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December 22, 2004
TrackCap.com trackpoint.com sells nothing but the nibs, nubbins, caps or whatever you call them for the IBM ThinkPad Trackpoint – you know, the little sticky-uppy thing between the G and H on Thinkpads. $10 for 2, so maybe they’re doing ok, especially since you can get 6 for $10 from IBM. (Shipping is free at both places.)
Trackpoint.com also sell screws for the IBM Ultrabay at a buck each, so apparently they’re branching out. Radical.
December 21, 2004
Google’s logo today features playful polar bears. I assume that if you come to Google from the southern hemisphere, it doesn’t have a winter theme, but I don’t know how to check…
Chris Anderson has signed with Hyperion (Random House in the UK) to do a book about The Long Tail, and has started a blog devoted to it. (The long tail is the social effect of the Web apart from the hit-heavy, glamorous side of it.)
This makes my head hurt – indirection makes me sweat – but I think that Michael Lenczner is proposing a way to use del.icio.us not only to track the comments we leave on people’s blogs, but to bundle together different people’s comments into one RSS feed so that you can see, for example, where all of the contributors to Many2Many are commenting.
But, I got this wrong in several rounds of correspondence, so I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten it wrong again; I am user but not a power user of del.icio.us. Read Michael’s blog entry to get the straight scoop (and to get the scoop straight).
Copyscape finds pages that repeat phrases you used on your page. It bills itself first as a way of tracking down the nogoodniks who are plagiarising your valuable content, but the page also mentions its non-violent egosurfing capabilities. [Thanks to Dave Rogers for pointing this out. He found it in Ian Poynter’s newsletter.]
December 20, 2004
Here’s an odd idea. The Urban Eyes proposal by by Marcus Kirsch (UK) and Jussi Angesleva (Ireland) would feed pigeons tiny RFID transmitters embedded in bird seed. When a transmitting pigeon passed close enough to one of the CCTV cameras watching the streets, the camera would transmit a video image to the Urban Eyes server. You would then see how the city looked to a particular pigeon in the 12 hours between ingestion and excretion.
This won third prize in the Fused Space contest. The winning project proposed setting up light sticks on a small Swedish island; lights would be lit when people visited an online memorial for the dead. (I think.)
[Thanks to We Make Money Not Art for the info.]
The award for the most narcissistic performance by a recognized actor in a real movie, where the aforementioned narcissism is completely undeserved is ….
…Mickey Rourke, after plastic surgery that pulled his face back so tight that it stretched his nose holes, in The Last Outlaw.
(FWIW, I discovered this while lying awake with jetlag at 2:30 am. I may never sleep again.)
BlogExplosion is designed to boost traffic to your site by funneling members there according to how many members’ sites you visit. I’ve been playing with it for the opposite reason: It randomly shows me blogs I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.
In their latest newsletter to members, they list the following feature enhancement:
List blogs by country
The directory got an update so that you can now list blogs by country too. This makes it much easier to locate those blogs from the same region as you.
Ack! Isn’t this feature more valuable as a way of finding blogs that aren’t from the same region? That’s really what I’m looking for.
The front page of the Boston Globe has a good article on podcasting by Peter J. Howe, a staff writer — they didn’t farm this out to one of their (excellent) tech writers. Peter writes:
If Internet-based weblogs turned everyone into a potential newspaper columnist, and digital cameras let them become photojournalists, podcasting is promising to let everyone with a microphone and a computer become a radio commentator.
After the fold, he gets to what the effect podcasting will have on broadcasting: With the ability to mix home-grown creations with an increasing choice of mainstream offerings, we’ll get program allegiance, not channel allegiance.
[Note: The Globe link will break in a day or two.]
December 18, 2004
Interesting article by Di Luo in Computer Gaming world about the government using games not to recruit and train for war (e.g., America’s Army) but to teach more peaceful tactics. Tactical Language Learning System and Virtual Environment Cultural Training for Operational Readiness teach cultural sensitivity. The former is built on the Unreal engine and the latter uses the LithTech engine that brought us so much gamey fun in No One Lives Forever and Tron. For example, VECTOR players learn to understand other cultures’ body language, and also get extra points for head shots.
The article also reports that the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict has created A Force More Powerful that’s designed “to train activists in the planning and tactics needed to bring about political change.” There’s some great stuff on the ICNC page reminding us how successful organized non-violence has been. It makes you wonder what we could have done in Iraq if we had been more imaginative.
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