February 2007 - Page 4 of 4 - Garrick van Buren

Consciously Overlooked

“There are lots of topics I want to track but I don’t care if I see every item.” – Steve Rubel

20th Century Phonecasters

“To listen to the music, a subscriber had merely to sit beside the telephone and hold the receiver to his ear.” – Popular Science, September 1933

What Do You Think I’ll Like?

Aaron, one of the masterminds behind FeedRinse, asks that all RSS Reader provide feed-recommendations.

While I agree there is value in RSS readers making it easier to add relevant sources, my experience with the recommendation engines like Netflix and Amazon has them batting .30. It’s rare that I purchase or rent anything either of those engines think I should. It’s far more likely that I’ll be inspired by another person providing a recommendation.

It’s not the engines fault. Star-rating, past purchases, and high-level genre categories don’t provide enough information to generate a quality recommendation.

That said, RSS is a pretty good recommendation engine itself. Nothing like email, but still pretty good. It could be better sure, and I’ve got some ideas around that.

LATER:
I just received an email from Ben Moore pointing me to Tim O’Reilly’ s post about Yahoo’s new Pipes service. Ben thought there might be some similarities between Pipes and some of the projects I’m working on. Ben’s probably right (the site’s down right now).

While Pipes sounds interesting (“Pipes opens up mashup programming to the non-programmer” – Tim’s words). What’s more interesting to me is that Ben pointed me to it. A relevant, personal recommendation.
Thanks Ben.

Blogumentary now on Google Video

Just got word that Chuck Olsen put his film Blogumentary all up on Google Video. Congrats Chuck.

Chuck and I talked about the film back at First Crack #18 and I reviewed the film way, way, back in First Crack #6.

The Power of 1 Slice of Bread

Every wonder why there aren’t as many open-face sandwiches for sale in your local supermarket. No?…..well, it’s political:

“USDA inspects manufacturers of packaged open-face meat or poultry sandwiches (e.g., those with one slice of bread), but FDA inspects manufacturers of packaged closed-face meat or poultry sandwiches (e.g., those with two slices of bread).” – U.S. Government Accountability
Office, High Risk Series: An Update

The upshot is – by adding one more piece of bread, sandwich manufacturers can sell their product without explicit approval from a government acronym and get inspected every 5 years – rather than daily.

Can I Celebrate New Years on Feb 1?

Like magic, all the crazy stress and pressure I’ve been working through the past 8 weeks evaporated at the stroke of 12 last night. Seriously, magic. I have no other explanation. Then again, I have no explanation for why January was that tough either.

Things feel like they’re right back where they should be. Mind if I celebrate the new year 31 days later? I feel like I missed it the first time around.