Long tail UI Widget
This is kind of cool. I am playing around with the
Last.FM music service. Among the many things it
does, is that It 'watches' everything you play with iTunes to figure out your
music tastes. And then with that, Last.FM recommends
music that you might like. What caught my eye is the first use of the famous
'long tail' graph as a
User Interface element. You can drag the vertical bar right and left to affect
whether the recommended music is more in the popular or obscure range of
possibilities. Cute! Technorati Tags:
cool,
longtail
Web 2.0, I knew ye well. Here comes Web 2.5
Check out Liam Breck's new blog.
"Next, the religion of The Network Is The Computer has indoctrinated the congregation to ignore an obvious issue with connectivity: We depend on PCs only because electricity is ubiquitous and reliable. If the power is out, you've usually got acts of god in progress, and little divine inspiration for work." (from Web 2.5: Always-on-you Web 2.0 Tools)
Welcome, Liam! Technorati Tags: web2.0
[GEEK] Maybe Attention.xml and OPML shouldn’t always travel together
"Personally, I want the data the AttentionRecorder is collecting to be used, but I don't want to freight porting my feeds from one platform to another with those additional 10000+ rows of data." (from elliptical…")
While it may make sense to use OPML as a foundation for the format for Attention information, they are not one and the same and should not be inexorably bound. In the world of aggregators , the one of the original and core use of OPML was interoperability -- import and export of a user's set of subscriptions from one aggregator to the next. The potential voluminousness of attention information would harm OPMLs role as the universal interchange format between aggregators. Now the approach of using an app specific namespace for attention information is perfectly fine, as long as it is optional, and as long as aggregators can safely ignore it in cases when it doesn't matter. (I note that from a purely parochial development effort point of view, this is superior to a new format such as XOXO which aggregators generally aren't parsing nor generating.) Technorati Tags: OPML, attention, XOXO
Really cool rowing instrumentation
If there are any rowing fanatics out there, or competitive rowing coaches, take a look at this cool in- boat rowing instrumentation product.
"The RowMetrics system is innovative in-boat instrumentation bundled with software to provide a complete measurement system.The revolutionary force sensors installed between the foot stretchers and the rails capture the amount of force being exerted by each rower on a stroke by stroke basis. It measures the balance between the right and left feet for each rower. Also captured is the total boat's performance and the deceleration after catch. " (from ChampionMetrics web ite)
(Thanks, Aleksey) Technorati Tags:
[GEEK] Unified name space for aggregator extensions for OPML?
There's been a lot of discussion (follow these links for more links) of late about how to extend OPML , including what I wrote about some common aggregation related OPML attributes. From reading the discussions and thinking about it, I am thinking that a course correction might be better. Much of the discussion has been about an Attention namespace for OPML. I totally support this and will participate in that discussion. Yet there are clearly some information that many aggregators need to store with the OPML, which is not part of the core OPML standard, and also not really connected to Attention. Faced with this question an aggregator developer can do one of several things:
They can just create a product specific namespace (e.g. blogbridge: xxx)
Or they can just include regular non namespace attributes in their OPML (which will in turn cause either the validator or other aggregators to choke.)
What if instead we try to define a general set of a ggregator r elated e xtensions (are:xxx) to OPML? We could do an informal canvas and try to figure out a small set of really obvious attributes to put into this ARE name space. To start you thinking about this, here is a collection of attributes derived from what BlogBridge and FeedDemon each store in their OPML. I've identified two sets of attributes: The following have to do with bookkeeping and the operation of the aggregator:
are:autoPurgeMaxitems - number of items that should be stored locally
are:autoUpdateFrequency - how often this feed polled
are:numUnread - number of items currently unread
are:numFlagged - number of items currently flagged
are:numVisits - How often a user has visited this feed
are:firstPostDate - Date of the first post
And the following have to do with local user overrides of information that can also be specified in RSS.
are:userRating - user supplied rating of how 'good' this feed is
are:userTitle - user supplied override to the title or name of this feed
are:userCreator - user supplied override to the creator of this feed
are:userDescription - user supplied override to the description of this feed
I'm sure these are already too many. My top level question to those of us responsible for OPML import and export within Aggregators of all kinds, what do you think? Shall we try to do this? Is it a good idea? Or shall we all just create our little parochial namespaces with different words for the same thing? Technorati Tags: blogbridge, feeddemon, OPML
Very cool illusion
Try this out, it really worked for me, and is really strange and wonderful!
"This should be proof enough, we don't always see what we think we see." (from Very Cool Illusion, via del.icio.us)
Technorati Tags: cool
Big Search, Mechanical Turk and why Amazon is at least as cool as Google
Adam Green points to Scoble who re-discover and discover, respectively, Amazon's street by street, address by address, photographic coverage of the map of, what, the universe? It's a neat new user interface of something they've had for a while, actually, but still, quite cool! some nuggets:
"Will I use it? Hell, yeah, it is damn useful. I can point you to Border Cafe in Harvard Square, which just happens to be one of the best college student dives in the country." (from Darwinian Web, Adam's new blog)
and…
"But, if you need to know what a store looks like before going there, Amazon is definitely something you should check out." (from Scobelizer)
and…
"Is your house on their map? It's pretty creepy to have pictures of your neighborhood on line. Intellectually, it makes perfect sense, but it still creeps me out." (from a comment to Scoble's post)
and finally…
"Unfortunately, the image defaults to the side of the street with Starbucks. You'll have to click the film strip for the opposite side of Church Street." (again from Darwinian Web)
Which brings up Mechanical Turk, the new, totally clever Amazon service which some have written about but somehow seem to have escaped Scoble's all-seeing- eye. So what is Mechanical Turk (see this for the origin of the name)? It's an Amazon service generates solutions to little problems or tasks which are trivial for humans and impossible for computers (exaggerating a little here.) What kinds of problems are these? Oh say choosing what photograph best represents the storefront of the Border Cafe! What I imagine is this: Amazon has outsourced a bunch of SUVs equipped with digital cameras and a GPS to drive up and down all streets in the US. The cameras automatically snap picture after picture, each encoded with the current lat long. Using maps and directories each address will match several pictures. The remaining problem is to select the best one to represent the storefront. A very menial task, but one that requires a person. Enter Mechanical Turk. Anyone with an Amazon account can sign up and request to 'complete simple tasks that people do better than computers, and get paid for it." I tried this and was presented with sets of 3 to 6 photos. My job : decide which one most looks like the front door of say, Ernie's Body Shop, 1234 Main Hyway, Maine. I think each task paid something like 3 or 5 cents. Clever, eh? Even cooler, Amazon chose to build this as a totally general mechanism, with APIs for both sides of the transaction. API's to define tasks, check results, qualify workers etc.. And APIs to work on problems and suggest solutions. Pure genius! So, let's say I have a task like, answer the question: "Is this web page a blog or not?" (a question that might be of interest to BlogBridge) I could:
Create a list of URLs that I want to check out
Add them to Mechanical Turk as projects
Seek out only workers who could show that they knew what a blog is (by submitting to some test questions)
Decide how much I wanted to spend
And turn the problem loose on people around the globe.
You know everyone always fawning over Google. Don't get me wrong, I think Google is great and I've done my own share of fawning. However, in my book, Amazon is the unsung hero in the new Web 2.0 world. They are every bit as innovative and cool as Google, and they do it while somehow inventorying and delivering gazillions of books and other products around the globe.
Goodnight Irene – Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly
Chorus: Irene goodnight, Irene goodnight Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene I'll see you in my dreams Last Saturday night I got married Me and my wife settled down Now me and my wife are parted Gonna take another stroll downtown Sometimes I live in the country Sometimes I live in the town Sometimes I get a great notion To jump in the river and drown Well I asked your mother for you She told me you was too young I wish to the Lord I'd never seen your face Or heard your lying tongue Stop your rambling, stop your gambling Stop staying out late at night Go home to your wife and your family Stay home by the fireside bright I love Irene God knows I do Love her to the day I die If Irene turns her back on me I'll take morphine and die (If you know why I posted this then you know why I posted this 🙂 Technorati Tags: blues
Big news from Iraq, if it’s true…
Zarqawi probably killed! according to Iraq the Model.
"According to these two sources, Iraqi and US military forces in Mosul think that Zarqawi, al-Qaeda leader in Iraq was possibly killed in a raid on a house where members of al-Qaeda were holding a meeting." (from Iraq the Model)
And I can remember, not that long ago, that it would offend our sense of propriety or at least political correctness to write "X probably Killed!" We, didn't do that kind of thing, kill someone on purpose. The world has changed … Technorati Tags: iraq