misc.ellaneous

A top 5 list of lists of lists

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:29:20 -0500

1. Fimoculous — most categories

2. Metacritic — data pr0n

3. Acclaimed Music — spreadsheets!

4. Largehearted Boy — most complete for books and movies

5. Kottke — superfluous

These ads for Google Chrome are amazing. Via Coudal Partners, as...

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:56:31 -0500

These ads for Google Chrome are amazing. Via Coudal Partners, as was the last post.

Ryan Tym Graphic Design - Hitchcock Collection

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 09:25:00 -0500

Ryan Tym Graphic Design - Hitchcock Collection

"That a community may no longer please its creator is hardly relevant. Once community exists, it is..."

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:41:30 -0500

“That a community may no longer please its creator is hardly relevant. Once community exists, it is not about the person who created the conditions for its existence; it’s about the people who inhabit the space. If you don’t believe that, you have no business creating anything.”

- Jeffrey Zeldman

luckyshirt: Beware the default settings in the new tumbr iPhone...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:19:38 -0500

luckyshirt:

Beware the default settings in the new tumbr iPhone app.

While you all eagerly await my next entry, I give you this video...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:32:06 -0500

While you all eagerly await my next entry, I give you this video about procrastination.

A stick in the dirt

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:59:00 -0500

This is a blog post. I should have written one yesterday, but I was tired, and I rationalized. I knew that if I didn’t post, I’d be out of the running for a Nablopomo prize. But what were those prizes? A hand-embroidered bookmark? No-sew fleece blanket? Lovely items crafted by lovely people, I’m sure, but not worth running myself ragged. “This is for me, not for the prizes,” I thought. “I’ll do two tomorrow.” And then I went to sleep.

I wish I hadn’t. With a few minutes to go, obviously I won’t be writing two posts today. But even if I did, I think I did myself a disservice by letting myself break the post-a-day rule. This may not be about the prizes, but it’s still about posting every day.

And by the way, I definitely did not just edit this entry to move the timestamp back a minute.

The first day of the rest of my month

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:59:00 -0500

To try something again after many failed attempts, I always have to convince myself that something external has changed. Otherwise I’d be trying something over and over expecting different results, and people tell me that was Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity… although frankly I’ve heard that so many times that I don’t believe it at all.

Anyway right now, I’m seeing a lot of externalities in my life change all at once, and it’s inspiring me to try a lot of things that have tripped me up in the past.

I’ve joined a new gym in my neighborhood, and it’s done something unprecedented: made me look forward to working out. Meanwhile, I’ve kept a food and exercise journal on my iPhone, which has helped me cut my calorie intake. I’m back on the Shangri-La Diet, and it seems to be doing its thing again. (It helped me lose weight a few years ago, but I went off it, and eventually gained the weight back.) For the first time in over two years, I really believe I can get in shape.

From literally (literally literally) as far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be an entrepreneur. For the first time all the pieces have come together, and it’s actually happening. I have a solid plan, the perfect partner, and an insanely great product in the pipeline. I can actually call myself a “founder.” All I need is a business card — once my partner and I decide what to call our enterprise.

Finally, there’s this. I’ve known for years that I need to start a blog. I could probably fill a couple shelves with all the notebooks I’ve filled with ideas to blog about. It’s so important to me that it’s tied up with a lot of anxiety. That’s why I’ve only tried to get into blogging a couple of times, and never stuck with it past a handful of entries. But this time will be different. It’s a new beginning. A new month. National Blog Posting Month. ~~And I will post every damn day this month, or die trying.~~

~~Ok, that’s morbid. I could get a tattoo that says “loser.” Or donate to the Republican Party. Something bad. We can negotiate, if it comes to that. Which it won’t.~~

EDIT: Starting… now.

How’s that for message control?

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:31:39 -0400

How’s that for message control?

Toscanini’s (an amazing ice cream shop in Cambridge, MA)...

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 10:03:57 -0400

Toscanini’s (an amazing ice cream shop in Cambridge, MA) has a Wiffiti screen, which is kind of like an animated Facebook wall. People can text in messages and MMS pictures, and they go up on the screen. The screen also cycles between various Twitter searches that the owners set. At Toscanini’s, they have one screen that displays mentions of their Twitter name @tosci, and another with search results for “Jon Stewart” (don’t ask me why). Anyway, I decided to try and get on both screens. I expected there would be a delay, but a few minutes later, my tweet was on the screen. TRIUMPH!

(After taking this picture, I submitted it with the headline “ZOMG RECURSION!!!”)

Corralling the Cool Kids

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 01:55:00 -0400

The more social Google Reader gets, the more it vindicates my tendency to eschew the blogs everyone else is reading. All my friends are reading Scoble, so when he says something interesting I know it’ll trickle down — like it just did:

So, the other day when I signed onto FourSquare for the first time in a while I found 442 people waiting for me. As I looked through the names I saw the same names that had first added me onto Twitter. And Dopplr. And Google Reader. And Facebook. And FriendFeed. And others.
You see, there’s a gang of about 2,000 people who really control tech industry hype and play a major role in deciding which services get mainstream hype (this gang was all on Twitter by early 2007 — long before Oprah and Ashton and all the other mainstream celebrities, brands, and journalists showed up).

It so happens that for lately I’ve been thinking about such bellwether types, although the group I have in mind is larger and more heterogeneous than Scoble’s Gang of 2,000. These aren’t just the first to discover the next big web app. Among them will be some of the earliest discoverers of just about any cool new thing on the internet. For lack of a better term, let’s call them “the cool kids.”

A few years ago, all the cool kids hung out at del.icio.us, and made it the nerve center of the hive mind. I never really took to tagging my pages. The main way I used del.icio.us was to reap the bounty of other people’s discoveries.

Aside from its critical mass of cool kids, the most powerful thing about del.icio.us was its metadata structure. Not just that it let you find sites filed under given tags. If anything, I was more interested in the ability to work backwards, finding people who had bookmarked interesting urls — and then see what else they bookmarked.

Though a lot of people still use the (now capitalized and dedotted) Delicious, there’s little doubt that it’s no longer the hot spot for the cool kids. There’s a new nerve center of the hive mind: Twitter.

But Twitter’s a different clump of neurons. In some ways, it’s better for keeping tabs on the cool kids. There’s more information, you can track it in really real time, and it’s freeform — not just links. But the flip side of this freeform nature is that it lacks even the minimal structure that has made ~~del.icio.us~~ Delicious so easy to navigate. Hashtags began as a hack solution to this problem and still are, even if Twitter has embraced them as an official feature.

There’s a lot of talk and work going on about analyzing Twitter trends, including trending links. But trends were just a small part of the utility of Delicious. Is it possible to add some structure to the links people tweet, to make Twitter a more useful tool for finding things in specific categories — rather than just popular stuff and general trends?