I mean BookMooch—have you tried it? It’s enough to send a book hoarder past the point of no return. You go and list the books you have that you no longer want and if they’re good ones, you’ll receive email alerts within minutes from people who have those same books on their wishlists and would [...]
Category Archives: Analysis
Google Searching Your Bookshelf
September 7 07
Photo: Flickr user gregw
Back in February, I reviewed all the book-oriented social networks I could find and concluded that what I really wanted was a more personalized version of Google Books. The rich related content with which Google surrounds many books is what makes it so valuable. Compare the book information pages for A History [...]
Nervous Information Theory
July 31 07
This business of “sensory input” is another old McLuhan theme. He once predicted that the advent of colour television would lead to an increased appetite for spicy foods. Call him a nutcase, but we got our colour television and then suddenly we were all eating Szechuan.
Canadian columnist Philip Marchand’s report on literal-media-observer N. Katherine Hayles’ [...]
Mahalopedia
June 6 07
Listen to this March 20 CalacanisCast interview with Andrew Lih, author of a forthcoming book (the first, surprisingly) about Wikipedia. Then go check out Mahalo again, Jason Calacanis’s new well-funded “human-powered search” project that currently has the blog world perplexed. Suddenly it becomes clear: Jason’s building his own for-profit mini-Wikipedia lite.
Wikipedia articles are in [...]
Disemvowelled Site of the Day: Scribd
March 6 07
Once upon a time, before my time, text files were the most interesting thing on the internet. You could learn how to program computers, blow things up, pick up girls, obtain free phone calls, survive nuclear war, pirate TV signals, perform witchcraft and conquer Zork in one short evening without leaving your bedroom. You could [...]
Startup Your Lists
February 27 07
List of White Label Social Networking Platforms
Growing like Tom’s friend list.
10 Company Name Types on TechCrunch
Compound or blend?
Ning – Create Your Own Social Network for Anything
Now everyone create their own social network so we can build a social social-network network.
What the Web’s most popular sites are running on
Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
New York Gets Googled
Google’s [...]
The Great American Browser History Novel
February 20 07
After I posted this silly pseudo-widget idea, Lauren emailed to say: “Wouldn’t an automated Wikipedia contrails widget be an imposition on your browser history? Scary!”
Maybe, but Slifeshare, which tracks every minute of your online activity in order to find other people doing similar things, is approximately 100 times scarier. Yet isn’t this what all this [...]
The Big List of Bookish Social Networks
February 5 07
As I mentioned when I discovered Wordie and Coastr, I’ve yet to find a book-oriented social network that’s inspired me to register. And it’s not like there’s any shortage of them. Here’s an alphabetical list of all the players I know of, annotated with deconstructive criticism. The bold-face names are serious contenders.
aNobii: Multilingual Hong Kong-based [...]
Novelty Social Network Reviews
January 16 07
I’ve been collecting novelty social networks lately because I’ve been tinkering with one of my own (because who wants to start a blog network these days?). Since I have a passion for both interesting words and fine beer, Wordie and Coastr have received most of my affections.
Wordie is surprisingly fun. Like many people, I heard [...]
Sneaky Links
September 12 06
Source: Wikipedia
Dale “The Son of Human Knowledge” Hoiberg went head-to-head with Jimmy “Wikipedia” Wales in an exploitative Wall Street Journal boxing match today. It was a pretty fair fight until Jimmy went below the belt with some some sneaky links.
Mr. Hoiberg: I must point out that Mr. Wales’s inclusion of two links in his [...]
Weblogs: The Stats
April 29 03
Number of new weblogs launched per day, according to Terrence Smith’s report on the NewsHour last night: 2,160
Number of professional journalists with personal weblogs who have recently been forced to stop blogging by their employers, according to Mark Glaser’s latest column: 3
Average American newspaper reporter’s base salary, according to Salary.com, in dollars: 31,092
Estimated amount of [...]
Music About Music
April 28 03
In his new meditation on the turntable in ctheory, Seattle writer Charles Mudede calls upon Heidegger, Marx, Walter Benjamin, Afrofuturist David Goldberg, DJ Marley Marl, Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and, unfortunately, Tone Loc to shed light on the true essence of the turntable. Worth a read, as he goes miles beyond the typical turntablist refrain [...]