gettin all zoidal on ya
On a lark, I’ve booked tickets to Paris next week for March 30th to April 6th via a steal of a deal on AirFrance. Meghan and I will be going together. We picked up the Rick Steve’s book yesterday and we’re thorougly excited. Yay!
Nature just launched connotea. “Organise your references. Share them with others. Discover new leads.” Basically its del.icio.us for biologists. Its pretty neat. When you bookmark a piece of literature it will find the DOI, PubMed ID, original journal, page number, etc.
How much of this is due to the fact the “long tail” bloggers stopped blogging and hence people started unsubscribing? I think a lot. Blogging caught on, everyone started doing it, then it got old and now only some people do it.
Another possible explanation: people can only be inundated with so much information. For instance, while in theory I could listen to thousands of bands on Real Rhapsody, I really only listen to a couple dozen. I lose track of them all. Same with blogs. I’m sure there are lots that I would like, but I simply can’t process that many of them. Maybe people have just realized they can’t realistically subscribe to a lot of feeds. I’ve found my tolerance is about 125ish.
After being courted for the bazillionth time to sell Quixtar/Amway today (this time in the mall), I swear I’m signing up just so these people get off my back. The person told me he was “in to marketing” and wondered if I was “keeping my options open for the future.” Once you sign up under a person you really can’t switch so it becomes a non-issue (I think).
First, the del.icio.us popular feed is one of my favorite things ever. I’ve discovered so many great things from it. The latest is RSS Calendar. RSS calendar allows you to maintain a calendar of events on the web. Once an event is entered, it’ll show up in your event feeds. For instance, I’m going to see HEM on Wednesday. The event will pop in my daily feed on Wednesday, my weekly feed a week beforehand, my monthly feed…you get the point. You’ll notice on the left hand of my website an aggregated feed of events which show this in action.
In the event description you’ll see that there are VCal and ICal files for the event. But this whole scenario is missing something : plugins for Outlook, iCal, Sunbird, and other calendaring software which looks at your feed and automatically imports the events. Then, I’d have a web calendar that not only integrated with my aggregator, but it’d sync nicely with all my different software.
I might be able to have a cut an Outlook plugin. Any other takers?
Robert Paterson has been writing on the future of TV. I have commented a little on it before. Presently I only see the channel model at work which we’ve inherited from TV. Even in the new web TV initiatives. The alternative that I see right now is the podcast model. Customers can subscribe to an RSS/Atom feed. While creating an open method for people to distribute content what about channel flipping? How do I discover new channels?
A couple ideas…
About 12% more Americans die from heart attacks and other natural causes on Christmas, the following day and New Year’s Day than on any other days of the year, researches wrote in the journal Circulation.
From todays Wall Street Journal.
Out with the old and in with the new. Welcome to net zooid. For those of you who wonder what in the world zooid means…
One of the distinct individuals forming a colonial animal such as a bryozoan or hydrozoan.
Thinking about this is the context of the net, it makes a lot of sense. This is just one site in part of a much larger animal – the net. It almost makes you feel warm and fuzzy.