Kevin Killian’s 1,525 reviews have earned him a ranking of 119th as an Amazon reviewer. He reviews books, movies, cookware, clothing…just about anything. But Killian is also a poet. Hooke Press has published a small edition—200 copies—of his Selected Amazon Reviews, edited by Brent Cunningham. The blurb for the book describes it as “Subversive and delightful modifiations to a pervasive online art form.” (Killian is prone to typos.)

The delightful meta-trail ends here, though: The book is not listed in Amazon.

(Thanks to Trebor Scholz for the link.) [Tags: kevin_killian amazon genre meta reviews everything_is_miscellaneous -berkman]

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Here’s an amazingly high res photographic image (a series of tiles, actually) of Boston. [Tags: boston]

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“What we really expect out of the Democrats is for them to treat us as they would liked to have been treated.”

—John Boehner, former House minority leader [Tags: politics]

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The Wall Street Journal reports on NewsAtSeven.com, a beta site from Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Lab, that automatically aggregates a news broadcast, hosted by an avatar named “Alex.” (Actually, it’s Alix from Half-Life 2. In fact, the the whole presentation seems based around Half-Life machinima.)

As it stands, it’s hard to tell how impressive the results are. The voice is clearly doing text-to-speech conversion, but I have no idea idea where the text is coming from. The editions I sampled are short and coherent, but for all I know, the system just picked a topic—e.g., Will Ferrell’s new movie—located a news report on the Web, and read it. The graphics are appropriate, but, again, I don’t know that they’re any better than what you’d get if you took the top results from a search for “Will Ferrell” at YouTube, Google Images, etc. So, I don’t know what’s supposed to impress me. I’m not saying it’s not impressive. I just don’t know how.

(Yes, the project could use a good marketer.) [Tags: newsatseven news everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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BuzzMetric‘s Matthew Hurst’s excellent blog, “Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media,” has run some great examples of why sentiment analysis—figuring out the attitudes expressed about a topic—is so damn hard. Here‘s someone posting about Steve Rubel and Wal-Mart: “Certainly, if you don’t post about it, I’m personally not going to not respect you for not doing so, however others may.” Let’s see a computer make sense of that!

Of course, that’s just overly-complex writing that even humans have trouble parsing. But how about this example, drawn from a review of the Su Hong restaurant: “When we moved from the area, my wife’s most frequent complaint was that no one made orange peel beef like Su Hong.” As Matthew points out, it’s a positive review in the form of a complaint.

Sentiment analysis remains real hard. For judging overall market trends, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but I’d love to see some analysis of how good it actually is right now. [Tags: sentiment marketing matthew_hurst everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Oxfam America’s “Unwrapped” program lets you buy gifts online for those who really really need your help. As is Oxfam’s wont, the gifts help a poor family sustain itself: For $20, you can irrigate a farmer’s land for two months, for $30 you can plant 50 trees, and for $120 you can start a village savings group. [Tags: oxfam charity]

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DayLife looks like a very interesting new site for assembling news sliced the way you want it.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch rips into it (even though he’s an investor) because, among other things, it has no RSS feeds. (It does have an API). I suspect that that’s because it’s conceived as a contextualized destination. Arrington thinks it won’t succeed because it won’t draw “news junkies,” which seems right. But maybe it’s not aiming at news junkies. Maybe it’s aiming at people looking for an online way of reading news that makes it easier to browse clusters of what they’re interested in. I think the slick, human-friendly look is a plus, although I haven’t played with it enough to know whether it’s going to become a permanent destination for me. My main hesitation: While I like it’s presentation of multiple sources and opinions, and i love it’s focus on clustering, I would like it to learn what are my interests. I’m also suprised that it doesn’t let readers leave comments.

Jeff Jarvis, another investor, gives a more enthusiastic write-up than TechCrunch’s. Craig Newmark is another investor. I have a lot of respect for Jeff and Craig’s understanding of, and commitment to, the news revolution. [Tags: daylife news everything_is_miscellaneous media techcrunch jeff_jarvis craig_newmark]

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Sean Coon has a terrific post reverse engineering the metadata at work at Musicovery, a Web radio site that has a Flashy UI that displays cuts by mood as well as genre, etc. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous sean_coon music metadata taxonomy ]

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Disney is launching a social network for kids. My knee-jerk reaction: Yech.

Gavin O’Malley at Online Media Daily has a more considered reaction. He points to the apparent failure of Wal-Mart’s social network for kids (“The Hub”—an awfully grown-up name), and worries that having parental controls will kill the Disney effort as well. I agree with Gartner’s Andrew Frank that it’s likely to be all product placement all the time…and, if so, I hope kids reject it.

But, of course, I haven’t seen it and don’t know what it’ll be like. Maybe Disney is smarter than that. [Tags: disney social_networks gavin_omalley ]

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I spent all last night obsessively composing (or was I dreaming that I was composing?) this blog post that explains that I spent all last night trying to get my body into exactly the right configuration so I could fall asleep. If a single fold of blanket were wrong, I had to fix it, but in so doing, I would knock some other element out of kilter. But the obsessive micromanagement of my bedware was only part of the obsession. The rest of it was the focus on writing this post. (And, no, this is not exactly the post I composed while obsessing. For one thing, it’s more meta than that.)

I honestly don’t know if I fussed all night or if I only dreamed that I did.

Less fever today. I’m actually going to tackle my email this morning, before my extended fasting (yes, I’m drinking water) makes me loopier than I already am.

Our son came down with it last night. He seems to be about six hours behind me. He does not moan. [Tags: illness fever tmi]

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