DefinitiveInk

An Emperor for a day

We are making some last minute donations for the year and found an interesting thing on the Doctors Without Borders donation page. Their "title" category extends way beyond the standard Mr., Mrs, Dr. to such things as Brigadier General, Deacon, and our favorite for the day, The Emperor and Empress of...

Links for December 30, 2005

TechCrunch's list of 2.0 companies he (Michael Arrington) couldn't live without. Pew study on Internet usage of men and women. (via HuffingtonPost.com Type in your zipcode + .com in a browser. Chances are it is being sat on by a company.

LibriVox - the people's Audible

LibriVox is a project in which people read and create audio files of books in the public domain. Sounds like a really nice project. TechCrunch)

Predicting the Future

I love this time of year for reading both top lists and predictions of the coming year. Fred Wilson has an excellent series of posts called Predicting the Future which has some great ideas and I expect most of them will be covered in some shape or form next year. It also links to Calcanis's predidictions who in turn links to Dave Winer, and Battelle. Start with Fred's...

Reading SEC filings on Google and AOL

PaidContent has a post about Google's right to sell their new stake in AOL in July of 2008. So does the NYT. The companies say this is standard language in such an agreement, I have no idea but think it is interesting nonetheless.

Semi-Daily Miscellany

David McCullough tours some of NYC Revolutionary War sites in the NYT.

"I was speaking in Vienna and then brought out one of the earliest
drawings ever made of New York," Mr. McCullough said. "It was some
houses and a dock for boats. And I looked at the drawing of that little
place and thought not just of the history that would take place there,
but of all the music that will be played there, the books that will be
written there, the poetry, drama and the architecture that will come
from there. There will be no city like it on earth."

Glass shape affects the size of drinks that get poured into them. Turns out that people put more whiskey into short glasses than tall ones.

Chris Anderson on "The Probabilistic Age" :

Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing?

A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.

Q: Huh?

Let him explain it in a fascinating post. (via Kottke)

Folio's 114 Magazine Industry Predictions

Folio's 114 Magazine Industry Predictions for 2006.

How to value a blog for purchase

I just downloaded and installed performancing's firefox editing extension and I'm using it for this post. In the about section for the extension I found this article about buying blogs and how to value them.

A list of best-of lists (via Rocketboom)

A fun experience watching Rocketboom while listening to the Mayor's droning press-conference about the end of the strike.  Aural multi-tasking in stereo.Now do your part to keep the city humming. Stop reading this and go shop!

The NYT transit strike stories use a Google map hack

The Times has launched a new feature of people's transit strike stories. It puts a custom icons on a Google Map with the stories in the info window. This is on top of the real estate blog they launched earlier in the week. And on top of that they finally printed the story they were sitting on for a year. Cool.

Signing Santa

Blog search and the NYT list of most blogged books

Jason Kottke has a nice post about the fact that blog search still has a way to go. It involves Freakonomics + the fact that he mentioned it 13 times last year and not one of those mentions is cited in the 125 blogs that the Times refers to...

Ah, Christmas in Kansas

What the heck is a fetus tree you ask?

Three women turned off by a pregnancy counseling service Christmas tree have canceled their memberships at a women-only gym in Lawrence.

They quit Body Boutique last week after noticing that the tree in the lobby of the gym was decorated with plastic figures meant to represent fetuses.

Read more if you really must...

Daily Miscellany

Article on sensible forms in A list Apart.
MicroPersuassion reports on a firefox blogging plugin .
Interesting speculation on TalkingPointsMemo about Sen. Rockefeller's note to Cheney and what the technology he refers to is. Are our e-mails being read?

Today's transit strike reminds me of the old doorman strikes we used to have. When that would happen everyone would form committee's take on Garbage, entry etc. This could be translated to the subway system. For instance who among us wouldn't want to drive a train for a little while? Oh well back out into the cold on my bike.

Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Six Hundred Minutes

Around this time of year it's good to take stock. Plus, I've always just loved this song and seeing that myspace wants people to link it up....

(via Winksite)

Daily Miscellany

Smart Stuff -  A very nice site of great innovations.
Article Dashboard's list of Top 10 web innovations for 2005.
A pull-down link topology  (via Kottke.org)

I received this great piece of Nigerian  style money scam earlier today. How did they know I was an Anglophile? I won't be responding to this so if you want feel free. He suffered a  "ghastly accident" read on;

NATWEST BANK UK
The Financial Ombudsmen Service
South Quay Plaza 183
Marsh Wall London E14 9SR

Dear Friend,

In order to transfer out (USD 12.6 M) Twelve million Six Hundred United 
States Dollars) from National Westminster Bank uk. I have the courage to ask 
you if you are capable,reliable and honest to assist us with this important 
business believing that you will never let me down either now or in future. 
I am Mrs. Nancy Brooks, the Chief Auditor of National Westminster Bank uk 
(NATWEST BANK). There is an account opened in this bank by Mr Smith B 
Andreas and since then nobody has operated on this account again. After going
through some old files in the records, I discovered that if I do not remit this money out 
urgently,it would be forfeited for nothing.Smith Andreas, a foreigner,and a 
miner at kruger gold co., a geologist by profession, died in a ghastly motor 
accident.... 

The Guardian's x-mas office photo gallery

The Guardian which is I think consistantly the best example of of 2.0 thinking and media (see their Travel Section, newsblog, zeitgeist, etc.) also has a fun side. They have launched a ever growing photogallery of office holiday decor.

Amazon's Alexa Opens Its Index To Developers For Customized Data

Very interesting! - Amazon's Alexa Opens Its Index To Developers For Customized Data: ": Alexa willl allow developers to request custom data as it spiders the web. The beta service, Alexa Web Search Platform, launched late Monday; it's designed 'to allow developers to build applications and/or services utilizing Alexa data.' The first 10,000 requests per month are free with additional requests at $0.15 for every 1,000 requests). Other charges cover storage, dedicated CPU use, etc. Users can add custom search fields and eventually will be able to build custom search engines without reinventing the wheel.(Via PaidContent.org.)

Around my office SoundTour Stop #1: Little Egypt - 226 West 37th Street

A short podcast about Little Egypt, the exotic (for Victorian Times) dancer who met an untimely end around the corner from my office in the early 1900's, at 226 West 37th Street.

 

Soundscape mapping a list of links

This morning I attended a few sessions of the Knowing the World Through Sound Symposium at NYU. I wanted to see the first panel about the New York SoundMap that is being created by the NY Chapter of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology. The* NY Sound Map is a Google map mashup which links to audio clips of sound recorded in the urban environment. Nice start. They handed out a great list urban audio ecology projects that I've listed below. It really opened my ears to what a vast field and way of thinking. some people map decibel levels, others through soundwalks create more meditative experiences. The work below has already made me broaden some of the audio ideas I'm playing with. Some of the links below are very academic in nature. Ones with *'s seem to approach more of what I'm interested in.

Noise mapping concept for the uk sound map.
U of Minnesota sound map project
Soundmaps for the visually impaired
Brooklyn/Flatbush soundmap
Soundmap of a house
*Soundcities
* Berlin Soundmap
* The Sonic Memorial Project
*Tony Round Soundmap
*Toronto Island Soundmap
Ultra-red Sounding the Naked City
* SoundTransit
*Puget Sound Soundscape - yes that means unbderwater sounds!
* NE Scotland Soundscape - including some background noise from one of my favorite distilleries.