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kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Not sure if it’ll stay like this, but what a great idea for a gadget site for normal people: a list of recommended technology products broken down into categories based on how people actually make buying decisions. Sample categories include Best Laptop Ever Created, The Great TV I’d Get, and Best Wireless Carrier.
Title Scream is a collection of 8-bit video game title screens. Not just static images either…animated GIFs, yo.
As part of a series of articles about robots in the workplace, Farhad Manjoo has his colleague Chris Wilson build a robotic Jason Kottke to see if it could pick links as well as I can. Say hello to Robottke.
In computer science parlance, Kottke doesn’t scale. That’s a shame. While services that collect popular stuff online are useful, they lack any editorial sensibility. The links on Techmeme and Summify represent a horde’s view of the Web. The material on Kottke represents one guy’s indispensible take. The Web ought to have both kinds of aggregators, but I’d love to see more people starting link blogs that offer a clear editorial vision. But how do you get more of something so hard to do?
Enter Robottke. Over the last few weeks, Chris Wilson has been building a machine that aims to automatically generate links you might find on Kottke.org. Robottke isn’t meant to replace flesh-and-blood Kottke; we just want to come up with a list of items that Jason Kottke might link to each day.
You can check out Robbotke here. How does it work? We began by crawling all the sources that Jason Kottke is likely to look at every day — we look at all the sites he links to, and all the stuff that people he follows on Twitter are sharing. The hard part is choosing the best, most Kottke-like links from Robottke’s collection. It’s helpful that the human Kottke meticulously tags all of his posts with keywords. When Robottke finds a link, it searches for topics that it knows Kottke likes — the more it finds, the higher the article ranks.
Hey, that riderless bike link at the top of Robottke actually looks pretty interesting…
New Tumblr: Things Apple is Worth More Than. Such as: the GDP of Singapore, every single home in Atlanta, Georgia, and all the illegal drugs in the world.
Jim Romenesko is shutting down The Obscure Store and Reading Room after thirteen years. TOS&RR was an early blog that helped shape many that came after it…it was one of my favorites back in the day.
Romenesko was also one of the first, if not the first, full-time bloggers…the Poynter Institute brought him on in 2000 to write the MediaNews blog. Romenesko is stepping away from Poynter (he’ll continue as a part-time staffer) and will launch a site on his own domain soon.
(Fun fact: I did the design for TOS&RR back in, what, 2002? 2003? I was amazed (and somewhat embarrassed) to discover that the logo survived until the present day.)
Great new site from Rion featuring online videos, photos, books, and other media that’s appropriate for little kids.
There’s just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven’t seen. It’s most likely not stuff that was made for them…
But we don’t underestimate kids around here.
With obvious exceptions, media “made for kids” is mindnumbingly dumb. YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo are amazing resources of not-made-for-kids but totally-appropriate-for-kids stuff like what Rion is posting here. I’ve often wanted a Wikipedia For Little Kids (for the iPad) that’s almost exclusively video- and image-based that I could let Ollie loose on to learn about stuff. (via @swissmiss)
Wow, for the 12th anniversary of MetaFilter, Matt bought the domain of the first site MF ever linked to (cat-scan.com) and dedicated it to stories from the site’s early years. More here.
Can’t remember who tipped me off to this (Cederholm? Hoefler? Pieratt?), but Colossal is a top-notch visual art/design blog. There are a dozen things on the first two pages that could slide right into kottke.org quite easily. He’s on Stellar too!
The Inn at the Crossroads is a blog dedicated to exploring the cuisine of George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice book series, from which HBO’s Game of Thrones is adapted.
The Queen took a flagon of sweet plum wine from a passing servant girl and filled Sansa’s cup. “Drink,” she commanded coldly. “Perhaps it will give you courage to deal with truth for a change.”
Sippey posted a brief item on pagination navigation on “river of news” type sites, comparing the opposite approaches of Stellar and Mlkshk. I thought a lot about where to put those buttons and what to label them. There’s no good correct answer. For example, “older” usually points the way to stuff further back in the timeline that you haven’t read, i.e. it’s new to you but old compared to the first page of stuff…are you confused yet? I focused on two things in choosing a nav scheme:
1. The Western left-to-right reading pattern. If you’re in the middle of reading a book, the material to your left is a) chronologically older and b) has already been read and the material to your right is a) chronologically newer and b) unread. From a strict data perspective, a) is the correct way to present information but websites/blogs don’t work like books. b) is how people actually how people use blogs…when a user gets to the bottom of the page, they want to see more unread material and that’s naturally to the right.
2. Consistency. Once you add page numbers into the mix — e.g. “< newer 1 2 3 4 older >” — it’s a no-brainer which label goes where. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the reverse: “< older 4 3 2 1 newer >”.
Also, I do whatever Dan Cederholm does. (But dammit, he does the opposite on his blog! Hair tearing out noise!!) That said, I like Sandy’s suggestion of getting rid of the “newer” button altogether:
We put “Older” on the right, but did away with “Newer” altogether in favor of a link back to page 1. If they want to go back to the previous pages, people can use their back button.
Or maybe put “newer” at the top of the page? Still a waste of screen real estate? Anyway, once I figure out how I want to do infinite scrolling on Stellar, those problematic older/newer buttons will go away. Huzzah!
Dooce gets the NY Times Magazine treatment this weekend. More than anything, reading it made me nostalgic for a certain short period of time where people could write personal blogs intended to be read by more than just family and a few friends without worrying about money or a “personal brand”. God, those were the (clearly unsustainable) days…here’s the new reality:
Amy Oztan, who blogs at SelfishMom.com, is particularly transparent when it comes to her sponsors. She has a lot of them — companies who pay her, in money or in product, to advertise on her site or to mention them. Oztan has an entire section explaining how she makes her money, including an extensive index of tabs she uses to alert readers to the economics of everything she writes. It starts with Level 1 — “The product or service mentioned was provided to Amy free of charge (or at a considerable discount not available to the public)” — and goes up to Level 13: “This is a sponsored post. Amy was compensated to write this post. While Amy’s opinions in the post are authentic, talking points may have been suggested by the sponsor.” In between these extremes are compensation for inserting links to a certain Web site, attending an event or administering a product giveaway. Which pretty much explains why, between daily witticisms, she so regularly describes how she offered Kleenex to the woman next to her at a conference or placed her HTC HD7 Windows phone on the tray table next to her when she lucked into an empty row on her last plane trip.
Six Apart Japan, Movable Type, and the Six Apart brand will be acquired by Infocom, a Japanese IT firm.
We are happy to announce that Six Apart KK (SAKK), a Japanese subsidiary of SAY Media, has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Infocom, a Japanese IT company, as of February 1, 2011. As part of this transaction, SAKK will assume responsibility for the worldwide Movable Type business, and the Six Apart brand.
We at SAKK are very excited to continue our investment in Movable Type, the Movable Type Open Source project and the worldwide community of developers, publishers and bloggers around the world that use Movable Type.
This depresses me. (via waxy)
Favorite Tumblr of the week: Fake Criterions, featuring mockups of Criterion films that would never get made. For example:
Note: a surprising non-fake Criterion is Michael Bay’s Armageddon. Well, it does feature Steve Buscemi and Oscar winners Billy Bob Thornton and Ben Affleck. (thx, george)
A collection of photos of Dear Leader looking at things: corn, your desktop, wheat.
Actually, I can’t recall seeing a photo of Kim doing anything but looking at stuff. (thx, steve)
Disunion is a new NY Times blog that will be covering the events of the Civil War in “real-time” as it happened 150 years ago. From one of the first posts about the last ordinary day:
[November 1, 1860] was an ordinary day in America: one of the last such days for a very long time to come.
In dusty San Antonio, Colonel Robert E. Lee of the U.S. Army had just submitted a long report to Washington about recent skirmishes against marauding Comanches and Mexican banditti. In Louisiana, William Tecumseh Sherman was in the midst of a tedious week interviewing teenage applicants to the military academy where he served as superintendent. In Galena, Ill., passers-by might have seen a man in a shabby military greatcoat and slouch hat trudging to work that Thursday morning, as he did every weekday. He was Ulysses Grant, a middle-aged shop clerk in his family’s leather-goods store.
Great idea. The Times started publishing in 1851 so their archives should have a ton of stuff related to the war. (via df)
Nice little piece by David Carr in the NY Times about The Awl, a small batch blogging concern owned and operated by Choire Sicha, Alex Balk, and David Cho.
“My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for,” Mr. Sicha said. “All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”
Maira Kalman’s lovely illustrated NY Times blog about American democracy is now available in book form.
Roger Ebert recently sat down with Errol Morris to talk about his new movie, Tabloid, and a bunch of other stuff. The interview is presented as a series of eight YouTube videos. In this one, he talks about how he got started writing his blog for The NY Times and how that helped him get over his 30-year struggle with writer’s block:
He’s working on a seventeen-part article about a murder case for the blog. Seventeen parts!
The New Yorker has a trio of interesting articles in their most recent issue for the discerning web/technology lady or gentlemen. First is a lengthy profile of Mark Zuckerberg, the quite private CEO of Facebook who doesn’t believe in privacy.
Zuckerberg may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that’s kind of the point. Zuckerberg’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.”
The second is a profile of Tavi Gevinson (sub. required), who you may know as the youngster behind Style Rookie.
Tavi has an eye for frumpy, “Grey Gardens”-inspired clothes and for arch accessories, and her taste in designers runs toward the cerebral. From the beginning, her blog had an element of mystery: is it for real? And how did a thirteen-year-old suburban kid develop such a singular look? Her readership quickly grew to fifty thousand daily viewers and won the ear of major designers.
And C, John Seabrook has a profile of James Dyson (sub. required), he of the unusual vacuum cleaners, unusual hand dryers, and the unusual air-circulating fan.
In the fall of 2002, the British inventor James Dyson entered the U.S. market with an upright vacuum cleaner, the Dyson DC07. Dyson was the product’s designer, engineer, manufacturer, and pitchman. The price was three hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Not only did the Dyson cost much more than most machines sold at retail but it was made almost entirely out of plastic. In the most perverse design decision of all, Dyson let you see the dirt as you collected it, in a clear plastic bin in the machine’s midsection.
A collection of photos of things organized neatly. If only life were like this.
And here it is. He’s written 40 entries about capitalism and 44 about the blockade. (via @tcarmody)
An annotated list of the best film criticism blogs. (via the house next door)
Sam Kean is blogging the periodic table of elements over at Slate.
Starting today, I’ll be posting on a different element each weekday (the blog will run through early August), starting with the racy history of an element we’ve known about for hundreds of years, antimony, and ending on an element we’ve only just discovered, the provisionally named ununseptium. I’ll be covering many topics-explaining how the table works, relaying stories both funny and tragic, and analyzing current events through the lens of the table and its elements. Above all, I hope to convey the unexpected joys of the most diverse and colorful tool in all of science.
If you like that, Kean has written a whole book on the topic.
The answer is yes, sorta, and no.
People are not tiring of the chance to publish and communicate on the internet easily and at almost no cost. Experimentation has brought innovations, such as comment threads, and the ability to mix thoughts, pictures and links in a stream, with the most recent on top. Yet Facebook, Twitter and the like have broken the blogs’ monopoly.
ScienceBlogs has added a blog about “innovations in science, nutrition and health policy” sponsored by Pepsi to their roster. Posters to the blog will include Pepsi research staff. Some of the other bloggers on ScienceBlogs are not happy.
However, that said, I am completely mystified by ScienceBlogs’ latest development: adding the PepsiCo “nutrition” Blog. How does ScienceBlogs expect to maintain their (OUR) credibility as a science news source (we are picked up by Google news searches afterall) when they are providing paid-for content under the guise of news? Further, I cannot imagine what sorts of credible nutrition research PepsiCo is doing that they can or will actually talk about publicly, nor can I possibly imagine any “food” corporation actually caring about promoting public health. PepsiCo is a corporation, not a research institute, fer crissakes!
(via @tcarmody)
On the list are kottke.org favorites like Hilobrow, The Sartorialist, Shorpy, The Awl, and Roger Ebert’s Journal.
After nine years offline, FEED Magazine republishes its archives.
Welcome to the archives of the web magazine FEED. Launched in May of 1995, it was among a handful of “webzines”—as they were once called—in existence then. FEED tried to re-imagine how we would read and write in the digital age even as we dedicated ourselves to the craft of writing, a craft we were perfecting as green writers and editors ourselves.
We also convinced a handful of published authors to contribute. Hence, FEED was billed as the first Web-only magazine to feature “established writers.” But its ultimate legacy may be the collection of writers who published some of their earliest work at FEED, and who then went on to luminous careers: the novelist Sam Lipsyte, Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox, media theorist Clay Shirky, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, Talkingpointmemo’s Josh Marshall, and many others.
One of the pieces that FEED published was an early look at weblogs by Julian Dibbell. (You have no idea how much it bruised a certain naive blogger not to have been mentioned in that article. Perhaps there’s been a certain “I’ll show ‘em” element to this person’s blog ever since. Or so I’ve heard.)
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