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Geek alert: the technorati API has been released. This will let people with too much time on their hands write scripts to mine data from the vast technorati database. In other words, this will help automate the weaving together of the weblog world.
Over the past few months, I've gotten a lot of requests from people who wanted to be able to use the Technorati database for a variety of purposes - everything from social network research to mini-applications that would send them a page or an IM whenever someone posted a link to their website. I created the Technorati API order to help foster these creative ideas and developers.
Verizon to add wi-fi to phone booths?
Crossing fingers...
Ftrain is always worth the ride:
An editor, could I persuade one to read this far, would correctly say, "where is the story?"
My weak reply: this is not a story but a marker. People will find it in the future, as they come across these pages, and they will see that after the water boiled and I drank my tea, I kept writing. 2004, 2005, 2006, 2020.
Christopher Locke is back on a roll. He puts the 'is' in disorder. Or possibly the 'or'...
New Neal Stephenson novel, Quicksilver, due out in September.
In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.Preview chapter on line now.
Computer programs can be very good at textual pattern matching, but they are very bad at semantic matching. Finding every occurrence of 'rose' is no problem; finding every expression of love is impossible.
Given this, might it be the case that since information on the web is largely found by computer programs (like google,) will the web exert pressure (realized or not) on writers to standardize (fossilize?) their use of language?
In other words, will our dependence on google as a means of having our writing discovered by people who are looking for just such things, exert a pressure on us as authors to use language more uniformly? Or, again, will something like the semantic web emerge, not through marking up our writings with XML tags which specify what we "really mean", but through a general shift towards always using the same word or phrase for a single idea?
You might think of this as the emergent semantic web. Or the bottom up semantic web. But - and this is the point - you'll have trouble finding all documents on this or any other subject unless we stick to one name or the other.
Will this be good or bad for language? And for humans?
If you're experimenting with iTunes rendezvous sharing you probably want to grab this http://www.etek.chalmers.se/~lernvall/itdlgui2.tgz.
[update: just to be clear, since at least one person was confused, I didn't write this program. And I have no idea who did. Just passing along something I found useful.]
From the prurient link department: James Joyce's (really quite) dirty letters. Possibly not safe for work if your surfing is being monitored.
My friend T. bought the new 30 gig iPod. I haven't seen this reported elsewhere, but in playing with it for a few minutes I noted some severe sluggishness in the interface. Sometimes it wouldn't respond at all to the "wheel" for many seconds. This is troublesome. I wonder if he might have gotten a bad unit? Or is the 30 gig drive just too big? (He did have it full.) I'd be curious if anyone else can report on this.
The new Nokia 6800 is finally out in Europe. Soon in the States. Very interesting flip open keyboard for text entry. (Yeah, I linked to this one a long time ago.)
And the Danger HIptop (my mobile) is now out in color. Apparently, even with the color screen, battery life has slightly improved. And the seriously underpowered camera has also been slightly bumped, from 120x90 pixels to 320x240. I want more, but that's better than nothing.
But no word yet from T-Mobile on terms. Remember, they only promised flat rate data for the first year. What's going to happen? It's the flat rate pricing that makes this the current best device for me.