Best things I’ve seen lately?

• A wake-up call for geeks who have been neglecting the legislative initiatives that will affect all of us in the future.
• The latest rant against betas, which I only agree with insofar as the term “beta” has become meaningless for those of us who might want to actually make use of the term for our products.
• A consistent set of POP failures in Gmail, which have gone remarkably unreported.
• Flickr proving themselves, once again, the best lemonade-makers in the business. They’ve made “please try again later” seem downright friendly.
• I’ll link to it again: KartMatch, the tracking app for Mario Kart DS friend codes. It’s the first Ning app useful enough to make me lament the service’s downtime.
• Dahlia Lithwick, the best legal writer who writes for laymen, explains why following the law is a good thing, for those who’ve forgotten.
• The NY Times explains the tyranny of cute, an effect we probably already would have known if we could watch TypePad’s server logs since the launch of Cute Overload.
• Just for myself, the post I wrote on the company website about Fortune 500 companies using Six Apart tools. There’s actually at least a dozen more that aren’t listed, but I always forget most people don’t know about these.
• And finally, Fark Photoshop Monitor. It’s a trap!

More to come later, including (hopefully) a wrapup of my trip to Taiwan.