A not-so-helpful phrasebook
A not-so-helpful phrasebook. “Si vous allez aux Etats-Unis, vous trouverez que dix cents c’est beaucoup de fric.”
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Entries for April 2004
Directional intelligence
I’m one of those people that can’t tell their left from their right. Well, it’s not that I can’t, it’s just that I have to think about my left hand making an “L” shape (“L” for left) and then I’m ok. Same with geographical directions, only worse. In my brain, the concept of west is tied to the concept of left, so in order to orient myself on a map or in a physical location, I need to point myself north, think of my left (for “L”) hand, associate left with west, and then east must be the opposite way. How I developed this Rube Goldbergian mechanism for wayfinding, I don’t know, but it’s the best I have.
A recent visit with my mom suggests that I may have inherited my directional difficulties from her. I certainly didn’t get it from my dad. He could find due north with his eyes closed. As an IFR-trained pilot, he probably had to. When I was younger, he’d give me directions like, “head north for two miles, turn right at the red barn, veer southwest at the V in the road, and then turn right onto County Road D. It’ll be on the east side of the road.” I’d blink at him and then retrieve a scrap of paper to translate what he’d said into a consistent terminology (either L/R or NS/EW) and make a map that I could follow. I have accepted that I will never be any good with directions and compensate for my weakness with preparation (I always know where I’m going and how I’m going to get there and if I don’t, I stop and think about until I do or let someone else lead the way) and repetition (the concept of “left” is almost natural now). But I still get burned occasionally and it can be frustrating.
Is anyone else out there directionally challenged?
The Internet responds to cheese-cutting lasers
The Internet responds to cheese-cutting lasers. “Dont we have a war going on somewhere and they are slicing cheese”
An open letter to Flip Saunders
Dear Flip Saunders,
First, congratulations on your Minnesota Timberwolves capturing the #1 seed for the playoffs in the Western Conference. I have been a fan for many years, and for the first time, I feel good about the team you have assembled and have high hopes for this postseason.
But we need to talk about Wally Szczerbiak. You’ve got to get rid of him. Can’t you see that when he’s in the game, he makes the whole team worse? No one wants to pass to him because he’s a black hole; the ball goes in and never comes back out. It disrupts the whole offense. All he wants to do is shoot, shoot, shoot. He’s a good individual talent, but doesn’t play within the offense at all. Please trade him and get someone who’s less selfish and can play some defense.
Fondly,
-jason
A grand day out with Quentin Tarantino
A grand day out with Quentin Tarantino. I didn’t know you could have fun at Crate and Barrel.
What to do when your spouse’s deployment
What to do when your spouse’s deployment in Iraq is extended.
Tutorial: make your own AIM/MSN chat bot with Perl
Tutorial: make your own AIM/MSN chat bot with Perl.
This NYTimes profile of Wonkette makes me
This NYTimes profile of Wonkette makes me want to take a shower. “I think it’s implicit in the way that a Web site is produced that our standards of accuracy are lower.” Yuck.
PulpFiction (expect a letter from Miramax soon)
PulpFiction (expect a letter from Miramax soon) looks to do everything a modern newsreader should do. Love the filters. Every single app in the world should save all data it ever sees, data about that data, and have ways to filter and search it.
Send your postcard-sized artwork to the 10,000 Cards
Send your postcard-sized artwork to the 10,000 Cards project for inclusion in a massive collage. “It’s for an exhibition on the modern applications of art and the new society of a new generation of artists.”
The Amateur Gourmet is one man’s adventures (
The Amateur Gourmet is one man’s adventures (or hijinks, as the case may be) in the kitchen.
Indiana University prof takes a crack at Moneyballing the NBA
Indiana University prof takes a crack at Moneyballing the NBA. Top 5 players in NBA according to his stats are Hedo Turkoglu, Vince Carter, Kevin Garnett, Brad Miller, and Manu Ginobili.
Wired News report on Julian Dibbell’s success
Wired News report on Julian Dibbell’s success as a full-time virtual goods broker. In a year, he could make more selling Ultima Online gold pieces than a teacher or firefighter.
Google, Yahoo fight it out for ping and porn exit page supremacy! HOTTT!!
Rael recently noted a shift among Unix folk in pinging google.com instead of yahoo.com when checking for network availability:
It’s not, mind you, that yahoo.com has become unreachable or unstable; just the Google has so come to represent the very essence of stability and reachability that it’s made its way to our every ping.
While Google rules the ping space, Yahoo is still tops of the Web in terms of porn alternatives with a solid #1 ranking in a search for “exit” and a #1 ranking to Google’s #2 for “leave” (that is, when porn sites give you a chance to “exit” or “leave”, they’re still linking that word to Yahoo more often than Google).
AOL is moving from using their proprietary
AOL is moving from using their proprietary markup language to HTML.
A loud quiet launch
The first line of the news.com article on A9 says that “Amazon.com has quietly launched a test version of its long-awaited search engine” (emphasis mine). Curious. I wonder if news.com felt slighted at the way A9 chose to initially publicize the site, breaking the story via a weblog instead of a traditional media outlet (like, say, news.com) and the “quietly launched” is a displeased rejoinder to the strategy. Judging from the response so far (233 news stories on Google News, A9-related posts hold the top 3 spots on Blogdex, a very active thread on Battelle’s site, a post on Slashdot, an article at Search Engine Watch, and it hasn’t been 24 hours yet), the launch wasn’t that quiet.
A9
A9, a new search service from Amazon, has launched in beta. Amazon chose to break the story through John Battelle so that, in his words, “[the news would] move from the blogosphere out, as opposed the WSJ in”. Battelle’s got some good thoughts on it in his post. They’re using Google’s search results, display book search results alongside, have a search toolbar, keeps track of your past search results and what you’ve visited already, and more. Toolbar includes a diary feature with which you can annotate any Web page you visit (a la E-Quill). My first thought: how about some contrast? The cream background and gray text ain’t working for me.
A9 has a generic version of their search service that doesn’t track you via cookies or use your data in their analysis.
Steven has whipped up a Firefox search plugin for A9.
Erik Benson, an Amazon employee, has some thoughts on A9.
John Battelle’s interview with Udi Manber, head honcho at A9, is now up at Business 2.0 and he has more thoughts on A9 on his site, including:
As an aside, I have to say the idea of a complete, lifetime record of a person’s searches and browsing history - which by the way that person can edit - is an extraordinary concept. It’s taking the idea of the database of intentions to the utmost granular level of history - the individual. What, I wonder, happens to a person’s search history when they die? Do they have a right to own it? Does it get passed down as a keepsake to his or her children?
How to debate Creationists without being boring
How to debate Creationists without being boring. “God spoke to me and told me that you are wrong.”
NYU prof finds inverse relationship between a
NYU prof finds inverse relationship between a CEO’s personal use of the corporate jet and their company’s stock value. And it’s not a simple relationship…the stock value lost far exceeds the cost of the jet/fuel/etc.
Baseblogs, “baseball and blogging are a perfect match”
Baseblogs, “baseball and blogging are a perfect match”. Nice roundup of baseball blogs; Denton clearly missed this lucrative vertical.
I think we should probably stop calling it syndication
“Syndication” (via RSS and Atom) is about to hit the big time. It’s getting a lot of coverage in on/offline technical publications and will soon be covered in more mainstream glossy magazines and newspapers. Millions of people are now using RSS and Atom to syndicate their Web sites. Large media organizations like the BBC are syndicating their content via RSS. Amazon is syndicating lists of their bestselling items via RSS. Syndication is booming. Syndication is why RSS and Atom use is skyrocketing. Say it with me: syndication!
But is syndication really what everyone’s all excited about? I don’t believe so.
When the BBC (for example) provides content (headlines with story summaries, dates, and links back to full stories) for publication on other sites, that’s syndication. This is what’s happening with RSS on My Yahoo! and the purpose for which RSS was first developed at Netscape. Weather.com syndicates their five-day forecast (for a fee). Offline (where the syndication idea originated), United Media syndicates comics like Dilbert to hundreds of newspapers. Republishing is a distinguishing feature of syndication. When content is syndicated, the reader is getting the content from someone other than the producer. The BBC provides content to an online regional UK newspaper which is then read by that newspaper’s readers.
BBC content —> regional UK newspaper —> readers
But things have changed since Netscape introduced RSS. RSS and Atom feeds are now largely read directly by people with newsreaders. The BBC provides their content in RSS format, a reader accesses the file from the BBC’s server, and reads it.
BBC content —> readers
Hmm. So, people access documents written in a markup language that have been published on a Web server with a software application. If this seems familiar to you, it should. It’s called Web browsing and has nothing to do with syndication. RSS readers and newsreaders are just specialized Web browsers, nascent microcontent browsers if you will**.
If not syndication, then what makes RSS and Atom so compelling in comparison to plain old HTML pages? The data contained in an RSS/Atom file is more specialized and structured than in an HTML file***. An HTML page has a title, maybe a header, some paragraphs, and perhaps a couple of lists. That’s all a page can tell the browser about its information. When a newsreader loads an RSS file, it knows quite a bit more about the content contained therein. It knows the file contains 15 items (an item is typically a news story or weblog post) and each of those items has a title, a description, a link, maybe some categories, when the item was published, etc.
Using this information, the newsreader can then display the content in these files in various ways that are helpful to the reader. It can tell you at a glance that you have 68 unread news items; it can aggregate items from several RSS files into a new “feed” (perhaps a feed on biotech); it allows you to skim literally thousands of different items from hundreds of different sources sliced and diced in a myriad of ways. RSS and Atom treat the items contained within a file as first-class citizens.
So, that’s the big deal about RSS and Atom, not syndication (although RSS/Atom can be used for syndication). I figure that if we technologists, publishers, and journalists are going to get all excited about this stuff and evangelize it to others, we should make sure we know exactly what we’re so excited about.
**As an aside, what are now called RSS readers and newsreaders will eventually evolve into microcontent browsers (bad name for a good idea). I talked about such applications last year in relation to Safari and Sherlock:
A web browser is a tool for people to get information from the web. Much recent effort has gone into developing other interfaces through which to do just that. With Watson, Sherlock, and NetNewsWire, you “browse” the web for specific kinds of information with interfaces custom built for each task. Why the distinction between regular web browsing and web browsing using specialized interfaces for structured data?
With Amazon offering product information and the availability of other non-news information via RSS and Atom, the term newsreader is already a misnomer. When more people start publishing content that doesn’t fit the title/description/url format (recipes, movie reviews, photos, music playlists, etc.), “standard” formats will start to spring up (some have already) and the browsers will need to support them in some fashion. (This requires that the publishing tools support these new formats as well, which they eventually will. The whole ecosystem — readers, publishing software, publishers, browsers — will move along in fits and starts, just like it did with RSS.)
***This isn’t strictly true. Valid XHTML files are XML and there’s no reason why you can’t make an XHTML file that contains headlines, dates, and summaries and use them like people are using RSS/Atom files. Tantek and co. are discussing something similar with XOXO, using XHTML to “semantically [express] Outlines and Blogroll-like subscriptions in an XML format that is both renderable by browsers and parsable by strict xml engines”. But for now, let’s assume that RSS/Atom files are more specialized and structured than HTML/XHTML files, if only because of current convention.
Soldiers in Iraq taking advantage of global media distribution
Soldiers in Iraq taking advantage of global media distribution.
American Airlines gives customer data to other
American Airlines gives customer data to other companies without the customers’ permission. Guess who flew American in June 2002? Me! Yippee!
Record labels want to raise online mp3
Record labels want to raise online mp3 prices to $3 per song.
A Chinese edition of Lessig’s Free Culture is being organized.
A Chinese edition of Lessig’s Free Culture is being organized..
Bribing your way into some of New
Bribing your way into some of New York’s best and busiest restaurants.
How I stopped buying CDs and started loving music
How I stopped buying CDs and started loving music.
NYC locksmith says Google is his best source of customers
NYC locksmith says Google is his best source of customers. Yellow Pages are too expensive, he says.
The Memespread Project
The Memespread Project. An attempt to chart the spread of a meme (in this case, a single Web page) across the Web from a single source (this here remaindered link). Spread the meme by linking to it.
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