I designed and posted a new t-shirt over at cafepress - I p0wned you mom’s b0xen.
This is one of the great reaction T-Shirts of all time - you can’t even imagine the looks you get when you wear this shirt. It’s easy to tell the people that get it from the people that don’t, and it’s fun watching the reaction of both…
I Blogged about Radio Paradise over on Online Music Blog today:
Radio Paradise is old fashioned radio for the 21st Century - Each hour of music is carefully blended together to flow smoothly between different musical styles & genres - just like real DJs used to do on FM.
They don’t use the computer-generated playlists or “carefully researched music libraries” that have sucked the soul out of FM radio.
I think Radio Paradise is the best online radio station on the net today.
Jay, JD, and I have been having a running conversation about tags - not html, rfid, or pet ID tags, but user generated categories for things like blog posts, web pages, photos, etc. I think that some kind of Folksonomy will replace, or at least enhance the way the we now currently google for information. Obviously there are a lot of issues to be overcome before then, but even with my cursory understanding of the issues I can think of a couple of approaches that the computer science types that I work with haven’t been able to completely shoot down.
We have a project in the shop that has to be able to tag pages so that you can do a lookup and find other related pages by comparing the tags. As simple as this sounds, it turns out that at any scale at all this can take quite a bit of computing horsepower.
So of course that got me thinking, how does Technorati keep up with a million blogs, a million different tags, and 14 Million tagged blog posts? With all of the down time that they have been having they may be struggling with the issue too.
I’ve been interested in tags, and more importantly, folksonomy since it first appeared on my radar some time last year. Wikipedia defines it thusly:
Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification.
This phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, folksonomy produces results that reflect more accurately the population’s conceptual model of the information.
With Technorati the issue of tagging is mostly a phenomenon of users tagging their own blog posts, but the idea gets much more interesting with services like furl and Flickr. With these services users create something ( a web-page or digital photo ) and they can tag it. But I can tag it, too, as can you. With an entire community tagging things they have a much better chance of being defined correctly then if one person or entity has to define it.
Labor becomes very efficient when distributing the labor to the users tagging items, and takes advantage of a huge pool of specialized knowledge. Companies like Getty Images have employed tagging for years ( tagging all of their photos ) and it works well on the front end, but is very labor intensive. Paying dedicated taggers is not a sustainable business model when you are trying to tag everything.
While furl and del.icio.us are “bookmark managers”, and Flickr is for tagging photos, Technocrat for blogs, etc. what we need is an open, standard, architecture that allows and enables all of us to tag everything digital and provides an open framework so that everyone can take this info and develop uses for them that no one has even thought of yet.
There is a lot of talk these days about the emergence of media published by regular folks as opposed to the walled off “news organizations” that have provided us with “news” over the past few decades. Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine is a blog that covers this issue fairly well from a unique perspective. Jarvis straddles the line of blogger and media insider.
Big media still doesn’t seem to get blogs, they dismiss them while at the same time lamely trying to cash in on their trendiness, by, get this, having talking heads read blogs on T.V. They recycle tired leftover textural content that isn’t good enough for publication on their main sites, newspapers, and magazines and repackage them as “blogs”.
But blogs and news are only the beginning. Pod casts, while dismissed as “Wayne’s World for radio“, are a huge step forward for citizen publishers. Not only do they provide an easy way to distribute audio content, they “tag” that info with meta information so that this binary file full of audio information is searchable and categorizable. Video is next.
Back in March I blogged about the extinction of network programmers that decide when and what you get to watch on T.V. - How much cooler would it be to subscribe ( for a small monthly fee ) to Jack Black’s “blog” and get an RSS feed containing members only links to all of the audio and video he has created and released over the last month then it is subscribing to HBO to catch his show, and going to Tower Records to buy the latest piece of plastic released by Tenacious D? How many new artists, musicians, and comics will be discovered over the next decade because they self publish on the ‘Net?
I was talking to the guys the other day and said “every site should be a blog” and got the requisite sighs and rolling of the eyes. Although I was trying to be provocative, what I was really talking about is that every website should have the tools that blog sites do. They should be able to ping sites and software to notify them that they have been updated, they should have rel tags built into links, they should be able to do trackbacks, etc.
Blogging software empowers users with little technical skills to publish on the web. Bloggers don’t have to worry with FTP, HTML, CSS, etc. to publish - and while that upsets some geeks, so does most everything else ( like websites with images :^> ). I want the next Richard Prior to podcast. I want the next Pearl Jam to find its audience through its blog, I want the next Vonnegut to publish his book on the web one chapter at a time and get compensated through paypal.
I’ve been been skinnin’ Word Press alot lately for my own devices, and I started thinking, hey, why not make a word press theme and turn it loose. So I whipped up a little theme and posted it over on copacetix.
It is a simple theme based on the defualt Kubrik theme, but is a little denser with a smaller header graphic ( what is it with all of these huge blog headers any way? ).
Cheers.
I’ve re-launched Soundloads wrapped inside of Wordpress. We got lots of good feedback about the site ( like it needs an RSS feed, categories, comments, etc.) luckily all these features are available in wordpress….
I am really starting to get skinning WP too, I’ve almost got the Soundloads wp skin to look like the old site.
Check it out and download so good, free, legal music. I’m still working on getting all of the old content entered, but it should be back by next week.
Tamara and I have been incorporating Portobello mushrooms into our meals as a substitute for red meat. She has this great way of cooking them on the stove in some soy sauce and serves them with organic spinach pasta and a vinaigrette.
As good as that dinner is I decided to try something a little different with them this time around. I got the idea for some soup by watching an oriental cooking show on the food channel. The soup that they were making is nothing like the recipe below, but did inspire it. So without further ado, JTk’s Hot and Nasty Soup.
First, take one large clove of fresh garlic, peel it, put it in some aluminum foil, and roast it in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes.
Puree 2 small ripe tomatoes, 1 small red onion, and a couple of peeled carrots and add them to 4 cups of water in a pot over medium heat. Plunk in 4 beef bullion cubes and your roasted garlic. Break out your grater and grate up a tablespoon of fresh ginger root, add it and 1/4 teaspoon red pepper, a 1/4 teaspoon basil and a 1/4 teaspoon salt. Of course, as always, add a bay leaf.
Chop up 4 medium portabello mushroom tops and 2 medium sized potatoes and add them to the soup. Lower the heat and cover and let cook slowly for the next couple of hours.
The soup is not for everyone, it has a bit of a bite, but I like it. It’s not really nasty, but there is this old joke about this hot and sour soup we used to get back home, but that is another story….
Wrote a review of this week’s Real Time with Bill Maher over on propagasm. I thought it was a better show then the last few and Gore Vidal and Charles Barkley were awesome.
Maher couldn’t pass up the obligatory Bush Administration appointee David Hager reference - the gynecologist that was “missing” his wife’s preferred orifice while she was sleeping and ended up raping her in an uncomfortable place.
Click on over to read the whole thing.
Firefox’s growth has been slowing up for a while now evidently it has slipped again. I think it is obvious why it has been trending towards slower growth - all of the geeks and nerds already use it. It is time that we ( the friends of firefox ) take it upon ourselves to spread the use.
A couple of weeks ago I got both of my folks to switch from IE and Outlook Express to Firefox and Thunderbird. Don was already using Firefox, but didn’t realize I had installed Thunderbird and thought he had to use outlook. From a security outlook ( ha! ) using Thunderbird may well be more important them using Firefox - in my experience more scumware comes in through outlook then anywhere else.
So I got my folks switched over - and I started thinking how many other geeks have hooked up their immediate family? Prolly more then a few. So if the previous growth has been from geeks and the immediate family of geeks, who are the 90% of users still trapped using IE and Outlook?
I am thinking that there are a certain percentage of folks that use IE because they love everything Microsoft. I know it is hard to believe, but they are out there. Similarly there are folks that have a vested interest in using MS stuff, MCSE’s, stockholders, MS employees, .Net developers, etc. I think this group makes up maybe 25% of users.
Then there is the group of users that is locked in because of MS proprietary features, Active X, or sites that they have to use and that only work with Internet Explorer. I think this number is smaller then it used to be, maybe 10% of all users. There are also ~5% of users that use something other then a browser from MS or the Mozilla foundation.
If my numbers are anywhere close to reality, that means that there is only 60% percent of the market available to Firefox and that it already has 10%. This also means that there are still fully half of all Internet users that can be converted to Firefox users, and if they were, that firefox could overthrow IE and become the dominant browser.
So how do we get there from here? If every ( non fully ms ) geek and his immediate family are already converted, what do we do? We have to evangelize and proselytize. We have install Firefox everywhere that we find an acquaintance using Internet Explorer and explain the benefits of switching. We have to go beyond our immediate family and convince casual friends - and their friends to give up their dependence on insecure, buggy, Internet software from Microsoft.
And it’s not a hard sell ( like linux :^> ) Firefox is better, period. There is nothing new to learn, its just as easy to use, easy to install, and just as pretty. Thunderbird is great, at least as good as outlook express, and much more secure.
So go forth and turn someone on to Firefox, if we all did it this weekend we could reverse that slow growth trend by Monday.
I’ve always bee wary of those “get a free iPod” type offers figuring that, as I have been told, there is no free lunch. That is until I was in communication with a friend ( who shall remain nameless but hates clowns…). He was talking about his new computer, and that he had gotten it for free.
Not only that, but it turns out that he has gotten a lot of free stuff:
This impressive list combined with this being a guy that I trust and respect made me wonder if I had been to quick to dismiss these “free” offers programs. As it turns out they are not exactly free, you have to sign up for an “offer” and that usually involves a credit card. To be fair the charge on the card is negligible ( one offer is only $5 ) and that same offer is a breeze to cancel after you use up that first five bucks. Then you need to convince x number of other people to sign up for one of the offers.
These programs are through Gratis and OfferCentric, and they seem to be legit - I have since verified this with a few other colleagues who are now sporting their free iPods. When you go to sign up and complete your first offer it looks as if these programs have the best reviews: Tickle IQ Test, Zooba, Consumer Info, Blockbuster Online, and StarClub Rewards.
So if you are interested in working this MLM type deal and trying to get a “free” iBook or windows type laptop - sign up with this link so that I can get credit for the refferal. This is an experiment for me and will continue bloggin the progress, report any problems, and then follow up when it is all over.