I’ve been a fan of Kevin Kelly’s work from the Co-Evolution Quarterly days through the Louis Rossetto days at WIRED (when it still had an edge- I read the first issue and immediately took out the longest subscription offered). I still have copies of SIGNAL on my shelf (which, among other things, introduced me to the work of Steven Roberts, recumbent bicycling (real, not stationary bikes) and the concept of connected nomadics. Kevin also wrote what I considered to be the best non-fiction book of the 1990’s, Out of Control (not to be confused with the book of the same name written by G. Gordon Liddy). It was a huge influence on my thinking, though some of the lessons I took from it may not have been exactly those intended.
Anyway, one of Kevin Kelly’s current on-going projects is Cool Tools, which is a web site, a mailing list, and a book, and probably other things I’m not aware of, but at least greatly entertaining and often useful in all forms. I subscribed to the mailing list as soon as it started, and while the quality has varied somewhat and there have been times when I felt that it wandered too far into non-utilitarian (non-useful) selections, I’ve never been tempted to un-subscribe, and I’ve learned of a great many useful things from it that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.
I’ve even submitted a few myself, years ago. They never used any of my submissions, and probably rightly so. I tend to focus on what I consider most important, which tends to be somehow survival-related, and the problem with things like that is that I can hardly say “I use this every day, I’ve used other variants, and I consider this the best”. I’m a programmer, after all, not a safari guide or search-and-rescue, the point is I don’t use this stuff regularly, so I need to make very careful choices without relying on my own experience alone.
In any case, I consider it a very valuable resource.
– Robert the Wombat