web

Kind of fun. I grabbed a text file of “A Tale of Two Cities” and put it into Wordle to generate a Word Usage Cloud of the top 75 words.

Imagine standing in a completely vacant Shibuya Station admiring the lines: up, down, left, right. Beautiful. An opportunity that doesn’t exist in the everyday. It has the atmosphere of one of those hidden spaces accessed through Haruki Murakami’s fiction.

Does anyone have an idea of how to take a screenshot of a flash tour like this? I really love some of the frames I’ve been able to create by exploring and I’d like to take a hack at drawing a few later but I don’t know how to capture the image.

I just discovered the marvelous Spherical Cow website today, a collection of thoughtful and funny comics. There aren’t a ton of them but what there is, is great.

I really like this one on “Many Worlds.”

This comic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I just got my Kindle last week and I think I need a bit more time with it to really gather my thoughts and make any real review of the device. I will, however, cop to the fact that one of my first thoughts when I saw the “Whispernet” connectivity and a browser was, “I really wish this thing had RSS.” Thankfully, it does. Kind of…

For all you Kindle-folk out there, and I suspect we’re a growing legion, here are the things you need to do to use Google Reader as your RSS Reader on the Kindle. I was excited to discover I could do this. While there’s nothing overtly tricky, this may be able to save you few exploratory and incorrect clicks.

1. Get an account on Google Reader if you don’t have one yet and add your rss feeds.
2. From the “Home Page” on your Kindle, click on “Menu > Experimental”
3. On the “Experimental” page, select “Basic Web.”
4. From the browser page, click “Menu” and select “Advanced Mode”
5. From the browser page, click “Menu” and select “Settings.” On the “Settings” page, click to “Enable” JavaScript.
6. Type the Mobile Reader URL (http://www.google.com/reader/m/) into the “Enter URL” bar at the top of the browser.
7. You’ll have to log-in to Google Reader on your Kindle now, which is kind of a pain the first time. You’ll probably want to ensure that the box is ticked to remember your settings so that you don’t have to do this frequently.

Voila! You can now use Google Reader for free from anywhere you get the “Amazon Whispernet.” Woohoo! Admittedly, navigation is a bit clunky and the speeds are not dynamite on the stripped mobile version of the reader, but I found that the act of reading the entries was quite pleasurable.

I have to use the Kindle roll and click navigation to get around on the reader site while using Kindle. Has anyone out there been able to get any of the keyboard shortcuts to work?

This is an excellent and detailed presentation on the quick rise of social applications and changing consumer behavior.

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Discovered via TechCrunch in this post

Jan sent me a link to a cool new shopping service called Polyvore that allows you to place sets of items you find while shopping online onto a page to see how they go with each other. What’s great is that people are using the tool to create other types of photographic mashups which are even more fun.

The “True Knowledge” demo of a semantic search engine looks quite promising to me. It incorporates user feedback and intelligent parsing of intent to yield search results completely impossible by Google. It’s hard to imagine where a fully adopted version of this technology could go but it would be amazing to use this in combination with Google or Amazon’s efforts to scan books into a giant database. I also wonder what happens with more ambiguous questions than the ones asked. Anyways, exciting nonetheless. Why would true knowledge demo the app prior to launch and give their competitors such a full look at the their user experience? That’s either crazy confidence or terribly naive - we shall see.

Blue Dot has changed their name, branding and product in one fell swoop and has been reborn as Faves.com. The improved product focuses on users being able to subscribe to topics of interest and receive customized feeds regardless of whether or not that user has friends already on the system. For me personally, this is a less valuable use case than the very social sharing experience I use the site for, but the new direction does not get in the way of my existing experience at all and could be come useful when there are more people creating content in subject areas that interest me. I think this is a really smart move for the folks over at Faves (boy is it going to be hard not to refer to Blue Dot all the time) as the changes are born out of an honest assessment of where the site was seeing success and where it was facing challenges. It looks like they’re off to a great start with a very favorable review in TechCrunch!

Similar to my recent post on the navigation changes at Amazon, I thought I’d collect a page of feedback on the new Faves.com to see what people are saying about it. How the media and bloggers are responding is below:

[Last Updated: 9:13AM, November 9, 2007]
[*** - connotes noteworthy review]

Blog Coverage

• ***TechCrunch: “[...] Blue Dot’s bookmarking service has remained a favorite of ours because of their consistently innovate their interface. Today, with their re-launch as Faves.com, is no exception.”
• ***Mashable: “So will all these new changes help Faves better compete with the major players? I really like the incorporation of feed management tools, along with the other ways to manage bookmarks, and leverage the community votes.”
• ***John Cook’s Venture Blog: “Seattle social networking startup Blue Dot is scrapping its name and repositioning the service — now dubbed Faves.com — so that people can create a personalized Web page populated with their favorite news topics. For example, a Seattle Mariners’ fan who also enjoys surfing and cooking could sign up to receive information about those specific topics from other users who have bookmarked related content. That puts Faves.com in direct competition with sites such as Topix.net, Digg and Stumble Upon.”
• ***Social Media Explorer: “Is this going to revolutionize social news or bookmarking? Probably not. But I can certainly see usefulness in the approach and am interested enough to try it myself. While I’ve grown weary of social news sites – I hate asking people to Digg my submissions or vote for my stories so they’ll get better traffic – there are enough interesting angles to the user experience on Faves for me to recommend you give it a shot.”
• The Global Geek Podcast: “Here is some news you can use. The social bookmarking site Blue Dot, has changed it’s name to Faves.”
• NW Innovation: “The company said that people were confused by the firm’s prior BlueDot.us domain name, so it has changed to a more mainstream domain. The firm also said that it has upgraded its service with a major release, including personalized home pages, voting, and topic subscriptions.”
• Center Networks: “Bluedot.us has changed their name to Faves as of today. I had a lengthy call with the executives last week but idiot me left all my notes at home. I have pasted their release below as a back-up. Here is the basic idea - they changed their name to more accurately reflect what they do, the .us isn’t as “trustworthy” and they are focused around topic networks.”
• Technically Speaking: “While changing a name might help a company, in this case - Bluedot.us going to and becoming Faves.com is an attempt for them to gain some new users. I hope they are also figuring out a way to get the old users coming back. Like Allen of CN, I quit using Bluedot when it became too spammy.”

Media Coverage

• ad-hoc-news: “More than 36 percent of Web users ?highly trust? the information they receive from friends and acquaintances in their online social networks, according to a new social Internet survey by Faves.com, a social discovery and bookmarking site. The same survey found that 34 percent of respondents visit a social networking site at least weekly.”

FULL DISCLOSURE: I used to work at Blue Dot as a Program Manager.

• Quiet Please: Architectural Representations of City in Science Fiction Cinema - It is exactly what it says it is, a wonderful collection of science fiction cinematic analysis pertaining to representations of cities.
• This Dilbert Blog post discusses the possibility that economists are immune to cognitive dissonance and explores a particular issue on the Bill Maher show, “Real Time” where economist Bjorn Lumberg spoke about global warming. I too watched that interview but I thought Bjorn Lumberg laid out his case clearly and beautifully. Bill Maher and the panel didn’t come to the same conclusion. Rob Thomas said the interview “…confused the shit out of me” and they all took turns taking pot shots at a guy who had just agreed that global warming was occurring but had a different, non-histrionic approach to prioritizing the issues that the others could not hear.
  

  The primary skill of an economist is identifying all of the explanations for various phenomena. Cognitive dissonance is, at its core, the inability to recognize and accept other explanations. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. The more your brain is trained for economics, the less it is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, or so it seems.

• Wired has a great interview with Ridley Scott where they speak about the evolution of Blade Runner and the forthcoming 5-disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition (which is on my Wish List btw!). [Tip to Bookninja]
  

  When you see an explosion that no one could have survived and the person is still running, then it’s bullshit. And that’s frequently why digital effects are not as good. Whereas when you do it physically, you’ve got to be careful — like, really careful. With digital, the painting book is unlimited; the world in, say, Lord of the Rings would not have been nearly as impressive 30 years ago as it is today.

The article is here:

In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon’s site.

Update: Apparently, this is a hot Amazon story today. Another blogger is reviewing the product before it even comes out.