooler than I’d thought-  This is a Swedish windmill.  Check out the long stick out the back.  That’s a lever that let’s a couple of Swedes lift and rotate the entire structure when the wind shifts.  How cool is that?  Of course, it all comes in one box with a single hex wrench…

So, you come here often?- Icebreakers are neat.

Scandinavians have awesome signs- I imagine the months without any hint of the sun give you lots of time to label things thoroughly.

The Swedes have a nipple graveyard-  Like the majestic elephants wandering off to their mythic graveyard, Swedish nipples seem to have a mass grave of their own.  At first I thought this was just bright ribbon decorating the children’s petting zoo.  Nope, just a few thousand nipples strung together in a display that was simultaneously beautiful and filthy (sort of like Pamela Anderson).

Because Sweden isn’t cold enough for the Swedes- You would think living near the Arctic Circle would get you your fill of cold.  No, sir, not for our friends in Stockholm.  They’ve made a bar entirely out of ice.  And when I say bar, I mean the bar, the walls, the furniture, the glasses, everything.  The vodka was about the only thing not made of ice.  Did I mention we were drinking? We were drinking. Not that you could ever tell from these pics.

This pig has an unnecessary rectum- I’m all for realism in my sculpture, but geez.  This is from the Stockholm children’s zoo.  They grow up so fast in the north.

It make sense the rest of the world hates us- I completely get it why much of the world hates us.  If we’re going to try so hard to export our culture, shouldn’t we make sure it isn’t stupid first?

The unassisted poop- One of my fellow travelers (I won’t name names but his pic is right here) was having some troubles a few days into the trip moving things along, so to speak.  We believe it was a result of the reindeer.  Anyway, we visited the pharmacy to see if they had anything appropriate to help expedite things.  As I was getting into position to get a good pic of John looking highly uncomfortable I caught the greatest line of the whole field trip: “No, I want something that goes in my MOUTH!“  Thanks, sort-of-pretty-Swedish-pharmacist.  His reaction to your enema suggestion made my week.

I’m working on a bit of an odd project and could use some help.  If you have pictures you’ve taken of people of stairs please send them around.  I’m not sure exactly how to explain what I’m looking for so just send whatever you’ve got.  Thanks.

I don’t usually talk about work on here, but some of you who aren’t in the MySpace product group have been asking for an explanation of the bookstore problem.  I figured it’s something I’ve talked about with the press so it’s fair game.

One of the key concepts that makes MySpace work is social discovery.  It’s pretty gnarly in practice but sums up nicely as the bookstore problem.  When I go to Borders, there are 50,000 books on the shelves.  But they are effectively useless to me because I don’t know what I want to read.  Borders may have great search, but search only really serves as a laser beam to find the thing I already want.  I can’t ask a search engine to show me something I’ll like.  Humans are very good at that sort of question.  Machines are not.

It’s a more likely that I’ll find something good to read by going to my buddy’s house.  He only has 10 books on the shelf but he can tell me which three I’ll like.  That’s social discovery.

This is reflective of a larger trend we’re seeing on the web today.  Not that far back, our content experience was driven largely by 100 editors sitting at Yahoo.  Then Web 2.0 came along and brought a blossoming of user generated content.  Now we’re up to our ears in user generated content.  Rather than search as the primary mechanism for parsing the vastness of the web, we’re shifting to a model of user edited content.

User edited content is just like my buddy’s bookshelf.  My connection with him allows me to deal with the manageable subset of the data that he has already vouched for.  He is my content editor, not because he was selected by some company, but because I find his tastes to be resonant with my own.  And, through my friend, I’m likely to discover things I’ll love that I wasn’t even looking for.  This sort of serendipity in a social context is exactly the sort of behavior that makes a more social web really interesting.

Now here’s a picture of me kissing a moose.

It’s 2:45 AM in London. And, while I should really be headed to bed, this post just can’t wait.  A few hours and many pints ago, I had a very lovely dinner at an upscale Chinese restaurant named China Tang.  This is interesting on two fronts.  First, I liberated a hand towel from from the restroom that says “Kiss Me I’m Chinese”.  Secondly, Kevin Spacey was having dinner at the restaurant in a private room.

Here’s the fun part.  I didn’t actually see him in the restaurant.  I did, however, run into him on our way out.  He was outside by himself having a cigarette.  I didn’t want to be the obnoxious American and ask to get a photo with him.  Instead I asked him to take a photo of me and my friends.

I’m proud to present you a photo of me taken by Kevin Spacey.

Ok, now I’m going to bed.