Tango, photography and whatever's bleeding edge
Something I threw together, just because I could: Twitter Quotient indicator. This page will get your # of friends, followers, favorites and updates from Twitter and calculate some ratios. The result might be confronting, disappointing or slightly funny. You choose.
I spent last weekend at the Brussels Tango Festival, mostly taking pictures of people dancing. Because of the lack of light that is typical for tango events, I had bought a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens online one week before. First at Pixmania, but because they couldn’t deliver fast enough (product not in stock), I cancelled and ordered at Foto Konijnenberg. I expected the package to be delivered in a couple of days. When I didn’t see any sign of delivery and the track&trace URL didn’t work, I contacted Foto Konijnenberg (very friendly and correct customer support, by the way) to ask what was happening. Apparently the transport company had been at my door twice, did however not leave any message, took the package back and at that moment no one could tell me where the package was. We’re now 2 weeks after purchase and still at the same stage: my lens is somewhere in the purgatory between vendor and buyer but the transport company (TNT/DPD) has no clue where.
Apart from the fact that the transporter screwed up their tracking of the package, the whole process of showing up at closed doors and going back seems so inefficient. It’s like so much effort has been spent to smoothen out the process of purchasing online, but the physical delivery still works basically the same as twenty years ago, eventhough the drivers now have wireless devices and you have to sign on an electronic sensor.
Let’s describe how I would have preferred to have my goods delivered:
Let’s remix 2 original observations:
In Yahoo! Pipes, what used to be a table in the relational database is now: a web page, an RSS feed, etc. The current list of sources includes: Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Local, Fetch (RSS feeds), Google Base and Flickr. Each source can be searched or queried using either pre-defined or user-defined parameters. For example, there can be a search of all french restaurants in Chicago via Yahoo! Local. The data source and the searches can be mixed together (think emergence), using a reach set of operators. Among them is the iterator (which lets the user loop through the results), a counter and many other functions that facilitate cleaning, manipulating and recombining the information.
Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As Database via PoorButHappy
and this one:
Command line interfaces. Once that was all we had. Then they disappeared, replaced by what we thought was a great advance: GUIs. GUIs were – and still are – valuable, but they fail to scale to the demands of today’s systems. So now command line interfaces are back again, hiding under the name of search. Now you see them, now you don’t. Now you see them again. And they will get better and better with time: mark my words, that is my prediction for the future of interfaces.
jnd.org
Continue reading ‘Pipes + SQL = Structured Web Query Language’
A site I use often to keep a view on “what’s happening” is popurls.com. It show lots of links, pictures and videos (Flickr, Youtube, iFilm, Wired …) but the part I use most is the top of the page: the 20 new hot links from the social bookmarking sites Digg, del.icio.us and Reddit.
I also find that I use the right part of the page (Reddit & del.icio.us) much more than the left (Digg) – just see the clicked (light-gray) links on the screenshot above. Today I read “Digg is for kids, Reddit is for grown-ups” and let me try to formulate why Digg seems to have less appeal for me.
The three services work differently: on the del.icio.us part, when you click on a link, you go straight to the actual page. This means that the owner of the site sees a “popurls.com” showing up in his referrer stats. Reddit links you to a Reddit URL (e.g. http://reddit.com/goto?rss=true&id=xuvx) which immediately redirects you to the actual page. So on the surface, you can’t see the difference. Digg, on the other hand, insist of sending you to the Digg page first, where a too shirt description of link invites you too click through. No instant gratification.
Both Reddit and Digg do more than just collect links, they also provide the platform to have a conversation about them. There is a difference in level of civility in both sites. While a Reddit user might add “I don’t agree because …”, the level of Digg comments is often more like “You loser! Whata pile of bullsh*t! …”, probably due to a younger audience. Since Digg forces me to see these comments when I click one of the links, I see too much of that.
I won’t deny that I’m a bit of a geek myself, but I like my news to be more of a mix of IT, human, political and cultural topics. To my feeling (that might be subjective) the topics on Digg are less interesting to me. Reddit is sometimes too much about American politics, but the rest of the topics are a mix better targeted for me. Del.icio.us is also quite my profile.
So that’s why I almost never look at the left column anymore. When there are interesting topics there, they typically also show up on the other two.
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