…and you thought my t-shirt was cool. Online publisher Blurb has announced their "slurper" that will grab content from you blog and turn it into a very slick looking coffee table book. I really love the idea of bring the online world into the physical world, and these books look very nice.
Well, the keen reader may notice I’m playing around with the style of this site some. One little CSS tip that I can pass on, for those of you who care to know: different browsers handle the error of replacing { with ( very differently. Whereas Opera 8.0 and IE6 try their best to cope, Firefox just barfs up everything after the error as un-styled text, as it is trying to be Valid CSS.
This week is sort of Media-Week here at super-structure, where I tell everyone about my personal news filters.
Yeah, and in teh beginning, there was Slashdot, and it was good. News of technology flowed from the mouths of geeks and they were happy in their green light. Then came forth the trolls and the fanboys and the hax0rs and they did multiply. They spoke of St. Jobs and castigated the demon Gates. They questioned the running of Linux on anything with electricity and of the ability to make toast. They quoted scripture including "first post!" and "All your base are belong to us." And so, the usefulness of the /. did diminish with time. Thus came the the WebTwoPointOh-ites from the land of TechTV to lead the flock to the new promised land: Digg. The site flourished with vast daily links until the trolls and fanboys did seek destroy it as well. Alas, a darkness did fall upon the screen…
For the over three months now, I’ve been using the Web2.0 darling tech news site, Digg.com. I have to give it’s creators credit for creating one of the fastest news sites in the world, both in terms of growth speed as well as how quickly news disseminates through it. The most often comparison made with Digg is to that of Slashdot, the much more venerable and moderated tech news site. I’ll spare you comparing the two too much further, but a little background is in order.
Nominally, they cover the same material and any link that finds it’s way to the top of one is sure to make it to the other within hours, if not minutes. Jason Kottke, the blogger everyone loves to say they don’t read but really do, wrote a great comparison on one of his articles getting the after-effect of both Digg and Slashdot postings: insane amounts of traffic. He goes into quite a bit of detail on what the Slashdot/Digg effect is like for both sites, but here’s a summary: The Digg Effect is a sharp and skinny spike in traffic while the Slashdot Effect is a longer wave, with greater total traffic. He even followed up when that story got posted on Digg. His posts follow more about the volume of the two sites, but he does discuss briefly their usefulness as news tools.
Where Slashdot is like some exclusive geek club with rules and structure, Digg is controlled by the masses and anything goes. If that sounds like Anarchy, well, it’s pretty close. I decided a long time ago that Slashdot held little of my interest. I found the conversations to be long and boring at best and rude and spiteful at worst. Further, usually only a couple of articles a day seemed to be worth me clicking on. When I started using Digg regularly, I found that the user-submitted articles had such misleading titles and descriptions, I almost always had to click on them to get any idea of whether the article was worth my time or not. As a news filter, it seemed to do me little good. As Jason Kottke describes it:
[Digg]‘s too much of an informational firehose. Bloggers and Slashdot story submitters might like drinking from that hose, but there’s just too much flow (and not enough editing) to make it an everyday, long-term source of information.
Firehose is exactly right. I might as well just do a perpetual Google search on "Tech", as I’d get nearly as useful a filter.
Slashdot is more similar to a tech variety show with some audience participation. It’s a multi-authored, daily link list that allows vast amounts of conversation within moderated, and more importantly, threaded discussions. Just in case it’s not entirely obvious, let me explain: threaded discussions, unlike this site or Digg.com, allow for sub-topics to stick together and have some hierarchical association. In a standard comment list, such as at Digg, all conversations are just lumped in a room together with no way to tie them back together. Also, what Digg doesn’t have is moderation. User’s have the ability score a comment and set a score threshold to comments they wish to view, but so few users take advantage of this as to render it useless. Even the crudest flames (and oh boy, you have no idea until you’ve actually read them) typically go completely unmarked, and users who truly try and provide insight, additional information, or better links go equally unnoticed.
Now, the really innovative feature of Digg.com is the fact that user’s can give any story a "Thumb’s Up" if the story is news-worthy (well, that’s how it’s supposed to work). You can then also report a story (spam, old news, just plain lame, etc.) to give it the "Thumb’s Down." I think having categories for the "Thumb’s Up" option wouldn’t have been a bad feature, either. That is, are you "digging" the story because you agree, think it’s important information, or think a handy link, etc. However, that’s really the least of my complaints against Digg.
A lot of people accuse the mainstream media of having a bias to this, that, or the other. I think their main bias is towards money, and how to make more of it. Slashdot has it’s own biases: very pro science and anti-Microsoft for starters. However, Digg has the sensational bug and a extremely short attention span to go with it. These two make for a dangerous and mob-like mentality. Take the Price-Rite-Photo story, which made Digg part of the story. Similar subjects that have gotten out of hand have been handled better, but it shows just how quick to react Digg users can be. Just ask Steve Maillet, who got accused of stealing Digg’s code for a couple of his own sites. I felt Mr. Maillet had done nothing wrong, but try telling that to the raging masses. This only degrades the usefulness of Digg even further: the wisdom of the crowd is watered down to the lowest common denominator.
Tomorrow, I’ll show you a great new site that I think solves a lot of the issues that I have with these two news sites.
I just finished reading through my second issue of Seed magazine, as I was considering getting a subscription. It’s already been on the newsstand for a year or so, but I tend to be behind the curve on these sorts of things. The magazine, which comes out bi-monthly, is fantastic reading. It has the cultural aspects of Wired, and like Wired, doesn’t pull punches when it comes to the science. The design and layout are great, with tons of information spread throughout. The photography science-as-art, with many being photos by researchers themselves. At least one of the two issues I’ve read even gave scales on a number photos for reference, which was welcome information. I get almanacs of the year’s best science writing each year, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing writing from these pages in there along with those from Wired and Scientific American.
The magazine is unapologetically pro-science, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. The writers delve into the politics and divisions within the scientific community and remind us how these affect our lives and our futures. We are all tied to the scientific community and Seed brings that relevance front and center.
Seed’s website has a number of their articles and shorts, as well. Also checked out their podcast. I highly recommend it. Most episodes are sub-ten minutes and are entertaining and informative. Imagine an a abbreviated science show from NPR. My review after reading a couple of issues: I subscribing for sure as I can’t wait to read the next issue.
I re-watched The Pirates of Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago, since it had be recently released on DVD (okay, it was actually more like months ago, but whatever). Anyway, it’s one of the better made-for-TV films I’ve watched and it was just as good the second time around. I also think this movie did a lot to bring Anthony Michael Hall back into the spotlight. It’s sort of ironic that he ended up playing who so many of us (rightly or wrongly) associate as being the kind of all nerds, Bill Gates, after playing nerds in his youth and is now known for a very different character: Johnny Smith on The Dead Zone.
The film spans from the mid-seventies, when both Gates and Jobs were 20 years old, to roughly the time that Jobs was back on top at Apple and Microsoft invests in them to help them stay in business. The story shows apparent rise and fall of Jobs and the meteoric rise of Gates. A lot of the action is focused on Jobs, particularly paying attention to his personal life, as it is more dramatic. Throughout all of the sensationalism of their stories though, we can see a lot of how these two men have influenced our lives and culture.
I began to think as the film drew to a close how a sequel could be just as interesting. Apple, since Jobs’ return, has become so much of a cultural influence with the release of the iMac and later the iPod. Bill Gates has somewhat reduced his role at Microsoft, comparatively, and has moved more into social causes. Leander Kahney wrote a great opinion piece for Wired’s Cult of Mac Blog on how Gates has actually done so much more in a social sense than Jobs and wonders why so often the consensus seems to be more in favor of Jobs. I have always found it interesting that Jobs, for all intents and purpose, is a man of vision instead of technical skill. I agree, he recognized how important personal computers could be, then again, so did Bill Gates. Unlike Gates, though, Jobs never actually wrote or designed any of Apples products1. Gates always seemed to have a tenacious business sense, but not always the vision of what consumers might want or use (remember how he seemed to not get the internet as extension of an open society?). I think the two men actually compliment one another and Heaven help us should they decide to run a company together. Then again, I don’t think egos that have had all this time to grow play very well together.
This also reminds me that I really want to read Andy Hertzfeld’s book Revolution in the Valley. Anyone know of any good books about Bill Gates and the history of Microsoft?
I have a few friends that have recently purchased a fifth-gen. iPod. You know the ones that play video that looks awesome? Well, I suspect many of those very same people have DVD’s that they’ve purchased and would like to watch while on the go. That’s made very, very easy with CloneDVD Mobile by SlySoft and your Fair Use rights. You can try it for free for 21 days and then purchase for $39 if you like it (via BoingBoing).
Wired has an article on designing storm resistant housing that is becoming a popular option for rebuilding in the Gulf Coast. Ideas including low cost housing (like I wrote about last week), steel homes designed in PA, floating homes from Amsterdam, and reinforced concrete domes.
I had written some time ago about getting a new scanner to replace my aging relic. However, the old one was working well enough, I just never had the heart to replace the thing. I mean, why spend money on a new scanner when the one I have does just fine?
Well, last month, when having a conversation with my father-in-law about older photos and distributing digital copies to family members, I decided that getting a newer, faster scanner was the thing to do. The old model would be just too slow to make that sort of thing practical. He seemed to agree that the next time Angela and I visited, we should digitally archive all the old photos we could get our hands on. So, I started looking for new scanner that would fit the bill.
Well, I did some research online and had made my mind up. Unfortunately, by the time we had went to CompUSA, they didn’t have the model I had decided on. However, Angela and I ended up stumbling upon the Canon CanoScan LiDE 500F. Sometimes, luck is all you need.
This thing really does it all and does it quite well. It isn’t the cheapest scanner we could have bought, but we paid extra for portability since taking it on trips was (oddly enough) going to be one of the things we’d knew we’d be doing with it. As a matter of fact, it even fits inside a Extra Large TimBuk2 Laptop sleeve. With only a USB cable for data and power, it’s very portable. It’s also much faster than our old scanner. However, it’s not just in the scanning speed. It’s also the improved scanning software. Lay on a couple of different 3″x5″ photos and the software will pick them out individual and scan them into two different files. The four auto-scan buttons (scan, copy, .pdf, and e-mail) are pretty customizable and make the scanner even more useful.
The scanner also has a cool lid that will is double hinged for thicker items and can dislocate (like an action movie character’s shoulder) to lay completely flat. This makes scanning in books much easier. The included OCR software, OmniPage, does a much better job than what I remember older version doing. Of course, it’s still only good for flat, clearly typed pages. You’re probably not going to be doing your own Google Print projects with this thing. Still, just one more feature that makes it a solid package.
I’ve used the film scanning attachment and was impressed with the results (some examples of photos taken with a disposable camera). However, it’s a pretty slow process and scanning from prints is much faster and seems to produce similar quality results, provided the prints are clean (let’s face it, negatives tend to be in better shape than prints).
I’m really pleased with this new scanner and I think that it will make my and my father-in-law’s project feasible, with the addition of Angela’s iBook (Canon has Mac software as well) and our external hard-drive.
As a kid, I loved B-level science fiction and fantasy books. Of course, of those, none were better than choose-your-fate books (note: I had mostly the D&D branded books, myself). Well, they’re back in a DVD format in Scourge of Worlds – A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure (actually released in 2003). I’ll have to give this a try, at least for nostalgia’s sake.
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