In Passing...

I thought I'd pass along a favorite Berkeley web site, In Passing... that chronicles those snippets of conversation you overhear, e.g.:

"Apparently he had to talk her out of naming the baby Nintafiv."
"Is that... Norwegian?"
"No, Nintafiv -- like, "nine to five", I think. But then it was a boy, and he convinced her that would be too cruel."
"Isn't she actually Norwegian, though?"
--Two women talking outside Thai House

Also: Overheard in New York.

And take some time to read Pippa Passes about how the overheard snippet can change everything.

Merry Christmas!

The Long Tail - continued

Those of you who followed the "long tail" link in my post about the Weblog Awards were rewarded with Chris Anderson's Wired article that talks about the new economics of being able to access the vast majority of content, etc., in the long tail of the demand curve. You know, the books at Amazon.com but not at your local store, the movies on Netflix but not at the local Blockbuster, the Web sites that have just what you're looking for but aren't on the first page of Google.

Chris has now created thelongtail.com, a blog to track manifestations of the "long tail" effect. Oh, and is it just me, or does the long tail in Chris's illustration resemble a banana slug?
Link

SpellWeb Adds Alexa Votes

Sites like BananaSlug, DynaKewb and Spellweb started as programming exercises, and continue as such. SpellWeb was originaly based on scraping as many search engines and comparing the results. When Google legitimized "borrowing" search results with their APIs, I switched over to using those exclusively. Now that the Alexa APIs have also been opened, I've just added Alexa to SpellWeb, so try it out.

I access the Google APIs using SOAP in PHP. I access the Alexa APIs using REST in Perl.

Link

It's Funny. It's Not Funny.

Pizza and privacy in 2010, compliments of the ACLU.
What are you going to do about it?

Suing Uploaders, Scaring Downloaders - It Works

Because the RIAA and MPAA can't really stem the downloading of Internet music and movies by going after the downloaders, they file suit against the uploaders (file-sharers), then count upon a technically confused fourth estate to misreport the facts. Real downloaders read the headlines, get scared, and curtail their downloading. The industry gets what it wants with a fraction of the effort.

Clear Night Sky

Followers of Clear Night Sky, Clear Ink's blog last seen about the turn of the century, can check out the new stuff. This time around the categories are Culture, Technology, Community, Strategy and Marketing. Sounds like we're in for a round of Double Jeopardy.

Link

Historical Hacks

I love the O'Reilly "Hacks" series. Here's one from way back:

2004 Weblog Awards (and the Tail of the Power Law Distribution)

Sometimes it seems that most entries in blogs are about blogs and blogging. Oh well. To check out the best in blogs for 2004, see the 2004 Weblog Awards. Of course, "best" is a little misleading, in that there are probably a lot of good blogs in the long tail of the power law distribution of blogs.