“links”

2006’s neologism is finally here: Googleseeding (also googletrapping or futuresearching or reversesearching), a beautiful idea by Jon Aquino: after an unsuccesful search, you post what you wanted to find and couldn’t in the hope of someone later finding the post and contacting you with the answer—or her simpathy.

Go read his introductory post (and its comments) to grok^EEM what this is all about (and for an actual example, read Ada’s beautiful Google seed for a lost friend).

In the post-scarcity society of Cory Doctorow’s fun Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom (which you can read for free), money has been replaced by whuffie^WP: a reputation-based currency, an ubiquitous measure of how much other people like you. Now, of course, PageRank^WP comes immediately to mind, no? (And here’s a good post linking both.) But the main difference till now was that whuffie was instantly viewable by anyone (through brain implants!) and PageRank is just a behind-the-scenes measure (though of course tremendously important).

No more. I installed Firefox Extension Search Status in a flight of fancy but it has become second nature to me to look down and right at the status bar icon where PageRank (and Alexa^WP Traffic) is displayed. We are social animals after all.

Remember those classic time-lapse^WP videos of fluid cloudscapes and opening flowers? (Or, to be more uptodate, of girls taking a pic of themselves every three years?^YT.) Well, this is something similar: Justin Frankel^{WP, ELZR}, Winamp creator and one of this generation’s software virtuosos, spent the better part of a year creating an audio-editing program called Reaper, took pictures as the developement months went by and mashed them together into a webpage. Amazing. (via Justin’s blog: c[a,o]s[a,o][s] de justin)

Blogging for dollars is the pretty good, pretty interesting cover article from this month’s Business 2.0 about how the mainstream blogs (MSB?^WP) like Boing Boing, Fark, Metafilter, TechCrunch ^ELZR, Digg or Dooce are monetizing their traffic. Thorough and filled with lots of $ data, what surprised me the most about it was how obviously promotional it was. It’s basically an extended infomercial on blog-advertising, which doesn’t take away that it makes several good insights on media and how technology is turning us into one-man-bands^ELZR, but, still, deliberately mislabeling content is just an euphemism for lying.

In what must be one of its most bizarre moves to date, Google just released a collaborative-tagging game (!): Google Images Labeler. It frankly seems against the company’s algorithmic DNA and I almost dismissed it at first, but perhaps it’ll work… for a while: it’s actually interesting to play but the interest fades quickly. (Via John Battelle)

I can’t remember where I got this notion that Google Finance was just an uninteresting, me-too product¹ from Google, but the prejudice set in without my noticing (as, alas, so many do) and it was strong enough that I hadn’t deigned to pay them a visit until I chanced upon them today.

Here are some screenshots of both Google Finance and Yahoo Finance (the current king of the hill) set to display Google’s stock information. There’s simply no comparison: Google outshines Yahoo “in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.”^EEM

¹ Perhaps it filtered somehow from the popularish blog GigaOM, who to my utter amazement finds Google Finance “downright tiresome and plain ugly.. clearly.. a me-too move.”

One on the design process, another on prejudices, and another on Ted Nelson^{WP, ELZR} .

Sexy Loners^WP is (or rather, was, it just closed this March) one fetishy, weird, morbid, scabrous, bizarre, twisted, risqué, potentially-offensive webcomic (really, so don’t click ahead and complain about it!) with subtitles to match (Story of my life… got the right girl, got the wrong sexual fetish—I jerked myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the stain, the only thing that’s real.—Sometimes I think God hates me, but then I remember that it’s probably because I do strips like this one.—When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers—The biggest threat to otakus is natural selection.—If I really knew a surefire way of getting laid, do you think I would have time to write a strip about it?). It also has the best interface I’ve seen for a webcomic and got me excited all over again at the possibilities of a wikicriticism (see The Lighter Side of Tentacle Hentai or Video Girl Etchi I to see how much the commentary adds to the strips).

And I am, because it really, really, really is true: YouTube’s lonelygirl15 is the birth of a new art form.

How Gibsonian (or Laughing-man-esque) the whole video-cult esoterica was, don’t you think? (Though no one would have predicted that we would become obsessed with a (fictional) chirpy teen.) Danah boyd has some interesting things to say and the New York Time’s article on the memebomb is outstanding (but would some link love really kill them?).

I knew I wasn’t the only workspace-obsessed geek out there: there’s an 800-photo-strong Flickr group of like-minded fellas!