DefinitiveInk

Daily Miscellany

QOOP - finally launches their site. I've blogged about them over the past few months, it's a good thing. (via - an e-mail announcing their launch)

Blogging lawsuit to watch.

Seth Godin on RSS  (via Steve Rubell)

Making Fake News - The Onion has redesigned their site to look like a real news site and it is not free and open to the public. This post is about the design.  (via Kottke)

Jack Meyers article,  "Craigslist's Explicit Sexual Content Poses Threat to Internet Freedom"

Mourning My New Orleans in Slate. My friend Joseph's family has its roots there as cotton traders in the mid 1800's. I remember standing in Natchez on a levee talking about it. I can't imagine what the people huddles in the Superdome think about the fact that they are about to be transferred to the Astrodome. 

Good list of places to donate to for Katirina relief.

Misc. reading

Wash Post article on Amazon's  new stats that measure a book's readbility and the number or words per ounce and dollar. Amazon also introduced a concordance function that uses a folksonomy tag display to get to search results.

Why is tagging so hard. Post by Fred Wilson with some really good points.

In a Web 2.0 world, apps are built on top of apps, using open APIs, allowing users to mix and match to create the best experience for their needs. 

If you are a nerd, like Tom Evslin or me, that's pretty cool.

If you are The Gotham Gal, that's not going to work one bit.

In a Web 1.0 world, a company like TypePad would build everything themself.

But in Web 2.0, other services, like Flickr, Technorati, del.icio.us, AdSense, Google Maps, Bloglet, SiteMeter, Feedburner, etc that have gained significant user traction, need to be supported.

That's a major headache and it will be interesting to see how TypePad and other blogging platforms deal with it.

It's almost an advertisement for an open source platform like WordPress where the users can actually add this kind of stuff into the platform.

So TypePad is faced with the fact that many of their users want Web 2.0 style integration and they need to build it themself.  That's a lot of work without much benefit to them.  But I see no other choice for them over the long haul other than to deliver that kind of integration.

I'm pleased to say that I squeaked by passing the test for  for 8th grade math in Illinois. My Achilles heel had to do with two geometry questions that used the same formula which I simply forgot. While it seems hard I have the feeling that in India third graders are doing the same thing and it would really suck to be left back that much.  I heard Frank DeFord,  on NPR today, say that at the turn of the century only 6% of Americans finished high school. I graduated in the early eighties and I know that at the time I would have aced the Illinois test. Lately I've been having some anxiety dreams about this (failing French class) I think this is due to the fact that I'm taking some big steps both personally and professionally.  I'm getting married at the end of September. Today we filled out an application for a marriage license up in Massachusetts. It was nice to see both parties be able to check male or female. They no longer do blood tests but B and I had to swear we weren't related. There is a three day waiting period which is the same period it takes to wait to buy a gun but you don't hear people object to it. I can wait three days in fact am now going to wait 27 but who's counting? It was somewhat nerve racking though not as scary as the lovely meeting we had with our officiant last night.  We thought he was going to grill us. On the way up we were talking about an article we had read in which a Rabbi told a story about a couple who he knew were special. The bride was a teacher and the groom loved the fact that one morning she got up and had some  letter stickers stuck on her ass.  We were trying to figure out an equivalent story but  he didn't seem to need one. I think we passed.

On a related note I really enjoyed Jason Kottke's post about his change of blogging style. He seems to be going toward a retro style of hypertext. To give that much thought to it is really something to read.
 

Browser based OSes (sp?)

Jason Kottke has a really interesting post about the idea of browser based OS systems, using browser based apps online and offline. This is hot on the heels of Google's release of Desktop. Since I'm trying to push forward some web 2.0 functionality so it's anxiety producing that the alternative title of his post is web 3.0. Once again behind the curve

From Daily Kos

Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business? - Wharton paper on web 2.0

Social Media ROI

(Note added 9.7.05 - I've noticed that many GardenWeb members are clicking to this post. Welcome but I urge you not to read too much into the post below. It is a quote from somebody else, not a plan. Please take a look at other posts and feel free to comment. Also nothing on this blog has anything to do with or represents iVillage in any way. It is my own opinion and follows my interests.)

Two interesting and powerful posts by Matt McAlister, the VP and General Manager of Infoworld; one on the ROI of  social media which is something I'been pondering lately, and the other on having editors use del.icio.us feeds to build your own news aggregator of interest to readers.

"So then how do you define the social media revenue model? It seems to me that the model looks like this:

1) Build a system that encourages users to add data

2) Provide an instant gratification service back to users based on the power of the data they provide individually and collectively

3) Charge subscription fees:

· advanced functionality

· data storage

· distribution

4) Upsell additional services where available or possible

As users contribute more data, the service gets more valuable. They become willing to pay for a deeper commitment and more ways to exploit the data pool that gets more powerful as it increases in size.

Lastly, there’s another revenue stream you can derive from partner relationships, third-parties who are able to leverage data uniquely. We tried a variation of this at InfoWorld where we pulled data from Feedster and displayed search results that were relevant to the page. Newsweek is doing a variation of this idea with Technorati. The social media tool provider can find revenue through the media property as distributor. The incomplete piece of this model is the data that could come directly from the distributor."

(via Steve Rubell)

orkney from caithness

orkney from caithness
Originally uploaded by niznoz.

A friend posted this photo taken from the top of Scotland looking out to the Outer Hebrides.  Wish I was there.

Morning reading

Two NY Times articles;

One on how the web is being used, and expanding,  illegal trade in endangered animals. Very depressing.

Another one on  why the educational software  market has broken down.

Forbes is running an interesting series of articles that counts down the 20 most important inventions.  #8 is the sword. To get this they created a panel that narrowed down the choices and then asked site visitors (and magazine readers - I presume) to go on line and answer a poll. Experts and editors also voted and weighted results made the list final.  Each item gets an essay.

Great series of subway station photos from around the world (via Nail Dash)

A good alternative reading list for the President while he is in Crawford.  He is supposedly reading Cod by Mark Kerensky (I read it several years ago, it's a great book and was the granddaddy of all of the single subject books that are around now),  John Barry's book on the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918, and oddly an upcoming 1500 page tome on Alexander the II, The Last Great Star (I've been wondering lately about our wholesale acceptance of the word Star but perhaps that's just my genes talking about the pogroms that led some of my ancestors to leave Russia in the mid 1870S). (via Mark Crispin Miller who also reports that we have taken over 200,000 casualties to date in Iraq and Afghanistan)

 

Amazon moves into publishing with $.49 shorts

Amazon introduces Amazon shorts - short essay and short stories for $.49 a pop. They are saved to your Amazon "Digital Locker" which I assume has some DRM built in.

Morning reading

Yesterday a praying mantis found itself on the 14th floor window of our mid-town building. 

President Bush sprints past  Reagan's vacation record

Jonathan Ames catalogs the state of his health at 41. Being 40 myself I can understand.

Paidcontent is thinking of switching to Wordpress.

In addition to redesigning the front end, we're migrating all of the sites to a common platform with an integrated database. Our preference is WordPress with enhancements to make it more of CMS; we've also explored Drupal as a CMS and we're open to another open-source CMS if it can achieve our objective. We're planning a mid-fall relaunch.

They also have an interesting interview with Scott Meyer of About.com who says this,

Scott Meyer, president and CEO of the New York Times Company subsidiary, explains: "The Times and About and the blogosphere occupy different parts of the content spectrum. If you imagine on one end you have authoritative journalism, which is the Times, the Globe and the IHT in print and online, and then on the very far, opposite end you have aggregators who aren't publishing anything original, aggregating and helping people to navigate it. That's the Google News and Yahoos of the world. Blogs are closer to the aggregation piece than the authoritative journalism side of the spectrum. About is in between blogs and the authoritative journalism part of the world. Blogs are part of what About does but About guides are not bloggers."
Instead, he said, About is looking for ways to add blogs, better interaction and joining the conversations -- "something we're investing in quite heavily, which is why we brought Jeff Jarvis on board." For instance, one guide has started tagging articles so they can be picked up by bloggers. About also has a couple of user blogs in progress.

 

Daily Miscellany

Stuff on my cat - photos of very patient and indulgent cats.

A co-worker of mine, actually a pod mate, is on Feedster's Top 500 blogs, The Sheila Variations #499. I'm jealous.

WSJ article on Vodaphone's SIMPLY phone, which of course, won't be sold here anytime soon. This kind of jibes with the fact that retro (or old) cell phones are all the rage in Europe, or so says a friend visiting from England told me over the weekend

Vodafone's initiative began two years ago, after the company surveyed 5,000 Europeans about what they wanted from a cellphone. What it heard from consumers aged 35 to 55 shocked executives of the Newbury, England, company. Many in that age range didn't know their cellphone numbers or how to use basic functions.

One-third, for example, said they didn't know how to tell when they had received a text message. Some thought the envelope icon that signals a message meant their phone bill had arrived.

One woman in Italy told Vodafone she didn't know how to reply to a text message, so she would send back handwritten notes through her son, on his bicycle.

Many 35- to 55-year-olds also didn't like going into Vodafone retail stores because the young staff -- average age 24 -- talked in acronyms they couldn't understand. These consumers said they weren't interested in the cameras, Internet browsers and many of the other features that are becoming standard on the latest cellphones. "Our biggest customer segment turned round and said: 'You haven't been listening to us,' " says Guy Laurence, the company's consumer-marketing director. "It was an industry for kids."

the philosophy of Web 2.0

Peter Merholz (who I knew way back at Voyager but sadly haven't spoken to since he went on to fame at Adaptive Path) has a really interesting post on Web 2.0 and the philosophy rather than the technology behind it.

Web 2.0 is primarily interesting from a philosophical standpoint. It's about relinquishing control, it's about openness, it's about trust and authenticity. APIs, Tags, Ajax, mashups, and all that are symptoms, outputs, results of this philosophical bent.

(via Scoble who writes -

This is why I often ask "what is your philosophy?" when talking with teams about new products.

Why is that question effective? It gets to whether they really thought about the whole thing or whether they are just putting together a checklist of features.

It's so much easier to evangelize things that have a philosophy.

I hope every product developer at Microsoft reads Peter's post. Does your product/APIs/services stand for something? Or you just putting together features to appease your boss?
)

How Flickr grew into itself

Adaptive Path has a really fascinating interview with Eric Costello, the Client Development Lead of Flickr, on how the service evolved. Flickr evolved from a flash app that was part of a planned on-line multi-player game. Interesting insights into the social networking features as a byproduct of allowing a user to not share some of their photos. Key points in this are user driven development and allowing the site to develop following feedback.

JJG: In the transition from Flash to a Web application, what new features were driven by user demand?

EC: Tags were not in the initial version of Flickr. Stewart Butterfield wanted to add them. He liked the way they worked on del.icio.us, the social bookmarking application. We added very simple tagging functionality, so you could tag your photos, and then look at all your photos with a particular tag, or any one person’s photos with a particular tag.

Soon thereafter, users started telling us that what was really interesting about tagging was not just how you’ve tagged your photos, but how the whole Flickr community has been tagging photos. So we started seeing a lot of requests from users to be able to see a global view of the tagscape.

JJG: That’s interesting. I would have thought that people would be most interested in their own little world – themselves, their friends, their family. But what happened was that once they got hooked on the site on that small scale, people wanted to see that big picture. They wanted to feel like participants in this larger community.

EC: Yeah, that was definitely a surprise to us. Flickr was really envisioned initially as an organizational tool for an individual who has this huge collection of photos. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends.

And people certainly use it in different ways. I primarily use it to share photos with my friends and family, and most of my photos are restricted so that only people I’ve said are my friends and family can view them. But we found that it took off when we got some excellent photographers who were interested in using Flickr as a new kind of photo blog, so that the world could see their pictures. And that, I think, is really the primary usage of Flickr now.

I'm also really impressed with the fact that they meet and just throw things up on a board in group brainstorms. It's the kind of collaborative creation that leads to exciting things and keeps people interested.  The idea of things not starting out as planned and the need to allow for failure.

This article goes hand-in-hand with my earlier reference to the Salon article about 37 signals as great examples of the way to create new and exciting tools and companies. Larger companies should try to grab a little of this methodology and see what happens. (via Susan Mernit )

The joys of contextual advertising

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has written a post about an interesting ad that appeared in the Google links he is running on the site. It's really great now you can read about social security reform, the Plame scandal, and other malfeasance on the part of the Republican Party and click through to date Republican singles all in the same place.

Six Apart's Blogging thorugh History

"What if" blogs had been around for hundreds of years?  Mena Trott's  great slideshow of blogs possible effect on  history. (via Micropersuassion.com)

37 Signals - The passion for new ideas and Less is More

Great article in Salon about 37 Signals. It talks about Basecamp, Ta-Da, Ruby on rails, 43 Things, the fact that this is a five person company having fun and seeing what they can do. Their spirit is something to emulate no matter how large a company one works at.

Expressing ideas in code is an apt description for what many new Web developers seem to be doing these days. What stands out about 37 Signals -- as well as Adaptive Path, Odeo, the Robot Co-op, and a host of other successful Web firms -- is the passion it has for new ideas. These people, you get the sense, truly understand the flexibility of the Web and are delighted by the power they possess to make it better.

(via Kottke)

national underwear day

When I first saw this  I actually believed there was something called "National Underwear Day" that had been thought up by the National underwear lobby. I'm sure there is some kind of lobby for underwear (undergarment) manufacturers, but alas it is not an official holiday merely another "guerilla" promotion for a web site that only sells underwear - the aptly named freshpair.com.  Glad I missed it between the tourists and people walking around in their underwear it must have been a pain to get around Times Square yesterday. I really don't see myself buying boxers online. No real reason not to since my taste in them is rather plain but I  just don't see it. (via Gawker)

Daily Miscellany

Amazon's tail is a bit shorter. Still long but they probably aren't tripping over it. Chris Anderson updates the estimates of how many of Amazon's book sales come from books outside the top 100,000 found in a B&N superstore. Originally he and some MIT whiz-kids thought it was 57% now it appears closer to  <39% . Still a 1/3 to a 1/4 of Amazon's book business which is huge and much more than the industry est of 20%. (via Kottke)

Media Bistro's, Elizabeth Spiers, open letter to editors of  Women's magazines. Really good post.  (via Gawker)

Great photos of street artist Bansky's recent work on the Palestinian side of the Israeli wall.  (via Coolhunting)

60 years ago today

“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One and I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.”