DefinitiveInk

The Huffington Post uses real-time Aa/B testing to write headlines

So here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.

via www.niemanlab.org

Does the Brain Like E-Books? - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com

via roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com

Interesting group of essay on digital reading The thing I loved and didn't expect was David Gelernter's essay on The Book Made Better:

All reading is not migrating to computer screens. So long as books are cheap, tough, easy to “read” from outside (What kind of book is this? How long is it? Is this the one I was reading last week? Let’s flip to the pictures), easy to mark up, rated for safe operation from beaches to polar wastes and — above all — beautiful, they will remain the best of all word-delivery vehicles.

I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa. I might like to make a book beep when I can’t find it, search its text online, download updates and keep an eye on reviews and discussion. This would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding. Such upgraded books acquire some of the bad traits of computer text — but at least, if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, I’ve still got a book.

MT for objects :) Now that would be interesting. When I was at Voyager we had a summer institute with ITP where a few academics came into to work on projects. One of them was for Ulysses and the thing I remember from being around it was that it takes five or six companion books to really read it. If these were built into the binding, or a thin digital companion  which knew what book you were reading and assembled things like a map, search, timeline, comments etc. You could still read the book while taking advantage of the web and its resources. Of course nothing really stops you from reading next to your laptop and doing this too but right now we seem to be having either/or debates.

The Learning Network - The Learning Network Blog - NYTimes.com

via learning.blogs.nytimes.com

My friend Katherine, who runs The Learning Network at the NY Times has just relaunched their 11 year old (and mostly unchanged) site as a blog! Very exciting.

Snow Shorts - making the world safer for lunchroom trays

via www.wired.com

If I can convince B that these are an absolute essential for the park this winter we might all be walking around with plastic bottoms.

Seth Godin says "Make a decision"

It doesn't have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.

In fact, make several. Make more decisions could be your three word mantra.

No decision is a decision as well, the decision not to decide. Not deciding is usually the wrong decision. If you are the go-to person, the one who can decide, you'll make more of a difference. It doesn't matter so much that you're right, it matters that you decided.

Of course it's risky and painful. That's why it's a rare and valuable skill.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Michael Steele is in your house

There is fun to be had by visiting this site and entering a URL to experience  a little talking version of Michael Steele magically appear to announce the site of your choosing as the future home of the Repubican party.  He just can't make up his mind. First I was excited to have him visit Definitiveink but then he popped up on some other sites where I was surprised to see him like the ACLU, Talking Points Memo, MoveOn, and even the White House. The really funny thing is that when he popped up on the White House he was hard to see as he was behind the scenes. This is probably a happy coincidence of coding but is very funny as he appears behind the nav mostly obscured by the slideshow. 

• 
• 
• 
• 

 
 
 

Talking Points Memo LIVEBLOG of the Senate Finance Committee Vote on The Health Care Bill

2:41 p.m.: Rockefeller says, "I'm going to vote for this bill coming out of Finance...because I think that, in spite of a lot of the problems that I have with it, I think that the dialogue is now for real."

via tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com

Great liveblogging on Talking Points Memo of the Senate Finance Committee vote on health care reform. Includes video and photos of key moments. Someone's got to watch this stuff.

Ready, Set, Tweet a story with Neil Gaiman

Starting October 13 at Noon EST, Neil Gaiman (known as @Neilhimself) will launch a special round-robin interactive storytelling experience. He'll tweet the first line of the story and then the rest is up to you! Just login to your Twitter account (registration is free) to continue the story. 

via www.bbcaudiobooksamerica.com

Nice idea, but the man has over 1,000,000 followers. Are they really only going to take the first 1,000 responses?

Art in Odd Places 2009

Art in Odd Places 2009

It's too bad the site does the festival such a disservice but if you can get deal with that it looks like an interesting group of projects around the city with a focus on 14th Street. Projects include some manhole cover tours, acoustic ecology walks, some what-happened here stuff, and a few this-is-happening-in-an-unexpected-place performances that make you think about your surroundings a bit differently. A few years ago B and I went on a bike tour as part of the Glowlab festival with Bettina Johae, one of the artists with a piece in the Art in Odd Places Festival called The Immediate History of 14th Street. (Use the link to the festival to get to it.) The bike trip was fun as it recreated some of her art documenting the edges of the city. We discovered  amazing fishing shacks on piers as we rode around Hamilton and Howard Beach.

Fact or fiction - understanding art by touching it or watching movies to read books?

Which of the following appeared in The Onion and which appeared in The New York Times?

1. "You can't grasp the brilliance of a great painting just by looking at it," said Phil Brehm, 32, who acknowledged that he hadn't set foot inside a museum since a mandatory field trip in high school. "To truly appreciate fine art, you need to be able to run your fingers over its surface and explore its range of textures."

"Or just rub your face all over it, like I do," Brehm added.

2. “It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like,” commented Fred L. Gronvall in a review on Amazon.com. The videos, he wrote, “add to the experience in a big way.”

Answer:
#1 is from The Onion, Struggling Museum Now Allowing Patrons To Touch Paintings
#2s fromThe NYT', Curling Up with Hybrid Books Video Included another in what seems to be a series of breathless and uncritical articles by Motoko Rich about "new" ventures in electronic publishing.

Newsweek covers hyperlocal wars in NJ.

Millburn is ground zero in what is fast becoming America's first post-newspaper media war.

via www.newsweek.com

Newsweek article about hyperlocal efforts. Appreciate both the writing about the day-to-day activiteis of the reporters and their effect upon the town administrators but also the historical mention of Sidewalk.

Brownstoner Launches Paid Local Resource Directory

Today Brownstoner launched a directory for local resources that can help if you are renovating or involved with any aspect of real estate from  contractors and designers, to lawyers and real estate brokers. It is a paid directory. Businesses can sign up for basic listings or more full blown mini-sites on which they can collect leads, post photos, and in one case even an employment form. These pages because they are associated with Brownstoner and coded with some SEO care should  do better in search than the websites of these small businesses. It is a model of a product that could bring revenue to local and specialized sites steeped in a long print and web tradition that should be a nice revenue source for the smaller publisher and give them the ability to create packages with low to medium effort. It is also something that I am really pleased to have created over the summer with my friend Kael Goodman at Blankslate.  Hopefully other sites both local and vertical will take advantage of it.

Will Hyperlocal Ever Scale? One Entrepreneur’s Story | paidContent

Nothing about this situation scales. And yet the Seattle online community-news war rages on. What are we fighting for?

via paidcontent.org

Very nice piece by Justin Carder who founded, and also slogs around Seattle in the rain gathering stories for, Neighborlogs.

NYC launches BigApps competition

A x application challenge in keeping with New York City's drive to become more transparent, accessible, and accountable. $ 20,000 in cash prizes * Plus lunch with Mayor Bloomberg and tons of public appreciation. *

via www.nycbigapps.com

new contest to create apps out of NYC.gov's data mine.

What I would have entered in the Food Coop T-Shirt contest had I entered

The Park Slope Food Coop just had its first ever t-shirt contest. The prize is huge, a year of work credit, but even so B and I just didn't manage to get an entry designed. I think we hesitated because though we both love the Coop our ideas were to sarcastic and insidey so we didn't think would win. What do you think?

Potential Entry #1 - Outta my way hippie (Because you had to use the words Park Slope Food Coop Brooklyn, NY Since 1973 in the design The Outta my way... would have been wrapped in a box of text.  Ideally it would have been on the back.

Potential entry #2:
Park Slope Food Coop
Brooklyn NY
Too many rules since 1973.

Potential entry #3 would have had something to do with Kambucha and a really old mother.

Open House NY Podcast tours

I love podcast walking tours (having started a company that used to make them, and then creating an award winning project for Philly) so whenever I come across a resource I note it. I also love Open House NY and too often am out of town and even if I'm here can't really visit more than four places at the max. So it is a great treat to find that they've been making tours of some really interesting places that you can visit anytime or from the comfort of your computer.

List of Online Journalism Awards winners

Here is a link to the list of the Online Journalism Award winners. Great sites and work here; among them Gotham Gazette a daily read of mine, and the really impressive My Ballard by Cory and Kate Bergman. It isn't a daily read but if I lived in Ballard it sure would be. Also listed is a site I had never heard of called Yale Environment 360, put out by the School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. It has an opinion piece on it by Bill McKibben so that makes me an immediate subscriber.

Nice - The Word ‘Curate’ No Longer Belongs to the Museum Crowd - NYTimes.com

And to think, not so long ago, curators worked at museums.

The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting. In more print-centric times, the term of art was “edit” — as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully. But now, among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.”

Or more to the point, “I belong.”

For many who adopt the term, or bestow it on others, “it’s an innocent form of self-inflation,” said John H. McWhorter, a linguist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “You’re implying that there is some similarity between what you do and what someone with an advanced degree who works at a museum does.”

via www.nytimes.com

made of carbon so it is lighter in your wallet

"The Black Card is not just another piece of plastic. Made with carbon, it is the ultimate buying tool." 

(Strindburg - oh, woe is me. i want and have so much to give but nobody to buy for.
Helium - the ultimate buying tool)