The Telephone EXchange Name Project came to my attention this morning. It offers a database of the old two-letter abbreviations that used to precede five-digit phone numbers, before seven-digit (and now 10-digit) dialing became the norm. So if you weren't using your current phone number back in the early 1960s -- in which case you'd already know this -- you can find out what your exchange letters were, and what word they stood for.

Toyota's announcement that they're testing plug-in hybrid cars (see NYT, Jalopnik for details) is great -- if for no other reason than it holds GM's feet to the fire on the Volt project.

Jeff Jarvis, posting at both PresVid and his own BuzzMachine, has some interesting thoughts on the CNN-YouTube presidential debates. My favorite quote:

...the YouTube debates are a crack in the wall of control of elections, politics, and media. Bring your chisels.

Occasionally -- OK, roughly once a week -- I tell Tracy that I'm going to get a studio apartment. Or build a garage so I can go hide there.

Not permanently or anything. I like our house, I love my wife and kids, and I usually enjoy having the dog and cats around. But there are times when a mancave sounds really good.

As noted a week or so ago, I've been playing with Twitter and trying to see if it's actually useful for someone who doesn't live via mobile-phone text messages OR feel the compulsive need to microblog. For me, at least, the answer was "not yet" -- since there was no way to prioritize different feeds, or effectively "mute" those that you don't want to hear from 24/7.

New America's Climate Policy Program just rolled out an online version of its "Building Blocks" for state and regional governments that have tired of waiting for national-level action and want to start curbing greenhouse gases themselves. It's interesting stuff, and the bottom-up approach is more practical and market-friendly than it sounds.

I'm in the process of reviewing Tarleton Gillespie's Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture, which (so far) is a very smart look at an issue that's of great personal and professional interest to me. So rather than just scribble in the margins, I thought I'd drop random questions, observations and interesting factoids here as I work my way through the book.

I would say this is the first of many posts in a series, but hopefully there won't be too many -- the review itself is due soon...

On Friday, VentureBeat's Dan Kaplan wrote about PoliticalTrends.info -- a site that mines web data "to track political buzz in the blogosphere." It got me thinking about a rather unfortunate reality -- at least from the perspective of political junkies and would-be web moguls: Like newly launched restaurants, nearly all big-time political web ventures are doomed to fail.

In the always-be-nice-to-your-inlaws department: Be sure to check out WashingtonPost.com's new blog on small business, authored by Sharon McLoone.

I've been playing with Twitter for the past couple weeks, to see for myself whether it is: a) the latest Web 2.0 fad; b) a truly cool new tool; or c) another harbinger of the collapse of modern civilization.