For the geekier among us, you should know that my good friend Bob Parks has written a book, Makers: All Kinds of People Making Amazing Things In Their Backyard, Basement or Garage (Amazon link).

Makers features technologies old and new used in service of the serious and the amusing, the practical and the outrageous. The makers profiled are driven by a combination of curiosity, passion and plain old stick-to-itiveness to create the unique and astonishing. Most are simply hobbyists who’ll never gain notoriety for their work, but that’s not what motivates them to tinker.

The book is published by O’Reilly, publishers of Make magazine, which is also pretty great. This is a perfect example of a publisher that really celebrates its audience. Tim O’Reilly is a smart guy, one of the smartest in the techie space.

But let’s get back to Bob. Bob lives in Vermont with his family. He just sent me this photo of him and his daughter Lucy, which inspired me to post. Maybe we start ‘Cute Attack’ Mondays?

Or at least 4500 members of the media are.

For the record, I don’t plan to milk this “Smith” name thing forever. Sure, it’s named after me, but, you know, not really—it’s named after the 3 million people in America named Smith (at last count). Luckily, at least 4500 of them work in the media. With that in mind, last week I BCCB’ed (blind card copy blasted) them all with the header: “From one Smith…” and announcing that January 6 was National Smith Day and here comes SMITH magazine and isn’t it all newsworthy? The return was approximately 100 replies, most of whom got a huge kick out of the whole thing and a big bunch who checked out the site and liked what they read. There were a few “Is this a joke” messages (reply: I am real. National Smith Day is Real. Smithmag.us is real), a handful of radio and print interviews (which makes me an expert on …. Smith), and a couple of confused and/or annoyed Smiths. Those are always the most fun. (more…)

Salon.com Broadsheet

Salon contributor Larry Smith has launched a new online “blog-a-zine” titled — appropriately enough — Smith. Its most arresting feature so far is the gallery of 16 images of “Beautiful Pregnant Women.” The first batch of photos, taken by Jennifer Maya Luz Pliego, are super-arty and gorgeous.

Viva la Smith!

… a new online magazine dedicated to covering and celebrating personal stories. It’s all about elevating the collective narrative that’s been enabled in no small way by–yes I’m going to say it–the information technology revolution. The title is, appropriately, Smith. It look really great!

True Cost of War

GNN contributor Paul Rieckhoff is interviewed by the hot new Smith magazine. (I didn’t tell you, but there’s a beautiful spread of naked pregnant women)

Attention All Smiths, Today’s Your Day

… It also honors another Smith — Jedediah Smith — who was born Jan. 6, 1798, and became a well-known explorer and mountain man in the American West, according to Larry Smith, founder and editor-in-chief of Smith magazine in New York. … “A lot of people don’t know about National Smith Day,” Larry Smith said. …

Hello, my name is Smith.

And with the launch of this blog-a-zine, SMITH magazine’s small and scrappy team enters into the public part of what’s been until now a private obsession to start a magazine celebrating the explosion of personal media and the personal stories that celebrate the brilliance in the ordinary — brilliance that is now available in every form ever imagined. Here’s a letter I wrote about what we’re about, some version of which I figure will end up in our debut print issue, which we hope will be out the first half of 2006.

Why launch today? It is, of course, National Smith Day, the details of which can be found here.

SMITH magazine has been germinating, marinating and ruminating in my world for more than three years now. The concept remains largely the same as it was when Robert Priest turned our Word files into works of magazine prototype art in early 2003: the explosion in technology has fueled a golden age of storytelling, from blogs to iTunes flirting to movies on cameraphones to every other form of storytelling under the sun. For three years I’ve been running from publishing house to publishing house telling this story. (more…)

Woman marries dolphin

Sharon Tendler met Cindy 15 years ago. She said it was love at first sight. This week she finally took the plunge and proposed. The lucky “guy” plunged right back.

In a modest ceremony at Dolphin Reef in the southern Israeli port of Eilat, Tendler, a 41-year-old British citizen, apparently became the world’s first person to “marry” a dolphin.

(more…)

I hope we can use this blog to flesh out what SMITH magazine is really about — through posts and musings and links. Here’s one I just found today, and if there’s a more “SMITH” film out there, let me know. I’d like to see it.

The Grace Lee Project
When Korean American filmmaker Grace Lee was growing up in Missouri, she was the only Grace Lee she knew. Once she left the Midwest however, everyone she met seemed to know “another Grace Lee.” But why did they assume that all Grace Lees were reserved, dutiful, piano-playing overachievers? The filmmaker plunges into a funny, highly unscientific investigation into all those Grace Lees who break the mold — from a fiery social activist to a rebel who tried to burn down her high school. With wit and charm, THE GRACE LEE PROJECT puts a hilarious spin on the eternal question, “What’s in a name?”