DefinitiveInk

Just in time for August a screed about tourists in NY

Whatever you do stay out of this bloggers way. (via gawker.com)

John Battelle on LA Time Wiki experiment

Very interesting post by John Battelle on why the LA Times edtorial wiki failed.

 

 But when I read about this, I instantly recognized a core problem with the approach: it was top down community, rather than bottom up. Michael Kinsley, who created the site for the Times, was attempting to force a considered, editorial structure onto a set of readers who had yet to identify themselves or their own interests in any kind of structured way. It was doomed to fail, because communities can't be created by editorial structures - editorial structures must be created by communities.

 

Also Dan Gilmour on same.

David Pogue's podcast video

As a companion piece to his article on podcasts Pogue dons a blond wig, a fake mustache, and wields a spatula in a pretty amusing video take on the variety of available podcasts.

Morning reading

Feedster and AOL  - paidcontent.org, Susan Mernit, many others.

37 inches of rain in Mumbai.  Just think about that next time you are caught in what you think is punishing NYC rain. Interesting piece about people text messaging for help in the Guardian.

Very interested in the fact that Yahoo bought Konfabulator a few days ago. How will they tie in search and or content with widgets. Also a small aside about how the term,  "Widget  a general-purpose term, or placeholder name, for any unspecified device, including those that have not yet been invented. It is commonly used in textbook and other examples where the identity of the product or function is irrelevant and could be distracting." Has been co-opted to mean  small useful things whose function is their only purpose in being.

Slate introduces audio tours of several museums

Slate introduces several podcast tours of the Met and the MOMA. Nice preview of them available from the site.

 

Rodger Clemons apparently named his four children,  Koby, Kory, Kacy and Kody , for the fact that he is a strikeout king.

 

 

Social Networking 3.0

Mercury News' Silicon Beat column about GoingOn a next gen social networking service built on an open standard so it can be integrated into other services and interact with them. An image of it JD Lasica on the project. . Marc Canter, the co-creator on the project. (originally via PaidContent.org)

Personal Offshoring

Ben Hammersly has an article ( or rather dictated an article to someone in New Zealand who transcribed it) in the Guardian about personal outsourcing. He also has a new book about hacking Movable Type which I am going to order since I'm finally going to move a bit on walkr.org my pet podcasting/place project.

Time Inc is going to launch two new titles using the web first.  Love it.  (via Paid Content)

The NYT had a story about limited edition t-shirts (which by the way I wrote about awhile ago)  and for a while they were running this  picture of a gaunt man wearing a white v-neck t-shirt. The capton said something like "Hipsters wear limited edition t-shirts" . The guy in the photo has no name  and he's not mentioned in the article - just a hipster.  They've changed the wording of the caption but still no id. If you see this man or others who look like him - know that you are seeing a hipster. Beware.

Elvis at Summerstage and 2 links

Cat ladies explained

 

Has CNET cracked the online video code with whiteboards?

 

Last night I went to see Elvis Costello and Emmylou Harris at a "benefit" concert for Summerstage. While the music was fine, I would normally say great but am now keenly aware that going to a concert like this is almost like going to an oldies concert so I'm having to rethink the definition of good. What wasn't good, however, was the entire atmosphere surrounding this "benefit". The "benefit" was definitely one-sided and for me it is sadly consistent with the degradation of NY institutions that I grew up with. This concert was the most expensive in the history of Summerstage clocking in at $55. The money pays for the rest of the series but it seems they are having a large number of these sorts of concerts this year so I think there is a good possibility that the organization is not being run as the lean project it once was. The weather was very similar to the weather during the blackout, air so heavy you can't breathe, sweat pouring down and through clothes. So tickets in hand thousands of us had to stand in a line that stretched down the park to around 64th Street. Then upon entering we were told we needed to throw out our water bottles or finish them. This so we could pay for more water inside to accompany the $6 beers and $6 hamburgers. So dazed from the heat we then needed to fight for space on the ground since two of the 4 grandstands were closed for a "partnership for parks" benefit. Since the experience of standing tightly packed as if on a subway car was not the most pleasant we left towards the end of the set only to find that the west side exit was closed to make room for yet another benefit dinner party taking place on the terrace steps behind the bandshell. With not a goodie bag in sight.  The whole tiered thing with reserved grandstands and closed exits is so far from what Summerstage and even it's benefit concerts were it just makes me sad and a not a small bit angry. Lastly, no goodie bags.

 

Mapping the moon with Google

The first manned moon landing was 36 years ago today. The brainiacs at Google have come up with a great triubute to it with a google map hack (they can't really hack their own site) of the moon. Zoom in for a happy ending Easter egg. I never knew all of the landings sites were so close to each other. You can also get to this by clicking on the Google logo on their home page. I wonder how many people actually click on the graphic a day. This is the first time I've ever done it.

The dangers of fruit stickers...

Sticker-removal duty took Jean Lemeaux of Clarksville, Tex., half an hour one day last week.

"I was picking all the little stickers from the Piggly Wiggly off my plums and my avocado pears and my peaches," said Ms. Lemeaux, 76. "Then I had to make fruit salad out of the ones that got hurt when I took the stickers off, and then I had to wash the glue off the other ones before I put them in the fruit bowl."

"One time," she said, "I got up the next morning and looked in the mirror and there were two of them up in my hair."

From an article on fruit tatooing in the NYT. If these machies weren't too expensive it would be cool to tatoo fruit with patterns and art.

 

If this is the good life then count me out

The NYT has an amazing article about two people who own a new travel site and have been going around the world staying in luxury hotels and visiting posh stores. The author must have had some fun writing this article as it simply skewers these two nincompoops as they go into Hermes and hear there is a wait for a Birkin bag, (c'mon who doesn't know that after all of the celebrity obsession about that and Oprah's recent incident), yelling at waiters to assemble bagels, raising their eye-brows because the Waldorf Astoria has old carpets, and putting down the entire West Side. As for Brooklyn I'm glad they don't seem to know where the bridge is. The idea of their site is so old that one has to think that this is could simply be an exercise to take tax-deductions while acting like swells. Their site "backed by international investors" is a subscription site with an accompanying book. The market they are going after already has some very expensive "exclusive" guide that are made by Louis Vuiton and sold in places like Paul Smith (how and why I know this tragic fact has to do with a meeting we once had for cityreads where we were urged to create "exclusive tours") The site that they are reviewing for CarnetTravels even looks like a dotcom. It features an animated fictional character named Eva and a flash interface. Flash is a particularly woeful interface for travel sites as one would normally want to print out information. Even the idea of having a guidebook and an accompanying website is old hat. Why not have a digitally printed book from web site content that is updated from fresh reviews.

Flash as used for databases is simply problematic in my view unless it is data you would really want to just use online. Use of travel sites usually involves research in preparation for a trip so I think it is more useful to be able to easily print pages.  I also find a not-for-profit site called Place Matters to suffer from the same usability problem. Place Matters started out as a project to use the internet to enable people to nominate and record important places. It was a great idea that could have been done so much simpler and better.

Ajax may turn pageview and other metrics on their head

Good article in TechWeb on how Ajax makes using page views and other basic metrics difficult to measure. There is a quote from a VP at Omniture about how flash has presented similar challenges. The article just puts on the radar that there new technologies and terms for measurement will need to be developed. (via Paidcontent.org)

Speed reading Harry Potter

Join the great Harry Potter read-in, the arts editor's of The Guardian cover the release of Harry Potter in London and then speed read thorugh it - blogging as they go to creat the first review.

Walter Mossberg's article on Spyware and Tracking cookies

Mossberg has a very good column in Thursday's WSJ which deals with tracking cookies and their very close correlation to spyware. He is very against the fact that the industry has succesfully pressure Microsoft to remove tracking deletion from their antispyware program.

Suppose you bought a TV set that included a component to track what you watched, and then reported that data back to a company that used or sold it for advertising purposes. Only nobody told you the tracking technology was there or asked your permission to use it.

You would likely be outraged at this violation of privacy. Yet that kind of Big Brother intrusion goes on every day on the Internet, affecting millions of people. Many Web sites, even from respectable companies, place a secret computer file called a "tracking cookie" on your hard disk. This file records where you go on the Web on behalf of Internet advertising companies that later use the information for their own business purposes. In almost all cases, the user isn't notified of the download of the tracking cookie, let alone asked for permission to install it.

In the end he argues that sites should alert users to tracking cookies and explain the benefits giving them a clear choice to turn them off or on.

 

 

 

Morning Reading

 Our Essence Of Being - Rafat Ali in Paidcontent writes a long post about his editorial mission and the importance of integrity. In moments of doubt he looks back at his business plan which has the following.

 "Our belief is that in the near future, all media will be digital media, and we are helping define sustainable business models and innovation within this sector."

 Stowe Boyd (President of Corante) writing in Get Real about the design of compelling social software services:

"Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace, 'All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' I bet that all successful social applications will be based around the same, shared social architectural patterns, while ten thousand failed solutions will fall by the wayside by adopting some 'innovative' take on social architecture that will, in the final analysis, miss the point... Even established realms like Amazon will have to rework their architecture to match the social architecture latent in our wiring, or they will get pushed aside by an upstart that cracks the social code.

This post was created on a pc app called Quamana. I like it. Very much like creating an e-mail and much easier than having to log into typepad. It is a nice helper app but I don't think it is a life changer.

Go Tiger!

Morning Reading

First off I'm addicted to LeTour.com. The great thing about the Tour de France is that if you are on the East coast you can follow the coverage in the morning with breakfast. The site has a great graphic of the route and dispatches from the route every few minutes. Two days ago the drama of Lance Armstrong closing and then passing a breakaway group in the Alps was amazing. This morning the peloton was happily going along at an average of 31 miles and hour. 31 miles an hour! Same goes for the British Open. You can watch it without wasting your entire day like most other golf tournaments. Yes, I do watch golf. Go Tiger.

I'm writing the post using MarsEdit which Steve Rubel pointed to. At first I was wondering why I would need something like this, rather than just logging on to typepad? But it is very similar to writing an e-mail. I like it a lot.

Debate on the Wikipedia about deleting the article on Folksonomy. (via Steve Rubell)

Also an article "Don't Bore Me with Your Blog." (also via Steve Rubell)

One thing I know is that the headline "Morning reading" isn't a traffic driver.

Google enables adsense ads in RSS but you need 100 feed subscribers which requires something like Feedburner. Steve Rubel thinks they might be going for something bigger with search and tracking.

He also writes about a new tagging community called Shadows which adds ratings to the whole kit and kaboodle of social tagging .

Mark Hurst's Good Experience great online games list.

Site where you can dress up Camilla Parker-Bowles and countless celebrities. (via Panopticist)

How to find your dream job.(via Kottke)

Wists.com - visual bookmarks with a social component. I need to play with this.

A gallery of Japanese manhole covers. They are painted. who knew? Followed this from a visual link of wists.com

Fun music video with great visual photoshop puns.

Brooks Saddles site - the flash based site of the great bicycle saddle maker. Combines flash with old photography and neat use of old archival content.

I just bought a Kogswell frame on e-bay and am very excited to build out the bike.

Sad note: Byron Preiss died over the weekend in a car accident. He was a CD-Rom pioneer and book packager who often competed with Voyager in the early days.