Category: Internet

Okay, so I was a little inaccurate in my last post about LibraryThing; it’s not an overnight sensation, having been launched back in August of last year. In fact, Alex Barnett (who was in my home aggregator but not my Bloglines subscriptions; rectified) wrote about them back in January, as he was gentle enough to remind us this week.

Alex’s point bears thinking about. LibraryThing is an online service that makes it possible to get your data back out, in a variety of ways—RSS and blog badges and mobile access, of course, but also plain ol’ tab-delimited or CSV export. And that’s pretty cool.

In the meantime, the rest of my books have finished importing (guess they were pretty backed up!), so I’m off to play with it a little.

Via BoingBoing, this spectacular casemod brings memories of my childhood flooding back. My favorite Banana Jr. moment may still be the first strip: as the computer dances around the panel, Oliver Wendell Jones reads from the directions, “And most importantly… it turns off.” And the Banana Jr. collapses backwards, its feet up in the air, cartoon smoke coming from its case.

The Banana Jr. was a nice evenhanded mockery of personal computing in its day. Oliver Wendell Holmes was always hacking into remote systems (my fave: the New York Times headline “Reagan Calls Women ‘America’s Little Dumplins”), a quintessentially IBM PC activity. But the speaking, dancing computer was all Macintosh. I was almost disappointed when I got my SE/30 that the resemblance wasn’t closer. And Breathed was legendary for merchandising his characters everywhere (to the point that Opus made a joke about little plush versions of himself in one strip), but he missed a killer opportunity: stands for original Macs in the form of Banana Jr. legs. They would’ve been beautiful.

Following up my initial LibraryThing report from yesterday, last night I exported my Delicious Library to text (necessary because the underlying XML file was bigger than the 2 MB limit for imports) and uploaded it to the service. In spite of being overloaded by WSJ and BoingBoing traffic, the site was responsive; it reported all the ISBNs that it was going to add to my library, told me how many others were already ahead of mine to look up, and said that it should be done in about 10 hours. It beat that estimate and had my catalog of books live by 8 am this morning—unfortunately, though it was only part of it, since I hit the 200-book limit that comes with free membership.

The UI is a dream. You can view your books as a list or a virtual “shelf” displaying all the covers (fans of Delicious Library will recognize this view). Clicking on a title in shelf view toggles some options—look up the book in Amazon, view your information about it, view the social information (tags, ratings, reviews, weighted recommendations), or edit the information. In addition to the obvious features (tags, etc.), editing the information provides one very useful function, the ability to change cover art to one of a dozen variant editions, to art provided by another user, or to upload your own cover art. Very slick.

Similarity is an interesting feature, as is the ability to browse to see who else has a book in their library. I also like the automated tag clouds, and my personal author cloud is telling (though, again, skewed by the fact that only part of my library is represented). I look forward to exploring some of the additional social networking features over time.

The bottom line is that just a day or two after its launch, LibraryThing is shaping up to be a really interesting way to explore books, authors, and other people’s reading habits. Fun!

The Wall Street Journal pointed me to LibraryThing, a new social networking site based on the contents of your bookshelves. I dug into it and found a very cool feature: you can give it your Delicious Library database and it will import all the books (based on recognizing ISBN numbers) into your online bookshelf.

I haven’t played with it yet but you can bet I will when I get home. This is a near perfect marriage of offline and online functionality: scan a book with your iSight, upload the record in one step, and you’ve published it online. Very cool. Thought this was functionality that should have been in Delicious Library from the beginning.

It looks like Smart cars, which I saw for the first time on my trip to Paris in 1999, will finally be making their way to the US market. At least, that’s what rumors and unnamed sources say in such prominent places as the Wall Street Journal and Der Spiegel. Think that’s a lot of fuss for unverifiable rumors? You probably haven’t filled up recently. The nifty two seater Smart is poised to enter the market at a banner time for small vehicles thanks to soaring post-Katrina fuel prices; fuel economy is reported to range from 46 MPG city to 70 MPG highway. Of course, they crumple like an aluminum can if you breathe on them wrong, but honestly—after my most recent $40 tank of gas, I’m thinking that sounds like a reasonable trade-off for a lower fuel bill.

If nothing else, the Smart should set a bar for other automakers as the subcompact market heats up. Maybe now we’ll finally see the Volkswagen Polo in the US.

I’ve defended Google Books in the past because I think it provides real value. To be able to search across books both in and out of print and offer links to purchase is important, and to be able to access out of print pieces of our cultural heritage on line is also valuable. In that light, I certainly think that Google’s decision to make parts of its Google Books corpus more visible, starting with the complete plays of Shakespeare, is a smart one; it provides some much needed visible value with which it can back up its arguments in favor of opt-out indexing, as Michael Arrington at TechCrunch points out.

My beef with their approach is that it doesn’t go far enough, and there are other offerings that go farther. Example: the Google Books Shakespeare page doesn’t offer an easy way to search across all the plays from the landing page. Even if you click into an individual play there is no Shakespeare-wide search. (Though I did appreciate the verisimilitude of a reader’s finger in the scan of the image on Page 6 of The Comedy of Errors—hypocrite lecteur! —mon semblable!)

By contrast, the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center has a fully searchable version of the Globe Edition (1866) online, as well as transcriptions of the First Folio and a side-by-side comparison of the two editions, plus other critical resources assembled in one place on its Shakespeare page. And you can search Shakespeare in context of the rest of the Modern English collection, or within the scope of a given play. There are even ebooks, in multiple formats, for each of the Shakespeare plays.

I certainly see the technological differences between the two offerings (heck, I helped to put the Etext Center one together). For one thing, there are very few scanned images at the Etext Center, while with Google Books you get to see every page in context. For another, the Etext Center is finite while the stated scope of Google Books is infinite. But it seems to me that the Etext Center is doing far more with its limited resources than Google has done so far with its limitless resources.

(And yes, I’m aware that Google provides an advanced book search that allows searching across all books whose author is Shakespeare. But first, doing so exposes results from prefaces, does not de-duplicate across multiple editions of the book, and otherwise returns a lot of extratextual information of dubious usefulness. And second, Google could easily have exposed this as a scoped search on the front page and chose not to do so. What here they miss, their toil should strive to mend.)

Found on a future bookshelf, thanks to the fine folks at Wired:

Dianetics Revisited: the Truth About Scientology.

Check the author. (Use the sideways view at BookOfJoe if you need help.)

Hee hee hee.

Especially funny is its placement a few books down from The GTDism Reader: The Last Testament of the Prophet David Allen. (Merlin Mann, are you listening?)

Also good: the byline on Look Young Forever.

Dave points out a wonderfully lame Business 2.0 quotation, on a par with Steve Ballmer’s “most common form of music on an iPod is ‘stolen’”: “In an ideal digital world, we’d be able to buy copyrighted music and videos wherever we wanted, not just on a designated store. But that’s been the fate of iPod users, who can only buy content off of Apple’s iTunes Music Store.”

And the second paragraph makes the points that I would have: you can also use eMusic or your own CDs. But it’s dismissive of those two options. Why? Why is it journalistically acceptable to dis eMusic’s limited selection and limited market share while in the same breath complaining that iTunes users can’t experience restrictive DRM from a bunch of content producers with a vested interest? And who benefits from the type of reporting that makes these other music experiences sound desirable?

Well, Navio, for one. But I don’t think the customers win from yet another model to lock them into restrictive licensing of content that cares more about “protecting digital assets and maintaining brand control” than it does the rights of consumers.

Dave points to one of the announcements from Google Press Day today: Google Trends. The publicly facing application shows trending for search terms over several years, and compares it to the volume of news items that contain the search terms.

When I was working on online BI at Microsoft, we had an internal application very much like this that I helped launch for Microsoft.com search analysis. The bells and whistles were different but the display and the idea were the same: by looking at what people are searching for, you can gauge the popularity of a concept.

Dave fell into a trap that we discovered, too: neglecting to check synonyms when comparing the popularity of concepts. While RSS beats podcasting and blogs in the sample search Dave did, the term blog (singular) handily beats RSS and podcast.

So synonyms are obviously one issue. According to the About page, you can address this by grouping terms together, but I couldn’t make this work. Bug? Overall volume is another issue. Did you notice that the y-axis isn’t labeled?

But it’s still fun—particularly when you can take advantage of common names to tell a good joke. Hey ma, I’m bigger than Dave!

Arrgh. I was all excited about the prospect of switching to Verizon’s FiOS this summer when it becomes available in Arlington and getting three times our current speed from Comcast down (and about 10x up) at the same price. Then I saw this Slashdot pointer to a Boston.com article: an appeals court ruled that Verizon can charge dial-up customers on a per-minute basis, even if the number being dialed is a local call.

On the one hand, I suppose that Verizon is free to set whatever dialing and billing rules it wants—after all, why should it change now? On the other hand, there is no way that I would consider doing more business with a company that is capable of pulling a stunt like this.

I suppose that some strategist somewhere figured that this was a win-win for Verizon: tons of money from dial-up customers in the short term, and tons more DSL customers in the long term. I think this is a lose-lose: if customers are informed that Verizon pulls this crap, they should be fleeing the company like a sinking ship.

In the meantime, the small local ISP gets screwed.

What a wonderful business model.

Greg Greene tipped me off to the new satellite coverage of Europe in Google Maps, which led to a minor productivity drain earlier today. See: Florence, Längenfeld and Sölden in Austria, the Tower of London, even a certain well-known mouse.

One caveat: you can’t search the map in Austria—or apparently in Romania. And searching in Switzerland is a little funny: Google finds Luzern (but not Lucerne) but Geneva and not Genève, and shows Genève on the map.

It’s apparently Perpetual Motion Day today on the web. Following up my rambling about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and business models that claim to “create value,” I spotted the following two articles. Can you see the common theme?

• CNet: Getting gas from trash. “The two by-products of from digester would be methane, a liquid fertilizer, and solid compost. Eten envisions selling each of the products wholesale…. Eten said he was inspired by William McDonough, a designer who co-authored a book called Cradle to Cradle, which argues that a product lifecycle can be designed with little, or even beneficial, impact on the natural environment.”
• BBC: Natural light “to reinvent bulbs.” “Previous attempts to make OLEDs like this have largely failed to make an impact because traditional phosphorescent blue dyes are very short lived. The new polymer uses a fluorescent blue material instead which lasts much longer and uses less energy. The researchers believe that eventually this material could be 100% efficient, meaning it could be capable of converting all of the electricity to light, without the heat loss associated with traditional bulbs.”

Yes, folks, trying to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a core part of your business plan is probably a bad idea. In the first case, it’s certainly laudable to try to do something about garbage production, but the question is: can selling methane, compost, and fertilizer produce enough money to offset transportation and holding costs? Probably if the raw material is free… but there’s no free ride in the world and I would expect waste management companies or the supermarkets providing the raw material to eat up any profit margins to be had from converting their wastes to usable products.

In the second case, the researchers have either been misquoted or neglected their thermodynamics education. Heat is always a byproduct of the translation from one form of energy to another, unless that translation does no useful work at all.