web

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.

I wish the video were more agnostic to the bookmarking services out there, but this is a great description of how/why you should use social bookmarking to store the best sites on the web.

Click To Play

If you’re interested in social bookmarking, I recommend Blue Dot!

I used to work at a social networking / bookmarking startup called Blue Dot. While searching for an old demo video we had made while there, I came across a bunch of great videos, some made by our team and some made by our users. The following are all the videos I’ve discovered so far, all on one page for posterity.

The Press

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  Blue Dot on KOMO TV

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Uh oh. Oh no you didn’t! Harper’s has gone and “done it”, granting access to 157 years of Harper’s Magazine content as part of their normal subscription price. Take that New Yorker! Infowhores unite!

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I believe that I’ve got the exclusive scoop on this new blog-posting feature from Blue Dot [you must register and get an account to currently see the set-up form] as I was one of only a couple “closed-Alpha” testers. Lucky me, I was just given the go-ahead to let people know about it, before Blue Dot has even announced it on their own blog.

As a blogger, one of my main challenges is finding the time to post frequently enough to keep my blog fresh. On the days where I don’t have much time, Blue Dot’s new feature is a great help. I can get up in the morning, read my rss, find the stuff I think my readers will enjoy, dot it, and it will show up on my blog, complete with images! No formatting madness or fuss.

Here’s a picture of my post from earlier today:

Blue Dot’s newest feature allows us bloggers to keep our sites fresh and timely with minimal effort, using any dots we’ve created during that day. It automatically takes your dots from the last 24 hours and posts them to your blog at a time of your choosing. Del.icio.us has had something like this for a while (and I’d been using it) but it’s relatively flat and lifeless by comparison. Blue Dot’s has everything that del.icio.us’s solution has, bit it includes several things I think make it significantly better:

• Images - Blue Dot’s posts to your blog include the images from your dots. Good bye lifeless bookmarks! Hello, pictures!
• Tag Filtering - Ask my friends, I dot a lot. Blue Dot let’s me pick a tag for filtering the dots I want to show on my blog. In my case, I use the tag “thepugetnews.” Anything I tag with that gets posted to my blog each afternoon.
• CSS - You can add some Blue-Dot-specific css to your style templates and control the look to a greater degree than the competition.

Like this exclusive story? Please go Digg it!

Full disclosure: I was let into the closed-Alpha because I used to work at Blue Dot and requested this feature quite a lot. I am no longer employed there but I am incredibly excited that the feature is now available. Thank you, Mohit, for taking it on!

I don’t know if any of you have happened to see the Google customized logo for today but it looks distinctly like it’s missing the letter “l.” Knowing Google’s penchant for obscure mathematical, scientific, and literary references, I did a search on the word “Googe.” Sure enough, I got a wikipedia entry for Barnabe Googe, a 16th century poet mostly famous for the following line:

I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Update: Think this is nifty? Please go digg it so more people learn about it! Share the love on Valentine’s Day!

Update #2: It was just pointed out to me by one of my friends (thanks, Derek) that there’s another, even more direct reference for the day in here - Debbie Googe of “My Bloody Valentine!” Nice find, D!

Update #3: Perhaps we are reading too much subtlety into the Google design. Google’s own blog now has a post stating that “those with true romance and poetry in their soul will see the subtlety immediately.” I still like Derek and my interpretation better so neener neener!

Update #4: And now the disgusting ones from Urban Dictionary via the comment thread from the UK Register article. Warning - these are not “safe” and explicitly reference sexual practices in a “coarse” manner. And this whole post started so innocently!

“Free Books. Free Minds.” This is the Wowio slogan.

Wowio is an ebook service which allows registered users to download up to 5 ebooks a day. The site has an attractive design and their selection, while not huge, contains enough great title to make the offer very enticing. All the reading is done using Adobe’s ereader software.

And really, who are we to argue with free?

Well, if you’re smart, and I know all you folks who read my blog are smart, you WILL want to know what’s up with the “free” goodness. In this case, there is indeed a “catch.” In exchange for these books, you have to give up lots of personal data regarding your marketing preferences, race, education, and have your id verified by some fairly restrictive means (e.g. you can send scanned identification, give them a credit card for verification, or use a government/militray/state email address). In my opinion, the reward is worth it. I’ve got my data and preferences plastered publicly all over the web anyways. You’ll have to make the determination for yourself.

If you decide you’d like to give this service a whirl, let me know and I’ll send you a token so I get credit. Yeah, I’m a useless shill.

Perhaps the reason I’m so excited about this is that I was already planning on purchasing a TiVo TCD648250B Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder within the next several months (please, please let the price keep coming down) and these features just increase the value proposition of that purchase, but I also think the slickness of this end-to-end implementation is seriously enticing and poses a distinct challenge for Apple and their new Apple tv - especially since Apple’s only major movie studio partnership to date is with Disney and relies on the hardware constraint of the space on your hard drive.

• While the Amazon Unbox Store does not yet support Macintosh (grrr, what is it with everyone and the single DRM’d Windows solution?), bypassing all of that and going straight to my living room is fine.
• My digital library can sit on Amazon’s Media Library, I won’t need to buy physical DVDs (my collection is pretty huge already), and I won’t need to invest in new hardware (e.g. hard drives) to hold Gigabytes/terabytes of information. This appeals to my greener sensibilities. Amazon and Tivo should drum that angle up in the marketing.
• If I were to idly speculate (which I love), this solution gives Amazon/Tivo the option of upgrading the quality of the movies fairly seemlessly to the end-user. After all, users won’t have to have the movie on their own hard drive. Amaozn/Tivo could detect when I want to reload a movie out of my digital library and give me the option as to the quality I prefer (so I can match it to my setup). Even better, I’d probably just set a preference for the highest quality possible at any given time.

Amazon/Tivo, if you give me a rental option before the rest of the market can get there (something akin to Netflix without the mailing), I’ll be yours forever!

Disclaimer: I am a current employee at Amazon.com but I had no prior knowledge of this implementation. I do not currently possess any future knowledge about this which is not public. Cheers!

Word from the New York Times is that Wal-Mart has introduced a new video download store today, the big news here being that they’ve inked deals with all six major Hollywood studios. Clicking a link from the New York Times article, this is the site I saw:

Yowzah. I know it’s beta but shouldn’t it look a bit better than that?

Luckily, I’m a savvy websurfer and know that I need to click ctrl+F5 to refresh all the css. What percentage of users know that? Doing that did at least yield the following:

Notice that the name error is still all screwed up.

I wonder of it’s going to support Macintosh? Not holding my breath. Will somebody please create an alternative to the iTunes downloadable movie solution that works on Macs?

For you writers out there, I wanted to post a brief review of a free new web application called, oddly enough, “Writer.” Writer is a web-based text editor designed to simplify the act of writing by focusing you on the task at hand. It’s pretty much a blank black square that you fill with words. If you’re like me, the day has enough distractions; there shouldn’t be a need to add to them hunting for formatting options within your “mondo-lithic” word processor.

Writer strips away all the cruft and gets you focused on the content. It has two “keyboard shortcuts” for you emacs fans: (ctrl+s) for save and (ctrl+n) for new. Think you can handle that, genius? If you can’t, there are some smallish, subdued links at the bottom of the browser window to help you do the same thing.

My favorite feature of the processor is the subtle way in which it focuses your eye on the text. As you type, the words in the area you are working are slightly more bold than the words you wrote a bit further up the page. As somebody who is a horrible typist, hunting and pecking along the keyboard at all times, every time I snap my head up to the screen, I see exactly where I am at, sharply delineated.

The other thing I just love about this little application is the “blog it” feature. I’ve been experimenting with many free options for writing content and exporting it to my blog (a custom-hosted wordpress blog). Due to its simplicity, this app is now the de facto standard for writing posts. When I am done writing the content of my post, I click “blog it,” enter the admin details for my wordpress account, and the content gets uploaded as a draft post to my dashboard. Nice! I love how even this is not over-complicated. The author of the app, a “developer for hire” by the name of John Watson has realized that his app is not a “fully integrated blog-posting solution” and instead just focused on helping you move the content to a place where you can add those last-minute html flourishes.

Signing up for an account is optional and only necessary if you intend to “save” files and access them from multiple computers. It’s about as easy as it gets, you just supply a unique username and password.

If you’re a blogger, student, or someone who writes fairly short snippets of text, anything other than a novel really, I’d recommend giving writer a try. There’s really no reason not to, considering the insanely low switching cost.