Wed, 31 Mar 2004
newsmap is a visualization of Google News. It gives you headlines in color-coded bands by category, sized by how many places are reporting the same story, and shaded by age. This is information pornography of the highest order. It uses flash. It may accomplish what even Strongbad and weebl and bob have so far failed to do -- get me to install Flash on my home computer.
newsmap comes from the same person who wrote social circles, which also looks interesting. I may see if I can put together something similar with Perl and Graphviz.
Fri, 14 Nov 2003
Though only recently hatched, the Opte Project seems interesting. Basically, it's another map of the Internet, but designed to be generated in a matter of hours rather than months, which is what some similar projects take.
Update: Oh, bother. Looks like Slashdot mentioned it, which was probably a component in the path the URL took to get to me. Oh, well.
Thu, 06 Nov 2003
One of my favorite networking tales is The case of the 500-mile email, now happily ensconced at ibiblio.org.
Wed, 08 Oct 2003
Yes, it's true. I hates software. (Though, as of yet, not very much.)
Sat, 04 Oct 2003
I was doing a bit of browsing today and ran across several websites that I figured I'd record for later reference.
- BookCrossing - pass books around to people, record your thoughts about received books on the website.
- The Online Books Page - listing of over twenty thousand books freely available on the web.
- Internet Book List - looks like an attempt to create an IMDB for books. Good idea, only ten thousand books so far. And no ISBN search. Compare to All Consuming and...
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database - more or less the same thing, but aimed specifically at SF. Includes information on what awards books have participated in. Didn't see any good way to search by ISBN.
- The Library of Babel: Links - one blogger's collection of other blogs that deal with books (though the collection is, of course, incomplete).
- BookSpot.com - didn't really look around this site all that much, and the appearance seems a little too corporate for my tastes. Still, might be useful.
Thu, 02 Oct 2003
Sat, 27 Sep 2003
I've just discovered listsofbests.com. It's a website with lists of books, movies, and music that various people have deemed to be really good at some point or other. Mostly, I'm interested in the list of Hugo Award winners. It's been a goal of mine for some time to read every work that has won a Hugo, and this site will allow me to keep better track of where I am with respect to that goal. I'm not doing too poorly; I've read 29 of the currently 51 books on the list. So, here're my lists:
