Category: Uncategorized

More about Levy’s Newsweek piece on blogs… In addition to the essay itself, Levy began his own blog (A Blog About Writing About Blogs) in order to illustrate his point. It looks like a toy that he won’t develop, but it links to two sites (codestore and Escribitionist) where people were blogging about being interviewed before the piece saw the light of day. If I were a journalist, it might give me pause to realize that all my interviewees were going to publish their version of my interview that same day.

I was interviewed by someone at Newsweek magazine for an article about blogs. Naturally, I pictured myself with a big splashy cover story, torrents of traffic headed my way, a quick round on the talk shows to promote my new book, and a second home in Tuscany (something quite modest, really, in a Tuscan sort of way). But they wrote back and said they didn’t end up using any of the [boring] material from my [boring] interview. I can’t wait to tell Jay Leno this story. He’ll get a kick out of it.

The article in question, by Steven Levy, just appeared today, and it’s a good one, despite its shortcomings in the interviewee department (I was gratified to see that the woman who interviewed me was credited in the endnotes as having helped). Levy makes a few good points. One is that blogs deliver on the initial promise of the Internet: publishing made cheap and easy. Because self-publishing by blog truly is cheap and easy now, there is an uncountable proliferation of blogs out there, “dark matter,” as he calls it. Most of them are not particularly clever, but as a social phenomenon they are knitting people together, lots of them, helping them connect with like-minded fellow-bloggers. As Levy says,

The genius of this scheme is that you can get going without any mental heavy lifting. “There’s a low barrier to entry,” says Hourihan, one of the Pyra cofounders. “You don’t have to come up with a whole essay.” In fact, even a simple link and a wry comment can get you started. The blog’s raison d’etre can show up late to the party. By your comments and links, you eventually define your interests and ally yourself to the cluster of the Blog-osphere where you’re likely to find others like you.

I was touring around Wordsworth Books in Cambridge yesterday afternoon when I stumbled across
Linked: The New Science of Networks
by Albert-László Barabási. I don’t know about you, but I keep running across network theory everywhere I look, from biotech applications, to Internet protocols, to six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon style pop sociology. Networks are hot. Now is the time to learn about networks. Is this the book to learn from? The reviews on the jacket looked encouraging, but then, they always do.

Then I stumbled across a review of the book at peterme.com. He liked it. I bought the last book he recommended (“Word Freak,” a chronicle of the competitive Scrabble world), it was damn good. So I reckon I’ll get this one too.

A first! A noble, generous, and tasteful reader of the Rambles Weblog sent me a book from my Amazon wish list out of the clear blue sky. Now I can no longer complain that this site has never done anything to pay for itself.

And what was the book that arrived magically at my doorstep? It was R.A.C. Parker’s superb “The Second World War,” an everything-you-need-to-know-about-World-War-II-in-one-compact-paperback book. I recommend it without hesitation, particularly if you can get it for free. Read my (brief) review of the book at the Rambles Bookshop, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Paracelsus Rambles Weblog.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently playing around with the bookshop page. The backbone of it is an XML list that I manage by hand and then convert with an XSL stylesheet to HTML. The process works very well (although XSL is an oddball language to get used to), but I kept thinking there had to be an easier way than tedious data entry to get the author, title, and images all typed in. I figured someone had to have created a web service for this by now. A quick visit to xmethods.org gave me exactly what I was looking for in about three minutes. I don’t know who Cheeso is, but his book search web service did the trick. I wrote a little MATLAB code to format everything and resize the image, and presto, armed with only the ISBN number, I can generate a nicely formatted XML version of all the relevant book information plus a lovely little thumbnail. This is the first time I saw firsthand how valuable web services are going to be.

Here’s an article at Salon talking about the perennial problem of how a common resource, in this case the music downloading network Gnutella, can be ruined by the greedy. Gnutella bandwidth bandits “This incredibly selfish behavior causes a flood of query traffic. Although it maximizes results for the local user, it impacts the network greatly. If every client behaved like Qtrax, Gnutella would surely fall.” I’m sure Atlantic Records would be so sad if Gnutella were to fail because of greedy assholes. A cynic might observe that thieves hate thieves.

I work on a program called MATLAB, and once several years ago on a business trip to Singapore, we stopped at a place called Sim Lim Square, notorious for pirated software and ultra-cheap computers. Sure enough, it was easy to find someone selling the very latest version of MATLAB (and twenty other programs on the same CD) for $5. In the same store, the owner had posted numerous signs bearing the words “SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE TURNED OVER TO THE POLICE.” And who can blame him?

Has anyone ever told you to give them a call at 212-479-7990? That’s the number of the New York Rejection Line, a blow-off service provided free-of-charge to the New York community (or anyone untroubled by the 212 area code). Check out the tag line for RejectionLine.com: “Someone won’t leave you alone?
Give them ‘your’ number: 212-479-7990.” They’ve done a nice job of packaging up several kinds of self-serve rejection. You can preview them online here. As a rejectee you can opt to listen to a therapeutic comfort specialist, a sad poem, or a message that encourages you to cling to unrealistic hope.

I used to use SpyOnIt.com as my favorite notification mechanism. But no more. SpyOnIt looks very ill, ill unto death, sad to say. It was a good service, but then again, I never was clear on where their money came from. Now I’m using NotifyList.com — sign up in the box at the bottom of the left panel if you want to be notified when the Rambles weblog is updated. Of course, I’m not sure how NotifyList makes their money, but why worry? Everything’s going to be fine, right?

The 5K Challenge is back, and the final results have been tallied. The rules specify that you get no more than 5 kilobytes worth of web page to make whatever you want. As they say at the site:

The idea behind the contest is that the rigid constraints of designing for the web are what force us to get truly creative. Between servers and bandwidth, clients and users, HTML and the DOM, browsers and platforms, our conscience and our ego, we’re left in a very small space to find highly optimal solutions. Since the space we have to explore is so small, we have to look harder, get more creative; and that’s what makes it all interesting.

Or, as the poet James Falen has said, “Every task involves constraint; solve the thing without complaint.” Or more succinctly: shut up and dance. One of the highest rated entries is
Wolfenstein 5K, a three-d shooter crammed into 5K. Must be seen to be believed. On the clever concept side of things is the
Scale Model of the Solar System jammed into a long scrolling web page.

This is a good example of something that would not have happened before the web: Steve Silverman is a science teacher who happens to publish a site called Useless Information. I found it because I’m a fan of P.T. Barnum, and Silverman has a nice page about phrases P. T. Barnum was added to the language (it’s an impressive list, including “Siamese Twins”). Poking around the rest of the site, I found an article about Charles Ponzi, who always makes for a good read… do you know what the original Ponzi scheme was? The rest of the Useless site is like this: short punchy pieces about offbeat interesting topics. Silverman got so much good feedback about his web site, he ended up writing a book called Einstein’s Refrigerator.

Salon has a great piece this week about abandoned domain names: I come to bury IAmCarbonatedMilk.com, not to praise it. A site called Deleted Domains will tell you about domain names that are no longer being paid for, and therefore are being returned for public consumption. Go look at the Deleted Domains site… it’s hysterical. As the Salon article points out, registering domain names costs real money, so someone must have thought that these names were going to pay off. Which is sad when you look at some of these names. Some of the names are pure dot-com golden age nonsense: need a bib for your doggie? Log into doggiebibs.com. Others are out of favor: greedclub.com. Others are practical, like the watchful trio diownload.com, downkload.com, and downlioad.com, or the very reasonable faxedmail.com. You owe to yourself to go trawling through the weird stuff that people were willing to pay to own.