Thanks, but no thanks.

It's that time of year again. Time for a big ol' honkin' waste of space to show up on everyone's doorstep. No, not your brother-in-law, I'm talking about the Yellow Pages! You know, that anachronistic directory of ads and other information that's available pretty much everywhere else:

Phone: Dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (Please put this in your cell phone. Seriously. Don't call directory assistance via your carrier again. You're still doing that?)

Online: Yellowbook.com, Dexknows.com, Google, Yelp!, etc. etc.

Because we're a small shop and typically work digitally, we've really made a conscious effort to eliminate as much paper processes from our daily lives as possible. We pay our taxes online, we pay our utilities online or use auto-pay, our invoices are emailed PDFs, we direct deposit our paychecks, when you fax us something, we get an email with an attachment. I think we maybe pay two regular bills by physical check.

Karen was recently the recipient of so many copies of yellow and white pages, she thought her new neighbors were hazing her. Just yesterday we refused delivery of the books from the guy making the rounds in our building. Outside his van sat with the rear bumper nearly sagging to the ground, overloaded with dead trees. That seems like a good use of resources, eh?

So do yourself a favor. Opt out of the madness at Yellow Pages Goes Green, "an organization working to educate consumers and promote the green movement to eliminate the unsolicited delivery of Yellow and White Pages books."

The last useful thing the Yellow Pages book did for me was give my son a boost so he could play a Sesame Street game on the computer.
 

Bites.

We experiment (okay, play) with all sorts of cool toys on the web. Some even make us mad for not inventing them first.

One service I've been playing around with lately is bit.ly. Bit.ly is "a simple url shortener."

So it turns this: http://www.elementcreative.com/pov/2009/01/bites.php

into this: http://bit.ly/giDN

Probably one of the first (if not the first) of this type of service was tinyurl.com, but since then, all sorts have popped up, a by-product of dealing with all those computer-generated, CMS-driven, unique-tracking URLs that have inundated our lives and emails and tweets and Facebook statuses. Bit.ly is a bit different, though. It has a really nice, simple API that lets you programmatically shorten URLs, letting you dynamically generate short, human-friendly links within your web application. And because you sign up for an account on bit.ly, it'll also keep track of the URLs you've shortened with it.

There's some nice browser bookmarklet tools that make it easy to quickly turn that 5-mile long New York Times link into something that won't break in your uncle's email client, as well as a relatively new feature that rolls your bit.ly history into an RSS feed. Good stuff.

The blowfish mascot is cool, too.