Technology

CafePress seems to be a mite closer to launching their book printing arm. I just got an intriguing email offering me the chance to beta it; alas, I don’t have a book all ready to go. C’est la vie. However, the email does have some hints about formats. They want page sizes of either 4.18 × 6.88 (mass market paperback), 5 × 8, 7.5 × 9.25, 8.5 × 11, or 6.625 × 10.25 (comic books). That’s inches, one assumes. They offer saddlestitch binding for lower page counts and wire-o for full fledged books. Maximum page count is 600 pages. ...

Wired (original) and Dan Gillmor (original) just did stories on OhmyNews, which sounds pretty revolutionary. It’s an online newspaper (with a print component, but that’s a fish of a different color) that’s 90% written by volunteer reporters. Ah, you say, it’s Metafilter. Yes, except that the “citizen-reporters” file stories which are then checked and approved by professional editors. Really good stories earn the authors a smallish fee. In other words, it’s news blogging with professional editors. Compare this to Dave Winer’s optimism (original) about bloggers; note that OhmyNews is in fact having a real effect on Presidential elections in South Korea. In fact, Jon Bonne nailed it (original). “Professional journalism continues to exist because the public has demonstrated its need for two things: truth and convenience.” OhmyNews is a way to satisfy those two needs while still opening up a door for the amateur reporter.

Dave rants (original) : The other Web content management systems don’t even have Edit This Page buttons yet. I’m amazed that people think Movable Type is so advanced. They have a long way to go before they catch up to Manila. And Blogger is totally not in the game and neither product, architecturally is suited to easy connections to editing content. Too many steps, too much memorization. Oddly, every post on this front page provides me with a one-click method of editing itself. Click, edit, save, done. And I seem to be using Movable Type. I had to add the tweak, but it wasn’t exactly difficult (it’s just a template change) and the Movable Type architecture didn’t get in the way.

I love my iPod. I’d long ago noticed that its alphabetic sort puts bands with “The” in their appropriate place; i.e., “The Beatles” sort into the Bs. Good. But I didn’t realize until yesterday that it does the same thing with “Los.” Yep, Los Straightjackets are in the Ss.

So… this (original) is a very cool hack. I admire it. But I have to ask what the social utility of it is. Should we assume that the links with multiple incoming links are more important? Less important? We tend to assign importance to numbers, regardless of whether any was intended. I’m sure I sound like an idiot idealist, but the tendency to equate popularity to quality disturbs me a little. Google is the most obvious flagbearer for this concept, by the nature of their algorithm; they do a pretty good job of toning down the effect, but you still find this blog way too high in the results when you search on “Population.” It seems to me that Ben Hammersley’s hack encourages people to think of sites with more incoming links as more important, simply because it makes the information so accessible. ...

The Eater of Meaning is a Web page filter that is somehow so mesmerizing I find it worth linking to. (Via the Redhead (original).) Through its eyes, I discover that this blog is “Populates: Onerous. It’s wheelers I talmudization to mystics. Gaming, polarity, andrea lingo I donner’t wanderings to formulator abolishment.” And how happy am I to know that my blogroll contains such worthies as “Boiling Boiler” and “Officer Winslow Opinion”? Not to mention “Theraputic Volunteer Consternation.” ...

Berkeley DB XML is a very intriguing technology.

MyMind (original) looks like it has potential as an outliner. I suspect it does not export OPML files. Horrors! The cool thing is the linkage to a visual mindmap; that’s going to be really useful for sketching out campaigns. Um.

I’ve seen a couple of mainstream movies on the Imax screen. It’s fun; it’s not superhigh quality but it’s fun. I haven’t seen any Hollywood flicks remastered for the format, but I hear they’re pretty cool too. I will remedy this failure on my part this year. I have a weakness for movies — good ones, bad ones, I just really like ‘em. Well, not Martin Lawrence movies, but otherwise. When you tell me I can see a high quality Matrix sequel on Imax without waiting months and months? My inner geek comes out. ...

There’s a fair chunk of interesting stuff happening at the 2003 Emerging Technology Conference, and since O’Reilly is O’Reilly, there’s a sort of a weblogesque thing going on. Wish I was there… oh, hey, there’s Google using the conference for marketing. That’s not a dig at Google. I’m just constantly impressed at how smart those guys are. Man, and the Social Software track looks awesome.