DefinitiveInk

nice quote about networks

"...do you find humans at all odd?"
"Not really", replied Ashley after a moment's reflection, accelerating the globe and moving round into the midday region of the planet to make a full orbit before returning home, "but your obsession with networks takes a bit of getting used to. Still, it's understandable."
"How do you mean?"
"Because networks are everywhere. the road and rail systems, the postal service, the Internet, your friendships, family, electricity, water - everything on the planet is composed of networks."
"But why understandable?"
"Because it is the way you are built - your bodies use networks to pass information; your veins and arteries are networks to nourish your bodies. Your mind is a complicated network of nerve impulses. It's little wonder that networks dominate the planet - you have modeled your existence after the construction of your own minds."" - Jasper Fforde, The Fourth Bear (pg. 295)

Frucall and ibuyright

Frucall is a mobile service that tells you if you can get a better price for something online than you can in a store. You call a number enter the upc and then learn of the best price on the web for an item. It's an interesting idea and the service seems to offer some cool interactions between phone, web, and people. It seems that if you like the price they tell you on the phone that a call center agent will place an online order for you, and users can also use the service to bookmark items and leave themselves notes. I'm not sure how they handle the fact that items online are usually less expensive than those in stores minus the shipping and occasional sales tax charges but perhaps that is up to user to figure out. I don't think I'd use it but I am interested in the way that they are interacting with typed in UPC codes. 

An approach more up my alley was being taken by a project called I Buy Right which matches images of UPC codes up to a database of socially conscious product attributes. The project looks like it has ground to a halt for the time being amid some  unfortunate fortune hunting circumstances.  As I read about the project I began to think that it would work better if one could sms the upc to the database rather than take a photo. Surely that would be easier to do than the photo scanning they were planning. I actually think I would use something like this and am sorry.

The NYT has some really interesting services in this article and I'm very excited to try Google's.I've yet to try Google's sms service but am excited about that.

For, for an ad-free option, there is a little-known  Google service. Send a text message to 46645 (that’s “Google”; leave off the last E for efficiency). In the body of the message, type what you’re looking for, like “Roger McBride 10025” or “chiropractor dallas tx.” Seconds later, you get a return message from Google, complete with the name, address, and phone number.

FREE ANSWERS Google’s 46645 text-messaging service can fetch much more than phone numbers. It can also send you the weather report (in the body, type, for example, “weather sacramento”), stock quotes (“amzn”), where a movie is showing nearby (type “flushed away 44120”), what a word means (“define schadenfreude”), driving directions (“miami fl to 60609”), unit conversions (“liters in 5 gallons”), currency conversions (“25 usd in euros”), and so on.

Another service I would use  is one in which you could sms the name of a fish and get back a report about whether it was good to eat it. I carry around a chart in my wallet but it would be easier to text the name of the fish and get something back. Any takers?

Links 11/28/06

Dave Winer on the bubble bursting when Google does. Everything Web 2.0 being an after-market for Google.

The amazing number of comments Jason Kottke is getting on whether his new glasses look good. What if he were to present outfits he was thinking of wearing later in the week? A slow way to get dressed but buoyed by the overall approval of the crowds he could stride out the door knowing his t-shirt was a great choice.

NYT embedding an mp3of a "backstory" interview with an article's author on their front page.

A Bear Sterns report on aggregation and context being the sweet-spot of the content chain. (via Paid Content )

great social software presentation

Tom Coates's presentation about social software at the Future of Web Apps conference in SF in September, Greater than the sum of its parts in a clickthrough web based version. Looks like it was an excellent talk.

Camera guide on Flickr - a example of Yahoo integration between businesses

Camera guide to models most used by Flickr members. The charts are integrated with model and pricing info from Yahoo shopping. It has pretty much firmed up my choice of digital SLRS.

Complaints that make you thankful.

A wonderful video of a choir in Finland singing a litany of complaints put to song, "Why is it when you buy furniture all you get is a stack of boards"... and more. I'm thankful for this and so much more this Thanksgiving. (via VeryShortList which I wrote about in September. Sign up for it, if you haven't already)

links and stuff 11/21/06

Simulscribe - voice mail transcription service. I could use this to create novels out of my mother's messages. (via Coolhunting)

Zooomr.com - anothr photo sharing service. interesting map, lightbox, dhtml things going on (via flavorpill)

Emily Chang's list of good reads. The list is filled with great docs I look forward to making my way through. A quick click from there took me to ehub to see the latest oddly named services. Among the gems on the page is Rezzible which is a website creator for members of Second Life. A virutal website within a virtual world.

Tomorrow we get "early release" from work. I think there is medication one can take to combat this problem.

Local Search Is Like Social Networking

AdAge interview with Frazier Miller of Yahoo.

"...I very much feel like local is expanding from a look-up use case or the old Yellow Pages approach to a browse-type use case, where you want to bring in user-generated content elements to make a decision. ... It's more of a research and comparison shopping case. Moving forward there's a lot more around discovery and exploration." and

"Tagging is a powerful phenomenon that allows users to say this business is romantic, this coffee shop has WiFi. It allows users to access and organize internet data in their own way and makes an easy index to recall later but it also gives us a really powerful way to search across really generic listings that we can provide to other users."

Atoosa parody on SNL

(via Gawker)

Readers who know me have some idea what my experience was dealing with her as part of the launch team of CosmoGirl when I worked at Hearst. The term schadenfreude is appropriate  to the moment though perversely the public skewering that Gawker and now SNL have been levying could be considered good publicity by some.

Create your own Southpark Character game

20Q.net guessed Brussel Sprouts in 20 questions. Try to stump it.

Hollywood Reporter profiles of 10 Innovative Voices including my boss Beth Comstock.

Uncle Mark's Gift guide 2007 - a fun read

Mark Hurst, author of the Good Experience newsletter and owner of Creative Good,  has compiled a 2007 gift guide called Uncle Mark's List. It reads like the Rivendell Reader (to which I urge subscribe if you like bikes, even if you ride a fancy carbon one)  and Schott's Miscellany (about which there was a great article in the NYT yesterday, and which like Uncle Mark's List  started as small pub. for clients and prospective clients). In addition to some product picks, Uncle Mark's List has advice on how to give a best man speech, how to pick a portable game player, the best time to visit the Metroplolitan Museum, and it has links to some interesting sites I've never heard of before. One of them http://www.delivr.net/ is an e-postcard service that sends  Flickr images and another is Gootodo.com, an online to do list.

Very funny captioned cat photos.

Top 10 list of Top 10 Firefox add-on lists

(Via CNET.)

COPA on trial in Philly

Rufus Griscom of Nerve.com is blogging from Philadelphia scene of a trial in which he and others including the ACLU are plaintiffs against the DOJ regarding the COPA act. This hasn't caught my eye on many of the blogs I read daily. Perhaps the focus is too much on new things than protecting our rights to publish. Here is the DOJ response to the petition from the ACLU.

dumplings

dumplings
Originally uploaded by niznoz.

Heaven?

Digg users are editors?

Kevin Rose of Digg said this at Web 2.0, ""We have 600,000 registered editors bringing content to the site." Really..they are editors?

The article above did turn me on to the Digg labs tools stacker and swarmer - pretty cool info display but it makes the contributors more like clickers than thoughtful stewards and cullers.

The first three definitions of editor appearing on define:editor via Google

• a person responsible for the editorial aspects of publication; the person who determines the final content of a text (especially of a newspaper or magazine)

1. editor program: (computer science) a program designed to perform such editorial functions as rearrangement or modification or deletion of data

wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Editor has four major senses: # a person who obtains or improves material for a publication;# a film editor, a person responsible for the flow of a motion picture or television program from scene to scene# a sound editor, a person responsible for the flow and choice of music, voice, and other sound material in a recording# a computer program that is used by humans to efficiently make changes to files of a particular type.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor

An editor is a software tool. This category includes HTML editors, text editors, source code editors, and graphics editors. More complex text-producing tools with WYSIWYG interfaces are generally referred to as word processors.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_(software)

An editor is usually a program to create or modify text files. There are various graphical and text mode editors available on Linux. Examples of graphical editors are: nedit, gedit, kedit, xemacs, gxedit. Examples of text mode editors are: joe, ae, emacs, vim, vi. In a terminal, simply run them via: $ editorname filenam

www.winehq.com/site/docs/wine-user/glossary

Chowhound post Chow?

Found myself wondering today how Chowhound is doing post  integration into Chow.com and sale to CNET. Any thoughts from board users?

outside.in - local blog aggregator/info site. Tremendous. Love the design, how scalable yet intimate it is, the team is amazing. Wow. Susan Mernit has a nice post on this and some other projects in the local space.

John Geraci- one of the founders of outside.in also wrote this on his blog:

... your strategy for standing out from the crowd must be to offer a service that creates LESS noise. It must somehow cut straight across the din, or filter it or allow you to throw out two or more other things that were taking up your time before. I try to always keep this in mind as I come up with ideas - whatever you’re offering ought to replace two things that a prospective user was using before. Otherwise it’s just more noise in a very noisy world, and that’s not very appealing.

I try to keep this in mind.  Not always easy.  And it can sometimes be a very fine line between noise-reducer and noise-maker.

 

Techcrunch - podcast with founders of reddit which was acquired by CondeNast for Wired.

Wired news - social bookmarking showdown.

food.yahoo.com - is fantastic, love the design.

Paxton & Whitefield English cheese mongers. Unpasteurized Somerset Brie