David Eggers can now add time travel entrepreneur to his long list of literary and social accomplishments thanks to the Eco Park Time Travel Mart he recently opened in LA. Some of the humorous products available for purchase include: mammoth chunks, barbarian repellent, packets of shade and anti-robot fluid. More info after the break.

As with the other novelty stores in Eggers stable, the time travel mart will be used to support his non-profit 826 chain of tutoring and writing centers. If I lived in LA, I know that I would be a generous supporter. After all, how many places can you say “I want that yesterday” and get your wish? [Product Catalog and 826LA via io9 via Boing Boing Gadgets]

It’s Friday, people! Let’s celebrate with a look back at this week’s most popular posts:

• Top 10 DIY Car Hacks
  “Today we’ve rounded up 10 of our favorite car-related tips and tricks that work whether you’re at one with your engine or regard your ride as a mysterious four-wheel transporter.”
• Give an Old Laptop New Life with Cheap (or Free) Projects
  “Like a famed race horse or a classic book, you don’t just throw away a laptop because it’s banged up a little.”
• Coolest Cubicle Contest, Part the First
  “…today we’re kicking off our first Coolest Cubicle Contest, with $500 to Amazon at stake.”
• Dock Your Old Drives with the Hard Drive USB Dock
  “Dock any internal SATA hard drive in this USB dock to turn any internal drive into an external drive on-the-quick.”
• Manage Your Online Reputation
  “Are you happy with the results people get back when they Google your name?”
• Browse and Play Your Ripped DVDs with DVD Play
  “Browse and play the DVDs you’ve ripped to your hard drive with freeware application DVD Play.”
• Increase Your Morning Productivity with the 10 O’Clock Rule
  “…weblog LifeClever suggests de-stressing your mornings and getting more done by setting your watch to beep every night at 10 o’clock (or whatever time works for you), then getting started preparing for tomorrow.”
• Get Mac-Like Window Tabs in Windows with Nubs
  “…free Windows utility Nubs allows you to hide your inactive windows to the sides of your desktop using stylish, theme-able tabs.”

Firefox with Greasemonkey: The YouTube Lyrics Greasemonkey script adds a lyrics box to the YouTube sidebar perfect for following along with the lyrics on the wealth of music videos available on YouTube. The search is automatic when you hit the Lyrics link, and it can search several lyrics services for the song. The script will, obviously, work best when the artist and song title are part of the YouTube clip’s title. YouTube Lyrics is free, works wherever Greasemonkey does.

These Mobius Climbers are super-sweet playground equipment inspired by mobius strips, bending and curving all over the place with grips and bars for climbing. It’s the type of thing I would have killed to play on as a kid but would be forbidden to by my reasonable parents, who would see these things for what they are: high-concept kid manglers, inviting slippery-fingered first graders to take a head-first spill into a piece of sheet metal with grips protruding from its concave surface. Awesome. [Product Page via Neatorama and BornRich]

Jason Alba, author of I’m on LinkedIn — Now What?, gives Wired’s How-To Wiki advice on how to use LinkedIn for something other than esteem-boosting connection counting. One of the keys is stepping away from the monitor if you want to make contact with somebody in a contact’s network—in other words, use that old-fashioned phone to get ahead.

… LinkedIn “isn’t the place to nurture a relationship. It’s a place to find and be found. But once you find them, go outside the system.” Meet up in person to complain about coworkers … and you build face-to-face relationships that are stronger than any virtual connection.

Sound advice—no editor I know is going to hire a writer based on how great their online profile looks, and other businesses likewise still thrive on face time. Have any of our readers gained real, solid business advantages from LinkedIn or other social networks? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Get Ahead on LInkedIn [Wired How-To Wiki]

Who owns your friends (or rather the list of who your friends are and how they are connected to you) has been a big source of debate in the social networking world. Control over that data is what makes social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn so potentially valuable. Yet there has also been a movement afoot towards letting people take their friends with them, if you will, to other sites. In an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web takes social networks to task for hoarding data. The interview, conducted by Paul Miller, focuses mostly on the Semantic Web, which to Berners-Lee is all about linked data.

The interview is long and has everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about the Semantic Web (a set of evolving technologies to make the Web more readable by computers). But about 42 minutes into the interview (transcript here), is one of the most interesting parts. Berners-Lee says data on the Web is the new links, and Websites should stop keeping it to themselves:

I think, it is a very grown-up thing to realize that you are not the only social networking site… otherwise it is like a website which doesn’t have any links out. In the Semantic Web similarly, if you don’t have any links out, well, that’s boring.

In fact, a lot of the value of many websites is the links out.

Now if you look at the social networking sites which, if you like, are traditional Web 2.0 social networking sites, they hoard this data. The business model appears to be, “We get the users to give us data and we reuse it to our benefit. We get the extra value.”

So, first of all, are they going to let people use the data? I think, the push now, as we’ve seen during the last year, has been unbearable pressure from users to say, “Look, I have told you who my friends are. You are the third site I’ve told who my friends are. Now, I’m going to a travel site and now I’m going to a photo site and now I’m going to a t-shirt site. Hello? You guys should all know who my friends are.” . . . So, the users are saying, “Give me my data back. That’s my data.”

Of course, social networks are already moving in this direction. Last month, everyone from Google to Facebook pledged to work towards this and similar goals by joining the Data Portability Workgroup. And earlier this month, Google took a more concrete step by announcing that it would adopt certain standards in OpenSocial to give developers access to that coveted social graph (the map of connections between friends). The standards are called Friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) and XHTML Friends Network (XFN). And these are some of the same standards Berners-Lee is talking about.

It is one thing to join an industry workgroup, and another to actually implement some of these standards. More people like Sir Tim need to keep nudging the social networks and sites in general in this direction. Remember: data is the new links. Sites that don’t give it out won’t get any back, and eventually may disappear from view.

Although choice is generally seen as a positive thing, the New York Times examines how and why closing a few doors can help you take major steps toward moving forward with projects and getting things done. The article begins with a look at a third century B.C. Chinese general named Xiang Yu, who burned his troops’ ships and destroyed much of their means of survival on arriving in enemy territory.

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

According to researchers at MIT, “closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss”—even when that means keeping that door open is ultimately to your detriment. By allowing doors to close, your focus can more keenly home in on the tasks at hand and improve your focus and drive toward achieving those tasks. If you’re a consummate ball-juggler, the article is a must-read. Once you do, let’s hear your thoughts on options for getting things done in the comments.

Few Doors [NYT]

Weblog Web Worker Daily sits down with Getting Things Done author and productivity evangelist David Allen to discuss his upcoming book and how GTD is more than just lists. To Allen, it’s about control:

If you walk into anywhere and want to get more control, all you really need to do is a version of collect. That is I need to sit down and just get everything that has my attention or the attention of everybody in the group I’m trying to get [in] control.

The new book, which Allen describes as “GTD on steroids,” provides a higher-level look at implementing GTD in your everyday life, which is what Allen focuses on in this interview. If you’ve given GTD a once-over but have had trouble seeing the forest for the trees (or the project for the lists, as it were), this interview may give you a better idea of how and why you might want to integrate GTD philosophies into more aspects of your life.

David Allen Part 3: Really Getting it Done is Not Just Lists [Web Worker Daily]

You know the media world has been turned upside down when Websites start buying magazines. Today, the Knot, which operates the wedding site of the same name, acquired The Bump, a group of local magazines and maternity guides in 11 cities. Terms were not disclosed.

In an effort to reduce the natural churn of its audience (who needs to check a wedding site after the big day is over?), the Knot created other bookend lifestyle sites?TheNest for newlyweds, and TheNestBaby for new parents. So what does a Website need magazines for? The Bump is distributed in OB/GYN offices and could help channel readers to TheNestBaby. The Knot can also use it to sell combined print/Web advertising packages.

It’s got to do something to drive traffic. TheNestBaby barely registers on comScore, with only 171,000 unique visitors in the U.S. in January, compared to the TheKnot’s 1.8 million (which itself shot up in January after a few months of decline). Maybe print isn’t dead after all. I wonder if we are going to see more Web-buy-print deals, especially in niche media.

Sneakers hanging from telephone lines has long been an iconic image of urban life—which is why it inspired designers Peter Pracilio and Oscar Lopez to develop this Shoe Chandelier. Why they chose to make a light out of it is unclear, but it has a very compelling weirdness about it. The good news is that all signs point to this design becoming a real world product (in both chandelier and tabletop versions) sometime in the near future. Additional pic after the break.

[DesignGo and The World’s Best Ever]