Day: May 19, 2003

Best Lists of Bests lists

No, that’s not a typo. Bill Turner (of Brilliant Corners) unveiled the Lists of Bests site last week. Built on the Amazon Associates web services API, it presents interactive versions of various “best of” lists for movies, books, and music; allows you to use them as checklists and remembers which ones you’ve read, watched, or heard from list to list; and allows you to rate and build your own lists. There’s some natural synergy here with Blogcritics, and with anyone who ever felt like John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity (which is curiously not in either movie or book lists on the site that I can see; have to rectify that).

What Bill has done is to move something like Amazon’s ListMania out from under the Amazon umbrella and make it more discoverable.

Wish list for Lists of Bests:

  • Allow me to add new items to a list without them being already on the site, by Amazon number or ISBN
  • …hmm, that’s it, really.

I want to be able to add things like the KEXP Top 90.3 albums lists, books that have profoundly moved me, the best works of comic fiction of all time, and other stuff that’s not constrained by the works on the Best Of lists.

Your advice requested

My trusty Nokia 3360 is about to go the way of all cellphones. Lately the display screen has stopped working. I can usually get the display back if I press hard above the screen on the case, but it’s getting to be a real pain.

For various reasons (primarily cost and lack of availability through my current carrier) I’m not considering a PDA/phone hybrid right now. Given that constraint, what cell phone should I buy?

Currently in the running: the Sony/Ericsson T68i (though I wasn’t impressed with the flimsy case when I picked one up on Saturday) or one of the new Nokia 3650s with the built in camera. Or the Motorola T720—though if the battery on that is anything like the battery in my old Motorola it’s way way out of the running.