Facebook Friend Wheel... pointless but pretty

I'm finding my way around Facebook these days -- lots of familiar faces. And, at least in some of the groups, colleagues are discussing topics they used to discuss on their blogs... so it's almost essential to be there.

And there's some fun stuff.... via Roo Reynolds comes word of the Facebook Friend Wheel. A pointless but pretty map of your friends and their relationships. Here's mine!

    Technorati : facebook, friend wheel

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 05:00pm in Gadgets & Toys, Smart Communities | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0)

Desirable Roasted Coffee is not G rated...

While it doesn't exactly explain a month's hiatus from the Noble Blogosphere, I will say I've been put off blogging ever since -- that is, since 4:04 PM today -- I found out my blog is G-rated. G-rated? Only one thing to do. Jump back into the fray and get that rating to R -- at the very least -- by Christmas.

Hopkins is crowing that he's G-rated, but he would be what with that rock wallaby case coming up. Kami Huyse is G-rated, too. Hat tip to both.

    Technorati : Kami Huyse, Lee Hopkins, Mingle2, blog ratings

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:17pm in Blog Management, Gadgets & Toys, Humor | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (3)

Miss Dewey: a search engine for Lee Hopkins

Brother Lee Hopkins, who likes a pretty ankle almost as he likes a good Googling, can have both with Miss Dewey, a fetching, though tart-tounged, virtual receptionist.

Via PSFK

Read more "Miss Dewey: a search engine for Lee Hopkins"

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:11pm in Bizarre & Amusing, Gadgets & Toys, Humor | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2)

And if WikiBios wasn't tacky enough... Huggable Urns

My dear friend The Organic Goddess is good -- often too good -- at taking the pulse of low culture. Today, she sends word of Huggable Urns: pillows and teddy bears stuffed with the ashes of your dearest departed. That's right: pillows and teddy bears stuffed with the ashes of your dearest departed.

I like this model, personally. It sells for $99 (someone knows her retail pricing rules). It is 14" high and 20" around the chest, which I think should be ample for storing even my most corpulent relatives (and maybe a couple of cats, too: Huggable Urns aren't just for people!). Please note the details: the white pillow looking stuff behind the bear are actually angel's wings! And who cannot be moved by the discreet plea "Hold Me!" stitched on the paw? Isn't it just too too? I am not sure if the frame is included. But that's not a biggie, because the relative I have in mind would look better in something brushed chrome.

Technorati Tags: Huggable Urns, Organic Goddess

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:47pm in Bizarre & Unexpected, Gadgets & Toys | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0)

Bibliophilian Joy! LibraryThing

The neat thing about social media is that, once in a while, some developer comes up with a really sweet, rox-my-sox, idea. And, no I don't mean digg, flickr, or del.iciou.s (I never know where to put the dots).

Today, I lost my heart to LibraryThing. LibraryThing lets you catalog  your books, tag them, then share your library online with other users. It's been around since August 2005. Today, it has 47,670 -- make that 47,671 -- users and a catalog of 3.6 million+ books.

Signing up is easy -- pick a username and a password, no more data required. Adding books is dead easy: type in the last name of the author, and a word or two from the title, and the search engine will quickly scour Amazon and US libraries for options. But you can ask it to scour all Canadian, UK, Australian libraries, and the Amazons abroad. You have a choice of 30 more libraries for those esoteric searches. If it finds the book -- and it will -- click on it and... bang... straight to your virtual bookshelf.

You are limited to 200 books if you are a "free" member. For a paltry $25, you can add unlimited books.

Here is the screenshot of my virtual shelf.... made up of books on my desk that need to be reshelved. Added them in less than 5 minutes, so I assure you it's easy.

So what's the big deal?

Here's the great thing. From any book you list, you can click through to "Social Info." There, you'll find a rank-ordered list of the books most likely to appear in the personal libraries of people who own the same book. Here's list for James Gleick's Faster, which is on my list.

Well, that seems about right.... I own eight of the 16 ... and I suspect this is a far better tool than Amazon's excellent "people who bought this book also bought...." feature.

LibraryThing has a blog, some extra features... Go forth and have fun, fellow bibliophiles.

Here's a WSJ article. Hat tip to Weinberger.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 04:25pm in Books, Gadgets & Toys | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0)

Woe is no longer me

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:56pm in Gadgets & Toys | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0)

Painless tagging: great tool

One reason I used to rarely tag Desirable Roasted Coffee posts is that it was just too tedious to fiddle with html, remember the right Technorati or del.icio.us tag sytnax, etc.

But now I'm using EGM Stratagy Tag Generator. Wow, punch in the tags, hit the button, and out pops the right html for clipping and pasting.

Works for Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Furl tags. Nice touch: the html comes wrapped in a <span> so you can tweak your CSS to get tags to show up in style.

Technorati Tags: tags, tag generators

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:10pm in Gadgets & Toys, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0)

Useful information from Kayak Buzz

A couple of days ago, I gave the Kayak Buzz Flight Search site a once-over and found it sorely lacking.

Kayak's chief architect, Bill O'Donnell, has since responded: first in a comment to my original post, and later in email. While Kayak Buzz Flight Search may still be in the "more fun than useful" stage, you have to give them points for taking up the conversation:

You're absolutely right, the location of the Oslo airport was wrong: as any good student of geography knows, "off the coast of west africa" is zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude. Any geographical feature in our database that is missing it's latitude and longitude ends up there. We found the problem yesterday and fixed it.

We think Kayak Buzz is a fun toy, even if it's utility is, um, open to debate. But, we feel it does present an accurate view of what people are finding for low fares, and where they are traveling. More importantly, it demonstrates the real bargains that real people find using our search tool.

We released a new version of Buzz today, by the way. It lets you be much more specific about where you want to search. Come back and give us another chance!

Well, I'll do just that over the next few weeks and, if the kinks are worked out, be happy to re-review!

Bill later wrote me that non-North American coverage is not as deep as they want it to be, which probably accounts for the results I've been getting. True enough, when I plug in queries from US cities I'm familiar with, the results are better.

Let's keep an eye on Kayak Buzz Flight Search.

Technorati Tags: Kayak Buzz Flight Search, Kayak Buzz, Google Maps, cheap flights

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:05pm in Business, Cartography, Communication, Gadgets & Toys, Travel | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Kayak Buzz is a useless toy: wrong fares, bad geography

Sometimes an idea comes along that looks so good at first glance that even the mighty Scoble posts about it. So much the worse when the idea falls to pieces at the first poke. Kayak Buzz Flight Searches is one of these.

The idea is simple enough: let people buzz about cheap fares they are finding, then mashup the findings on a Google map. Excellent idea? Sure... and living proof that even garbage can be made to look good if you pretty it up.

Let's have a look, shall we?

I looked for fares from my home city, Copenhagen, in the under $200 range.  Here's what Kayak Buzz found:

Now, right away we have problems. I'll pass on commenting about the uselessness of a program that doesn't recognize domestic flights, and go right to the burning question: Where's Oslo?

Well, in fact, it's where it always is, at the end of Oslo Fjord -- but you wouldn't know it from this map.

So where does Kayak Buzz think Oslo is?

Why, just off the Nigerian coast (and here I'll just note that I am sure there's no connection between Kayak Buzz and Norwegian Nigerian scam letters).

Now, bad geography is a surmountable fault. After all, anyone aiming for Oslo presumably knows where it is, and will not be misled.

But the prices are as bogus as the geography.

Below I reproduce a chart from the Scandinavian Airlines website, showing current fares out of Copenhagen. They are in Danish kroner, but DKK 650 = US$100, DKK 1300 = US$ 200, etc. The astute reader (have I any other kind?) will immediately note there's no earthly relationship between Kayak Buzz's findings and SAS prices.

Bad toy! Baaaaad toy!

Via Rubel (who should know better!)

Technorati tags:
Kayak Buzz
Google maps
cheap flights

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:15am in Business, Cartography, Gadgets & Toys, Travel | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0)

Moleskine... You Write Smarter Stuff in one

Pricy, beautiful, functional ... so much that your heart breaks if you lose one.

Now there's a blog: Moleskinerie, a blog about the Moleskine, notebook of writers.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:38am in Gadgets & Toys, In Defense of Elitism | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (1)

Trying Out the Wisdom of Crowds

"Summer Reading" is usually more of a wish than an accomplishment. But I managed a lot this summer; indeed my June Amazon shipment is wholly depleted.

I like to read two or three related books in tandem, for the joy of serendiptity. That doesn't always work, but in July it did, and in a odd corner: how crowds, individuals, and society collaborate and "know".

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes businesses, economies, societies and nations. James Surowiecki. Short take: a collection of people with ordinary knowledge will generally make better decisions than any expert.

The Company of Strangers: A natural history of economic life. Paul Seabright. Short take: Most primates are only minimally social. Man figured out reciprocal trust, which allows anonymous transactions.

Blink. Malcolm Gladwell. Short take: if you know (about) what you are seeing, your first instinct is is the right one. If you stop to analyze, you may well go wrong.

I won't give longer reviews; all three have been reviewed to death, by better critics.

A common theme:  Surowiecki and Seabright both support the idea that "financial" markets, composed of independent  "traders"  are better predictors of future results than TV pundits.

One of the markets they cite is NewsFutures, where a punter can "bet" on outcomes of current events: Will Schroeder stay on as German Chancellor? Will a hurricane hit Texas before November 30? Will John Roberts be confirmed?

The thinking is that players, who have definite, though small, financial incentives to bet correctly, will, as a group, bet correctly. No individual will have the "answer". But the collective smarts of 20,000 individuals, with money or rewards at stake, should be a good guide.

As an example, let me show you where I am. I have a stake in NewsFutures. Here was my status a few hours ago:

As you can see, I'm backing Schroeder heavily to be re-elected Cerman chancellor. I'm spitting in the wind, obviously, but the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish papers -- all of whom traditionally have very, very good sources in Berlin, are tipping a Schroeder government.

Right? Wrong? I don't know. The "market" seems to think I am wrong (but since I took this screen shot, the shares have jumped from X$9 to X$29... as the US papers start to pick up on the European analysis.)

I also have a stake in Yahoo's TechBuzz Game. Here, I am on less solid ground, since I am not privy to tech buzz. But I have spotted a hole: there's a hurricane market. Meteorology fascinates me; and weather that affects the South deeply concerns me.

So here I've confidently invested in Rita and Stan (who doesn't exist, yet).

Rita is going to be all over the papers for a week or more. Stan will or won't develop. Still, I won't lose much by giving him a wager.

Now, if you've stayed with me this far, you may be thinking one of two things:

What are the moral implications of "betting" on hurricane strikes (or whatever)? None, that I can see. I don't cause a hurricane strike; indeed, if it looks like the hurricane will die out, I'll take the other position.  I've flipped on the Schroeder thing twice. I lost my butt on Phillippe.

Takeaway: the market is heartless & makes better decisions when it is heartless.

But you aren't affecting anything. Nope, just reacting with great interest.

Takeaway: the "market", given its incentives, is a better news gatherer than any professional news gatherer.

I have a lot of links to fill in here, and will do so over the next day. In the meantime, a Google Search will probably get you where you are going

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:56pm in Books, Communication, Desirable Roasted Coffee, Ethics, Gadgets & Toys, Smart Communities, Social Tools, Society | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (1)

Dipping My Toe Into Google Talk

Within minutes of one another, Robert French and Jeremy Pepper kindly sent me invites to Google Talk.  Google Talk is Google's new IM and voice-chat client.

I've signed up -- it's free and easy to install -- to try it out.

First impression: Skype is still streets ahead on all fronts.

So far, at least, Google Talk doesn't offer Call Out to or Call In from non.users, which is a big plus for Skype.

Moreover, you can't search for users -- only people in your GMail address book show up as potential Google Talk contacts. A big limitation, since I already know how to IM most of these people already, on Yahoo or Skype

I haven't checked the sound quality yet. Neither Jeremy or Robert is up yet. But I will when I get a chance. Still, I've had no complaints with my Skype sound quality.

Robert French and I had a chat a few minutes ago: Sound quality on Google Talk is just fine, as good as Skype. I did notice a couple of drop outs: one where the packets seem to have dropped out entirely, and one where they were delayed. I get that on Skype, too, though, from time to time.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 02:17pm in Communication, Gadgets & Toys, GMail | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Guess the News Using BlogPulse Analysis | Key People

Been stranded on a desert island for a few days? To get a fast read on what's happened and what hoi polloi thinks important, you could turn to BlogPulse's Key People analysis.

Looking at yesterday's analysis, you'd quickly realize a) Harry Potter has been in the news, but b) is being crowded out by late-breaking Star Trek news (and you would probably surmise that Mr. Scott is either dead or arrested). You'd also grasp that something was happening at the US Supreme Court.

Of course, seeing both Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears with "UP" arrows will probably drive you quickly back to that desert island.

Mightly yank of the forelock to Rubel.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:15pm in Current Affairs, Gadgets & Toys | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

PubSub LinkRanks looking Pretty Good!

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that PubSub's LinkRank (now called LinkCounts, apparently) feature was back up but buggy. Almost immediately, PubSub's Mark Wagner and Bob Wyman were Johnny-on-the-Spot with news of fixes and requests for feedback.

Today, Mark sent me this mail. And it's true, the site is looking and working as it should from where I sit.

"We have been continuing to work on our LinkCounts pages based, in part, on your previous feedback. We have "quietly" slipped out an update of the pages.  Several things that you had mentioned have been addressed. We have started tracking Shel's blog and we have fixed the "Site Converter" so that it now properly identifies Warren's blog.  The other main change that was inspired by your comments was that we hooked the "Look Up a Site" box to our Site Converter code.  Now you can enter a URL and we will "resolve" it to our entry for said URL. Thus you no longer have to guess what we may "call" the site.

"If you have some time and would like to run through the pages we would welcome any additional feedback, suggestions, etc that you have. Please note that the "start" page has changed and can befound here:  http://www.pubsub.com/linkcounts.php"

Bob Wyman has more on LinkCounts.

I've worked with programmers for much of my career, and so understand well that it's hard to get it right the first time. What I like about these guys is that they respond to criticism and follow up when the problem is solved. That's just common business sense -- and all too uncommon these days.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 05:33am in Blog Management, Blogging, Gadgets & Toys, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0)

PubSub LinkRanks Back Online; Very Buggy (But They're Working on it!)

Update: Even before I managed to send a copy of this post to the PubSub people, Pubsub's Bob Wyman and Mark Wagner had both posted comments explaining why I got odd results. That sort of fast, useful feedback is a great way to make friends. Thanks, guys!

Original post: PubSub's LinkRanks service is back online, after being down some months. The new version does not, so far, have the old "ranking" feature that gratified my blego when I was feeling blue and lonely, but it does have some interesting factoids (updated daily):

Top 100 Sites By Inlinking Sites for May 9th, 2005

•         249,827 sites created         716,886 new blog entries       
• 1,170,798 outlinks were created to 149,717 other sites
• 94,076 (38% of those with new entries) created outlinks.
• 6,310 sites       (3% of those with new entries) had both inlinks and outlinks.
• 260,629 syndication feeds had new entries.
• 5% of the 5,390,292 recently active feeds monitored by PubSub had new entries.
• 3% of the 9,968,379 feeds monitored by PubSub had new entries.

You can type in the URL of any blog and see a 30-day day-by-day review of how many incoming and outgoing links the blog had. Here is Desirable Roasted Coffee's summary.

For the fun of it, I checked up on friends Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Eric Eggertson, and Warren Bickford. And noticed right away that the service is wildly buggy.

For example, Neville gets credit for an average of 18 outlinks a day, with an astounding 127 outgoing links to 99 sites on April 28. Nevon readers will instantly realize that the program notes from For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report play a role here: the HH Report program notes link to anyone mentioned during the podcast.

So you'd expect to see similar stats from Shel's blog. But no... he's credited with zero outgoing links the last 30 days.

Moreover, the URLs are a problem. PubSub doesn't recognize Warren Bickford's blog address http://blogs.iabc.com/chair/. Tweaked to look for http://blogs.iabc.com, PubSub finds the results.

So while it's nice to see PubSub's LinkStats back on line, it's still in need of major debugging to be useful. To their credit, they admit that, and ask for feedback. I'll be sending this along to them.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 09:55am in Blog Management, Blogging, Gadgets & Toys, Online Media, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) | TrackBack (0)

Cartographic Joy

New Update from Greg the Cartographer:

"Allan,

Thanks for the kind words. I have brought back the site with traffic data coming from Traffic.com instead of Yahoo...

http://supergreg.hopto.org/google-traffic.com/

Cheers

Greg"

Update: Major bummer.... the site has been killed because Yahoo changed how they supply data in their RSS feeds.

I like maps, so much that it's sometimes necessary to physically drag me away from large wallmaps of even cities I know well. When working on projects requiring a lot of desk space, I may remove the photos of my children, but never my late-1940s globe.

So you can imagine my coos of joy when I discovered the Google-Yahoo Traffic Map. This nifty application overlays Google's maps with Yahoo's traffic data (and links to Google's sat maps) with results bound to please the cartographer in anyone.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 03:36pm in Cartography, Gadgets & Toys | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

You'd Be Naive To Send Me That Gadget

I've been grumbling to myself about Google's gmail lately, because it seemed the spam filter was starting to glitch.

Every day or so, sometimes 2-3 times in a day, a press release would creep through from someone I don't know. Real odd ones, too, because they weren't touting stuff to make my sex life better or to let me grab some dead dictator's money. Nope, always some CEO to make a speech at a conference, or so-and-so was going to have booth at some convention.

Today's mail brought an offer to try out a gadget. No strings, just let them know where to send it (they seem to believe I live in the US, but no matter).

And it dawned on me.... PR people actually exist who either a) believe Desirable Roasted Coffee is widely influential, b) are so down on their luck that they figure "what the hey", c) are interns who have dutifully and carefully found every PR blogger in existence, or d) all of the above.

Rather touching!

And pretty naive. I don't want to be a killjoy, but I'm the last person you want to send press releases to. As a carrier of PR, I'm pretty much immune to it. I don't like most new gadgets until they are out of style. By and large, I don't like the news that does reach me.

Here's an exception though: If you want me to read a book and review it, I will do so happily & honestly. Send books, not gadgets.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:06pm in Desirable Roasted Coffee, Gadgets & Toys, Marketing, Public Relations | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (4) | TrackBack (0)

Beauty, Bug Zappers, and the Yankee Flipper

Seeing beauty in something (and ugliness; it's the same coin) requires honed senses and the literacy to understand what your senses are telling you. As I've grown older, I've resigned myself to never fully appreciating high-tech. Neither will I appreciate jazz -- and, more importantly, be able to instantly tell the gems from slag -- enough to discuss it with anyone in full command of their faculties.

On the other hand, I have a pretty good handle on Southern country cooking, early blues, Southern fiction, and the northern night sky. I can instantly point out any visible planet, explicate the Sound and the Fury, convince you that Son House is superior to Leadbelly, and advise you to pepper the greens a little more, authoritatively, in under a minute.

In one area I refuse to stand behind any amateur on the planet: Low-tech devices that torment wildlife for my entertainment.

Back in the late '70s, my family had one of the first "bug zappers" on the block. I know it seems incredible now, but in 1979, that distinctive "zzzzzzzzzzzPop" was not as ubiquitous as the cricket's chirp or the frog's croak. We'd never heard or seen such, and so -- and we were not doltish cretins; we ate our SATs for breakfast -- my friends and I spent hours contemplating the bug zapper in its glory. I'm not sure we actually took notes, but it was generally acknowledged that mosquitoes and gnats provided lovely "white noise", and that moths were good for a great "pop" and great "flame".

But our greatest joy came when the Great Carolina Junebug met the zapper. The Great Carolina Junebug is about the size of a fruit bat (though far more docile; you can't leash a fruit bat), so when it hit the zapper, you had time to call friends, go buy another six-pack, order pizza, and -- if your fuses held, which was always a gamble -- organize a party.

ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzz BAM! (yes, Emeril Lagasse probably had a bug zapper in his youth). You didn't want to be within 20 feet or so of that thing when it went off, but it was splendid.

All of which leads me to a device that I wish I had use for.

The Yankee Flipper.

Now, this is enterprising marketing. It's a bird-feeder, so it's satisfying if you are into birds. But its more amusing purpose is to fling squirrels through the air. At great speed! And therein lies its beauty.

A product ostensibly designed for one thing ("feed birds") that also fulfills a deep-rooted second desire ("fling rodents!"). And the makers are smart enough to know that just seeing the product in action makes us crave one, even if you live - like me -- in a squirrelless place.

Here's the website with plenty of video format options so you can see how the product works. Do watch. You can almost see the dismay on their little faces.

Thanks to friend (and bug zapper watcher, though she's reformed, now) Lisa for the link. She blogs at The Church of the Sacred Earth and Holy Fire.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 09:29am in Gadgets & Toys | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Where am I? Where is my Community?

Via Smart Mobs comes news of Earthcomber, a mapping application for PDAs. One neat part of the application is that it lets members of public or private communities enter locations and comments on a map overlay. So a group of birdwatchers, for example, could quickly create an online map of good spotting spots and update it in realtime.

Or a city tourism department could provide business travelers with a map of wi-fi hotspots...and users could comment on conditions...

Or Student Unions could provide new freshmen with relevant online maps of campus....and student communities could modify.....

Or designers could map the retailers in Lower Manhattan selling their clothes...and users could note price differences, other wares, and friendliness of staff....

Or microbrewers could map the pubs selling their ales...and brew-lovers could rate pub ambience, food, and fun factor....

Only available in the US so far, and only a dozen or so communities are set up.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 05:07am in Gadgets & Toys, Smart Communities | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (1)

Look, Kids, a Button Maker for Us

I've decided blog chicklets -- those ubiquitous little rectangular buttons found on most blogs, including this one -- are going to be to the '00s what "modem handshake whine" was to the 90's. I've seen them in ads; and I'm starting to see them as "station icons" on television. I haven't seen them used in book cover design, yet, but it's only a matter of time.

Now we can roll our own, thanks to Pheedo CTO Adam Kalsey. Good job, Adam...

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:36am in Blogging, Gadgets & Toys | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Elegant Open Source Stat Counter!

Today, I discovered  RE_Invigorate, an elegant and unobtrusive stat counter for Desirable Roasted Coffee.

The code is a little snippet of java-script and there's no logo. Even better, the visual display of the stats is sophisticated, interactive, and real-time (if you are so inclined, you can even "watch" visitors enter and leave your site). Also lovely: it rates your site's traffic against the "average" user of the counter. Finally, it provides real-time stats of the RE-invigorate community, letting you see usage patterns, browser & system use, etc.

Just lovely.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:52pm in Blogging, Gadgets & Toys | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)