i have seen nothing interesting on the web today. i'm bored.

not only will you be able to buy your vending machine drink with your cellphone, the price will go up depending on how hot it is.

christmas trees that grow their own lights. biotechnology is constantly surprising me.

buy your coffee with your cellphone? wouldn't it be easier to just put a credit card reader in the machine?

while catching up on anil dash's weblog, i came across the webcrawler voyeur and metaspy. they're better than digging through referrer files.

what will happen to design as computers become ubiquitous? designing the invisible computer.

cam has a mini-rant. while i understand where his irritation against "ass-kissing" is coming from (although i have no idea who he's referring to), i'm not sure i agree with the generalization that personal voice is required to be able to call it a weblog. then again i don't read very many "link lists", i don't find them interesting when they've got no voice.

this new game evolva sounds like fun, although i wouldn't call it cannibablism.

for people into board games, fun again games is an excellent resource.

jen has written an opinion about how to run epinions.

sony develops a proprietary format with expensive and unusable applications, in salon.

office of the future unlikely to be a cubicle. via tomalak.

nqpaofu's bit on reputation drain is short but accurate.

i didn't realize amazon had patented their 1-click buying process, but they're suing barnesandnoble.com for infringement.

new rcfoc, 1 ghz processors and plants that phone home.

whispernumber.com is hitting the numbers more accurately than the analysts, in salon.

apparently, using sweepstakes to get long-term customers doesn't work. what was that company giving away a free t-shirt just for signing up recently? via tomalak.

an internet company just requires a business plan, not a product. this nyt article mentions blue mountain arts, a company with a billion dollar valuation, 10 million users and no revenue. via tomalak.

beyond repair? beyond ate my balls. the person who created the file balls.htm on beyond's server in her directory "liz", requested that i change the link to a geocities one. but, i think that if beyond isn't going to take the page down, then people should still visit it.

it has been pointed out to me, that, while playing with epinions may be a fun way to cause mischief, it would probably damage my credibility more than anything else. so i've reconsidered. creating a pyramid scheme is probably not such a good idea.

an article about givequick.

john pointed out that i was only partially right about users driven from a site to epinions reviews being instant money. i suppose i should have made it clearer that the process would ideally be: post a sign-up and let me sponsor you link, post lots of reviews, rake in the cash. i suppose you would have to regularly repost the sign-up link, or put it on your page somewhere.

another thing that john pointed out was the fact that weblogs are driving a *lot* of traffic to epinions. the blog community and traffic to individual weblogs has reached a critical mass where we can actually affect a company's traffic and image, both positively and negatively. just look at the fact that cam, peter and jason are among the most popular reviewers.

this observation by john led me to propose the following evil experiment: if every weblogger wrote a review per day, and we compiled this into a daily list (a blog of epinions reviews, so to speak), then each blogger linked to this list and reminded their readers to sign up for epinions and go visit all the reviews on the list, how much money could we generate for ourselves? since the reviews just have to be visited, not necessarily read, they can be complete garbage. and if each blogger made a commitment to visit everyone else's reviews, we'd have quite a little scam going. i'll volunteer to make up the page, if anyone's interested in trying this out. in fact, you don't even have to be a blogger to do this, you can have your reviews listed as long as you agree to visit all the other reviews on the list. this is sounding better and better...

sick and twisted in an amusing sort of way. ad campaign for a brazilian internet company.

to quote jason "Oh great day in the morning. Keith Dawson of TBTF has started weblogging. Sweet!". you didn't really want something original did you?

alamut has a "slightly more deranged than usual" set of questions and statements about opinions and the difference between opinions of things and opinions of people.

i had thought the whole epinions thing had been dropped, but my little objections prompted two more emails, one from jakob nielsen himself.
cimarron pointed out that epinions doesn't have to pay you, if you don't provide any personal information, then they don't ask for it. but, it doesn't seem to show that to other readers. this inspired the notion in me that maybe if epinions paid people by the usefulness (based on readers votes) of the reviews, it wouldn't degenerate.
jakob wrote that he had

"one point of disagreement: just because writers get a royalty when their reviews are read does not mean that their opinions get compromised or biased. Note that the writers don't get paid based on whether the users *buy* anything; they get paid based on whether the users *read* the reviews."

pop!tech wrapped up yesterday with talks by christopher ireland and brenda laurel of cheskin research. christopher's talk was interesting. she's been studying teens and asking them what they think without making any assumptions. three things that are happening among teens: ethnicity is cool, gender is becoming ambiguous, and teens are really concerned about privacy on the internet. me thinks web companies should pay attention to that last, will be important in a few years. brenda laurel on the other hand was annoying. she started her talk by saying that people shouldn't make assumptions about teens and force them into roles. she then went on to describe how we should be manipulating teens into becoming the people we (or rather she) thinks they should be. a little hypocritical.

i'm travelling today. lucky me, i get to spend 11 hours in airports and on planes.

i have the disturbing sensation of losing a day somewhere. probably thursday, because i never really went to bed. so wednesday was just extra long.

pop!tech is turning out to be a really interesting conference. john perry barlow of the electronic frontier foundation, was especially interesting yesterday. he talked about the way in which power is being taken away from the white, middle class male, and spread among everyone.

today, john sculley and lou mazzucchelli had vastly different opinions of where the interent economy was going. lou thinks it's a bubble that will burst within 3 years or so, john thinks the paradigm has changed: revenue is no longer the indicator of company value, customers are.

buy.com is just one example. a company that never intended to make a profit off the products they sell, but did intend to get a huge customer base, fast. funnily enough, and despite the criticism and predictors of instant death, they are doing much better than beyond.com.

john's latest investment peoplepc is working off the same principles. they're offering a high end pc (upgraded every 3 years) and unlimited internet access for $24.95/mo., without the ads.

i'll try and write more in depth about the talks, but there's so little time and so much to say. no promises.

evhead had some interesting ideas today and yesterday about "web of trust". i especially liked his quote from luke about learning more from people he didn't like or disagreed with.

i randomly followed a link from geneHack to apathy and was impressed by the stylish rendering of his linklist. i wish i was as creative, and patient.

peter should get epinions to hire jen solely for her visionary ideas about their product.

"So. In short, what Epinions needs to do is back up their person-based popularity contest reviews with true collaborative filtering. This will give them a large base of information about their users, which is what will *really* get in those advertising dollars. It will also legitimize the longer reviews in the eyes of people who question the objectivity of people getting paid, because that won't be the only content."

rant: memories.

maine is beautiful right now. i felt this weird sense of deja-vu while driving down to camden. everything seemed right and familiar. i'm guessing it's because of the climate, plants, houses matching those of my massachusetts childhood.

note to self: red-eyes are not the best way to fly across country. sleep is necessary.

the epinions/weblog thing has made it into the news. thanks jason.

i'm going to be in camden, maine for the next 5 days. expect sporadic updates. mmmmm lobster, real clams....

professor warwick is attempting to become a cyborg, in salon.

hmmm. seems i stirred up quite a bit of reaction and outrage with my attempts to discover what i disliked about epinions. i never meant to imply that you get paid for ecommerce links or positive reviews. i just put forth the opinion that when reviews are done just for the sake of doing reviews, and when visitors to john doe's site are encouraged to become an epinions member (sponsored by john doe, so he gets money when they write reviews), and read john doe's reviews (which he then gets royalties for), the value of those reviews then goes down. i'm not saying that everyone who writes reviews for epinions is evil and moneygrubbing, i'm just saying that i find less value in the reviews simply because they're getting paid for them.

peter pointed out that his was actually a neutral viewpoint, but positive towards the article itself. so just ignore my statement below. i don't think i'm getting enough sleep. plus i'm stressed over an unreasonable deadline, scary things marketing and biz-dev keep coming up with and want to add to the product (i mean really spam-like scary), and wishing i could go work for peter at epinions, ok maybe not the last, but it did cross my mind. and now i'm rambling so i should really just go home.

palm will get a color screenlift next year.

peterme had a link to this article which mentions epinions. funny how peter got a positive viewpoint of epinions from the article where as i got a negative one.

"Epinions.com is an Internet start-up that is another attempt at an information exchange. Another, because dozens of failed and less-than-successful attempts have proceeded them. I was particularly fond of one in the 80’s called (I believe) AMIX (American Information Exchange). But people keep trying."

car salesman's ad attacks the internet and proves why e-commerce is a good thing, in salon.

ray had some more to add on the epinions thing, and i think he pretty much put the nails in the epinions coffin for me.

"My problem with Epinions is that its format and its topics of choice (best-sellers, new movies, etc.) encourage writers to fit themselves into the familiar journalist-reviewer straitjackets (or three-piece-suits, if you prefer). I can get plenty of normal reviews from zines, papers, TV, and commercial sites -- amateur attempts to mimic those all-too-professional venues don't really have much to offer me. Or, to be more direct, they're BORING.
Self-publishing ventures like the Web allow for looser and more personal formats than that. One of the sad things about Epinions is that it's draining away topics and time from some writers who (in my opinion, as the professionals say) do better in the journal or weblog forms.... "

evhead has described my disaffection with epinions perfectly. he's talking about gazooba, but it still applies.

"if someone's getting a kick-back for recommending something to you, the recommendation kinda looses its cred -- even if it is from a "friend." (This isn't, IMO, the same as including your Amazon associate ID when you link to a book from your web site, as that's something you're writing about anyway, presumably, you're not specifically sending email -- some might consider it spam -- specifically to get this kick-back.) When you add the "multi-level effect" -- i.e., the desire to benefit from other people's efforts, which tends to be a siren call for sleazes of the world, the concept gets even more worthless."

sadly noise between stations has been around since march, but no one discovered it. i wonder how many other blogs are over 6 months old, but not part of anyones' list?

since i added the "recently added" feature to the portal, i haven't been putting any new blogs in my blog. don't know why, probably just laziness. i think i need to start pointing out notable blogs again. today one was submitted that i really liked, noise between stations has a nice mix of design, opinion, and personality.

amazon is holding a cryptography contest too. prizes include signed editions of cryptonomicon, the code book, between silk and cyanide, and applied cryptography.

Lindsay also found a way to get rid of the icky shop button. it works, but coincidently(?), right after i did it my network card locked up and i had to reinstall it. call me paranoid, but i think i'll suffer with the button.

it's a blog's life is a wonderful article about weblogs. thanks Lindsay.

"Blogs are never going to be big business and they're not the future of the web, either. But I find that I visit them more and more because in the blogs you can still find that educated, anarchic spirit - rather as I imagine medieval universities to have been, full of wandering scholars - which once seemed the natural atmosphere of the whole World Wide Web."

another search engine fast search, nothing special tho.

while much of what cam says in his epinions rant is true, i have to disagree about the e-commerce stuff. amazon's not quaking. nor will they be. people may make epinions their first stop, but they'll still head on over to amazon to buy that book. and while epinions is providing an extremely valuable service, they're still just another "over-hyped and over-valued dot-com company", that's why their name is epinions.com.

digiscents is doing a beta program. via scripting news.

a very interesting review of edward tufte's work. it compares it to museums where we "quietly contemplate human ingenuity and craft" but shouldn't believe "that what 'works' well as an exhibit would also work well on the street outside".

magnetbox has a huge list of sites that ben considers outstanding.

it seems like everyone is really getting into the epinions thing. am i odd because i'm not that interested in it? although, i decided that i should at least sign up for an account. i just don't feel inspired to spread my opinions in that way.

of course, having just finished the code book, i'm interested in playing with pgp. alamut conveniently had a link to mit's download site.

kenneth cole also has a nice little online store. i'm debating whether to buy another pair of these shoes i like...

coolhomepages.com is trying to create an inspirational design resource. some of their choices i have to wonder about tho. they do allow you to submit sites that you think are cool. via robotwisdom.

i'm obviously working too hard and surfing too little. i wasn't even aware that netscape 4.7 was out. sigh. it was only Lindsay's complaint about the "shop" button that clued me in. he's right, of course, the shop button is now in the exact same place as the old "stop" button, which is moved one spot over. that's really annoying.

at the back of simon singh's "the code book", there's a cipher challenge. 10 different encrypted messages to be cracked. so far, no one's made it past the 4th one, assuming the leader board is current. i solved the first two last night, but i have a feeling the others won't be so easy.

bananarepublic's online store is now open. unfortunately, they don't seem to want to take my money. sigh.

an article all companies, especially web companies, should take to heart. invest in functionality not looks.

i've seen lots of people linking to this map of weblog locations. i looked and shrugged and moved on, but, now there's a form to add your blog to the list.

tracy quan talks about telling her mother she's a prostitute in salon. thanks dan.

returnme.com has an interesting business plan. buy some stickers from them, put it on your stuff, then when someone finds it, they go to the website and claim a reward.

next monday's rcfoc is already up. two nice little toys, a cellphone/gps/pda all in one, and a microscope which takes digital pictures.

liquid audio sounds incredible. it's just like listening to a cd. at least over a t-1.

scratch & sniff chat rooms came up jokingly today (you don't want to know why), and digiscents is going to make them possible.

the ever-lengthing, ugly url. via tomalak.

dan gillmor told me that i'd be surprised how many people are paying cash for their houses. that'll teach me to imagine that people were intelligent.

cnet has jumped on the helpful information bandwagon. they've put up help.com probably to compete with ehow.com, expertcentral and other "how to" sites.

dan gillmor is making everyone wish they had those magical stock options to buy a house with. he left one important thing out tho. nobody would want to pay cash for a house. a mortgage is one of the few tax write-offs people without kids have. so this hypothetical person would be more likely to put $300k down on the house, mortgage $450k (because that's all they can afford based on their salary), and then invest the left-over $700k. is it any wonder why people spend their lives hunting the elusive "big ipo".

all those millions being spent on tv and radio ad campaigns only account for 3.2% of referrals. seems like a waste of money to me.

the latest rcfoc came out on monday. i finally got around to reading it today. lots of interesting bits about the future of storage devices, and online politics.

disappearing inc. has come up with self-destructing email. the sender encrypts and decides how long it will survive then the key self-destructs and becomes inoperable. cool.

for those who love anything free, clip2 is giving away free t-shirts if you sign up for an account.

factoid: today is both "Global Scream Day" and "International Moment of Frustration".

jason's done another stylish redesign.

one of the pleasures of blogging is people reading something that they're interested in and offering up recommendations or knowledge. i got quite a few kronos quartet recommendations:
from judith - pieces of africa "while it's very different from their other work, is quite remarkable and unusual - it's music by various African composers as played by the quartet - startling & a good intro disc to start with - nothing especially jarring like the George Crumb stuff on their earlier discs that can be hard to listen to..."
from chris - different trains with steve reich
from dave - kronos quartet performs philip glass "Glass's string quartets are simply amazing, and Kronos does a great job performing them with power and grace. This is my favorite Kronos CD *and* my favorite Glass CD."
released 1985-1995 "Ten-year retrospective gives a good sampling of the different styles of music Kronos has recorded over the years. Particularly moving is Barber's Adagio. This is actually a two-disc set with a second, shorter disc of unreleased tracks including "Elvis Everywhere", written for string quartet, baritone sax, and three Elvis impersonators, and Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze". The "Unreleased" disc is my wife's favorite."
howl, u.s.a. "Spoken-word and recorded-speech works including the voices of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Ginsberg."
henryk gorecki string quartets 1 & 2 "I don't know if you've heard Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, but this is nothing like it. It took me a while to even appreciate it, but now I really enjoy listening to it. It's rough, dissonant, extremely dynamic music."
Short Stories "A wild collection of really out-there pieces by several composers that may stretch your enjoyment/appreciation envelope a bit, but I love it. Particularly interesting is "Cat O' Nine Tails (Tex Avery Directs the Marquis de Sade)" -- essentially Tex Avery-cartoon-style music for an obviously sadistic cartoon."
Dracula Soundtrack "Philip Glass recently composed a soundtrack, performed by Kronos, for the rerelease of the 1933 Bela Lugosi version of Dracula, which never had one. It's not one of Glass's more adventurous works, but it's haunting and beautifully performed."
i now have a list that will keep me buying for a while.

yodlee seems to have an interesting concept, all your stuff in one place, but it's really hard to tell how useful it will be. their demo just shows a lot of info on one page, but is it useful info?

i know i've heard of cruel site of the day, i've just never visited before. i particularly enjoyed the cruelette script which takes you to a random cruel site. thanks rogers.

i know i read this weeks ago, but obviously forgot to post it. the guy who was rating weblogs is no longer doing so, apparently he discovered that anything on the web is never private. here's his reasons for pulling it.

a long, rambling but very interesting keynote address by tim o'reilly. talks about open source, the history of the computing industry and describes web sites as the killer-apps of the future.

i love forum. nothing other than the web teaches me new things about the world i live in. today i learned of and listened to the kronos quartet. a wonderful string quartet that i would never have heard of in my usual circles. now i just have to figure out which of their many cd's to buy.

webvan jumps off the ipo train at least until the sec will let them back on.

a reality check. "is technology unplugging our minds?" a review of three technorealists books in salon.

going through my referrer logs this afternoon i've discovered that on aol's search i come up for both "making love better", "getting better not older" , "it changed my life" and "lesson plans using sensory details description". maybe i should go into self help books?

interesting, the weblog story by frances katz that was in the merc on monday is being distributed by the associated press. it's also in this atlanta paper and here. thanks lindsay.

a fascinating interview with the cto of epinions. it's interesting to see where they plan to take this site.

nielsen's latest alertbox is on the 10 good deeds in web design. i agree with jorn's comments. why would i use a product photo when i don't sell products?

another article on the wonders of weblogs. as jjg pointed out, it sounds very much like the chicago tribune article. what's worse is they got my url wrong!

death is no longer an excuse! in the latest rcfoc.

disgusting. someone finds a pill that will work for male birth control and none of the pharmaceutical companies want to fund clinical trials.

too much work and not enough sleep turns brigitte into a zombie forced to play clickomania continuously. i will never forgive liz for sending me that link.

my friend liz has a hamster which she puts into a hollow ball, it then happily runs around the house for hours. i think this is the human version.

death of an htmler.

this is just too funny, fufme: via metascene.

"The system has intuitive interface and allows you to entirely concentrate on remote communication"

amazon makes move to sell everything to everyone with zshops.

vc's are laughing at the cia.

peter claims that smell has nothing to do with books, but jen has described it perfectly. how something is used is just as important as what it is.

i heard a commercial for eHow last night and again this morning. i think they've taken the "e-" thing way too far. i couldn't even understand the commercial last night, i thought the guy was saying "he-how". all in all it seems like a very lame version of epinions. if i never see another spiral notebook background on a web page, i'll be a happy person. ugh.

i know, the blog has been seriously neglected lately. updates will be sporadic at least for another week.

more on phillippe kahn.

this is cool, email without a computer.

since coercion seems to be at the forefront of my mind lately: ad banners on the golden gate bridge.

a mildly negative review of douglas rushkoff.

smart houses and body scanners in the latest rcfoc.

i finished coercion last night, and all i can say is i'm scared. the amount of manipulation that rushkoff claims is going on in our society is just overwhelming. what really bothered me was the end of the book where he described visiting someone's house in redwood hills and feeling the need to make more money in order to own one of these beautiful houses in a beautiful area. he described perfectly a feeling i have everyday driving through some parts of silicon valley. a feeling that is so completely stupid and close to unachievable (i'd have to be a multi-millionaire), but i still get it anyway. it's an unfulfillable need. and recognizing it scares me.

this always seems to happen. when i'm deep into a project, my surfing is seriously neglected. maybe tomorrow. maybe friday. maybe saturday. definitely by monday. things should pick up around here.

user-supportive internet architecture is the topic of the latest alertbox. while i see the value of improving to a more human rather than machine design, i have to disagree about email. i am not overwhelmed or stressed by email.

interesting. this guy's taken it upon himself to rate all the weblogs. sounds like way too much of a chore for me, but it'll be interesting as he gets more done. it does make me consider how valuable a rating system might be in the portal. something less one-sided tho. i just hate the idea of it becoming a popularity contest. ugh.

sad. infoseek executive caught in his quest for 13 yr old girls.

hard to believe, but amazon is down, and has been down for 20 minutes. will it affect them as badly as it did ebay?

i caught the tail end of forum this morning. they were talking to douglas rushkoff author of Coercion. apparently, he sat in a conference room while an ad agency analyzed scientology's cult marketing practices in order to use them in their campaigns. scary.

internet travel network is a really easy to use service, they let you book your flight and add car rental and hotel. very convenient.

it's confession time at the total abstinence society. thanks Acer.

jorn has written a weblog faq. thanks Lindsay.

virtual vineyards just changed their name to wine.com. new site design to go with it.

oh no! bob barker is in the hospital. there goes that road trip to the price is right. via this is news.

an amusing tog article, how programmers stole the web, misses the fact that javascript is not the language that runs ecommerce & weblications. usually that's perl, java or c++. he does make some good points tho. via webword.

The new talent could only continue to produce pretty pictures, while the traditional priesthood again took up the real work of programming. The web has stagnated ever since.

dan also continued peter's book conversation and came up with a couple of interesting book links. he's also getting good at catching my typos and proclaiming them to the world. :-p

i'm distinctly bored with most of the stuff i've looked at today. the only interesting tidbit so far was jen's continuation of peter's book discussion.

handspring released their new handheld product. it's called a visor. the visor deluxe comes in cool colors.

after reading that weblog article yesterday, and writing about stuff on peter's blog, and reading stuff on lindsay's blog, i've come to realize that i enjoy the weird one-sided conversations that incestuous blogging creates. maybe it stems from my own anti-social inclinations, but a comment that i wouldn't bother to email a person about, will end up in my blog. and i like to read a response to that in someone else's blog. i'd be happy to read it in email too tho. i've lost the train of this thought so i'll shut up now.

peter got a pop!tech invitation too, i wonder if they're targeting bloggers? he also pointed out that it sounds like a hanger-on conference where the attendees are made to feel cool by being near the speakers. so can anyone confirm or deny this? maine in october just sounds too tempting.

i received an invitation to the pop!tech conference this morning. it looks really interesting, both the topic and the speakers. is anyone else going? has anyone been to past camden conferences?

peter also links to anil dash's weblog. very similar in free flowing intriguing thought to peter's.

peter is ranting about why people insist on the texture and sensation of a paper and ink book. i think it has to do with the pleasure of old, high quality books. the one's that smell good, and feel good in your hands and as you turn the page. modern paperbacks don't give the same pleasure, but there is a slight connection. whereas electronic books have no connection. it's similar to the pleasure of writing with a quality pen on high quality paper. mmmm. textures. sensations. smells.

delusions of adequacy has a rant entitled " what's with weblogs?". he brings up some very valid problems that so far nobody's been able to adequately solve. via saturn.org.

"I fear that we can become too reliant on these fun-to-update little lists of links and observations. If one isn't updated, I won't know the news that day, because I bookmark the 'blog itself and not the news sources. And the 'blog tells me about Story A, which would make me miss Story B and C."

why geek geniuses lack social graces is fascinating. via jjg.

'Ratey and Johnson state that neuroscience "is proving Freud right: probably none of us is 'normal' -- normal in the sense of possessing a brain in which every part and system works as well as every other part and system -- and all functions lie well within an optimal range."'

genehack is back up again, although at a new location. yay! also, jjg and rebecca are back from vacation.

a few weeks back i was lamenting the lack of a bananarepublic website. well by october that should all change. (currently you can order a catalog and get notification of when the site goes live.)

this week's rcfoc describes some new innovations in e-paper, no more backlights, and a new free service called gurunet. i saw gurunet mentioned in someone's blog last week but wasn't particularly interested in it until i read this:

"GuruNet makes a stab at turning EVERY word on your screen, not just those in a Web browser, into a "live" link to further information."

it may just be me but isn't there something warped about 3com aquiring u.s. robotics, renaming it as their palm computing division, and then spinning it off and taking it ipo.

aaron of a boy and his basement has whipped a handy tool he calls surfmenu. it takes my huge, unwieldy list of blogs and lets you select the ones you want in your personal surfmenu.

while not as useful as Lwinn's list, jessamyn's old links page is an interesting view into the past. again via metascene.

this list of links is truly amazing. i can't imagine creating this, ok i can imagine, i just wouldn't want to do it. via metascene.

i'm not sure whether i would want this or not, maybe i'm just not the right audience for a headline viewer. but if i was, it seems like a really helpful tool.

i hadn't realized that Tracy Quan used to be a prostitute. i've really been enjoying her series, "Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl".

Project Gutenberg plans on putting 3333 books on the net by the end of 2001 according to this usatoday article. here's what they've done so far.

the latest alertbox is an interesting discourse about reputation managers like epinions. but seeing this:

Disclosure: I am on the advisory boards for Epinions and Google.

the glass ceiling still exists but may be made out of money instead of glass, in salon.

since alamut is inviting people to find a shorter route between eatonweb and amazon, i figured that i'd point out two paths that are only 2 degrees removed. all my book links go to givequick.org and are then redirected to amazon. and lindsay pointed out that i link to his reading list which links to amazon.

i have this theory that anything in a most popular list gets clicked on more just because it's there and therefore remains popular. not to denigrate the quality of any of the blogs in that list, but the list is almost identical to the initial list i put up on monday. maybe i should just look at the hits for the last day so that it's not cumulative.

epinions is a great site. i just wish it had been around a few months ago when i was trying to buy a laptop. thanks Lindsay.

death of a weblog. it's rare that someone explains so eloquently the cause of death. thanks johnny.

cool picture of the earth during an eclipse, taken from the mir space station. thanks jason.

oh no, this is too depressing. williams is going to stop making pinball machines! williams machines are the only ones worth playing. now i really feel old. via bifurcated rivets.

new blog: matthew kingston, i like the sock puppet.

every page is less than 20 clicks removed from every other page on the web. so instead of playing the kevin bacon game at parties, will people start to play the amazon game? "eatonweb. eatonweb links to Yahoo! Bill Pay which links to Yahoo! Finance which links to MarketGuide which links to news alert which links to cbs marketwatch which links to cbs which links to netaid story which links to netaid which links to realguide which links to doonesbury which links to the doonesbury daily briefing which links to this washington post story which links to the washington post homepage which links to their books section which links to amazon. so amazon's 14 clicks removed from eatonweb.

i don't quite understand what value yahoo is adding by allowing online bill payment, snappily called Yahoo! Bill Pay. i've been getting that from my bank for 2.5 years now, and they don't charge me $.40/payment. for some reason i trust my bank more than i trust yahoo. i wonder why.

tv causes sleep disorders in children, maybe this is why i could never get up for school.

nice little article about weblogs in the chicagotribune. thanks laurel.

in the latest moving webword, john rhodes emphasizes the frustration felt by users when they're misled. don't forget to stop by his new usability weblog while you're there.

i'm sure i've mentioned this before, but metascene is summarizing the blogs he's visited in the last week. very nice when you don't have time to hit the 175 or so that are out there.

i spent all day yesterday creating a new version of the blog portal. it now has sort functionality based on alphabetical, category, frequency of update, and type of blog (journal, links, comments). it's still being tested, so let me know if you see any bugs. and if you're feeling really bored, you can help fill in the database...

new blogs: Tangents | Pop Culture Junk Mail.

i added about 10 new blogs to the portal this afternoon. it being friday, i didn't take the time to list them here. just call me lazy.

getting tufte, a review of edward tufte's seminar, mentions weblogs. thanks ed.

a new vacuum is out.

finished ender's shadow last night. wonderful book, well written, and captivating. card did an excellent job of rewriting the story from another point of view.

i finally found a book that deals with jsp, professional java server programming by wrox press. i found it at ServerPages.com which seems to be a good resource.

another blog: bovine inversus.

fun timewaster: jackpot. via bifurcated rivets.

new blog: Subterranean Notes.

this is sweet. carsdirect lets you select a car & options, tells you the msrp, the carsdirect price, and the dealer invoice price. all up front. you then choose your color and fill out a purchase form, asking for financing if you need it. not being ready to buy, i didn't go further than the form, but think about it, no negotiating, no slimey car salesmen, an upfront here's what you'll pay price, delivery and all anonymously over the web. i'm sold.

this week's rcfoc has some more interesting bits about wireless, the new sega dreamcast and sony's planned playstation.

carlos kindly offered a scientific counterpoint to the true love thing. i would say that this actually supports the true love being over thing tho. all those chemicals get released and stick around for about 30 months, and then oxytocin takes over and facilitates the bonding process. so you may no longer be "in love" like you were for the first couple years, but the bond of friendship is maintained by this chemical. 10am is really not the time for this kind of theorization.

i almost missed this nugget, on 8/27 internet alchemy offered up robotwisdom as the target of a weblog review.

i knew it all along, true love is all over in 30 months. via bouzou.

stupid javascript tricks: earthquake.

imood at first appearance seems like a complete waste of time, but don't be fooled, there's a valuable resource here, moodylinks. i searched on bored, and was referred to treeloot. it's an insanely addictive waste of time, perfect when you're bored. of course, a lot of the moods don't have any links, so maybe moodylinks should be added under irritated.

i decided to use givequick's giving tree to donate to random charities.

another neat little hex color tool.

bungo wants to be your personal desktop on the web. maybe it's because i have a laptop, but i have no use for these desktop tools.

will cd's become obsolete? david strom describes his experiences copying all his cd's to mp3's. he's got no ugly cd racks, but he's still got the ugly computer.

hmm. today just seems to be a slow day. both at work and on the web.

after working with m$ visual sourcesafe for the last 2 months, i was about to start screaming for a unix development environment. i finally got to play with the new one today. it's sad how much i've forgotten.

i got a strawberry imac delivered to my desk yesterday. it's a little too pink for my taste, but it looks very cute sitting on my table. unfortunately, i have to give it to the qa person once i'm done with my design and ui testing. maybe i can convince them to buy me a g4 instead. hmmm...

according to the death clock, my personal day of death is friday, july 31, 2048. although if you put it in sadistic mode, i only get to live until 2008.

california energy commission has a high gas price complaint form.

i found out yesterday that i'm porting from asp to jsp. fun. unfortunately, there's no o'reilly book for jsp yet. does anyone know of any resources other than the javaserver web development kit?

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