onfocus

Howard Dean seems to be hopping on the cluetrain with his Net Advisory Net. (The name is almost a recursive acronym like GNU.) The initial roster includes prominent blogospherians Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, and David Weinberger (a Cluetrain author). It's the intellectual property/social software/non-bs dream team. [via boingboing]

Another snapGallery: surreal scenes of Hurricane Isabel at Langley Air Force Base.

The Crazy Signs of Scotland. A quick snapGallery with "Interesting and silly Scottish signs from a North American perspective." (And I thought Canadian signs were confusing!)

Amazon just added a new method to its XML API called TextStreamSearch. This method lets you send an arbitrary bit of text to Amazon, they analyze it for keywords, and then make product recommendations based on that text. This would let you send, say, an entire weblog post and get product recommendations based on that text. I think it could be useful for creating very targeted advertising based on a page's contents. (Sort of like I'm doing on my quotes page.) You could also monitor IM conversations and pop-up product recommendations based on what people are talking about. I haven't tried it yet, and it'll be interesting to see how accurate it is. [via AWS newsletter]

Update: I created a page to test the Text Stream search. You can try it yourself. (There seems to be a limit on the number of characters, but I haven't narrowed it down to exact numbers yet.)

Erik Benson pointed to Joel Spolsky's write-up of his office design. He is building an office like it's 1999, very nice! (Looks like a Monster Office project. ;) It will be interesting to see how the space adapts to use.

Weblogs Inc. No comment. (I need to get me one of those fancy links-only sidebars.)

Badge Swap looks like fun. Heather also put together a beautiful new site for her photographs: hchamp.com.

I added a couple of new features to ORblogs, a site that points to Oregon weblogs. ORphotos is a group photo space for sharing pictures taken in Oregon. If you're in Oregon, stop by and post a picture. If you're not in Oregon, stop by and see what Oregon looks like. ;) I also added a discussion forum. I thought I'd put it up and see what happens. This should provide a spot for answering some of the tech questions that come up frequently in email. And I hope that some of the participating weblog authors will help steer wherever ORblogs may be heading.

Check out Andy's new web application: upcoming.org. It lets you track events (concerts, conferences, etc.) that you're going to—and browse events that others have said they're going to. He calls it a collaborative event calendar. All of the events are organized by location and user, and you can keep a list of your friends on the system (and see what they're up to). He has everything available as XML, so you can add your own upcoming events to your site with some fetching and parsing.

The Democratic National Committee has a blog (with an appropriately bloggish title): Kicking Ass. [via TomTomorrow] They have a blogroll, comments enabled, and RSS.

Rael talks about why hacking is good, adding more depth to this article about hacking in the Miami Herald: Hack Your System: It's a Good Thing.

Moreover jumps into the business-weblog fray with a weblog search tool. Unfortunately there's no link to the search tool in that story, and no trace of it on their website. And here's a ZDNet UK article: Search tool scans blogs for business.

I'm posting this from the Sacramento airport because I paid for this access time and I want something to show for it, dammit! (Note to self: Never say, "I'll just work at the airport before my flight." You won't get much—THIS IS A SECURITY REMINDER—work done.)

Douglas Rushkoff argues that content is an excuse for social contact—not an end in itself.

Science Presenting Steam and Electricity to Industry and Commerce. More. [via MeFi] There isn't enough anthropomorphizing of abstract concepts these days. I'd like to see an engraving of Ingenuity introducing the Internet to Persistence.

According to Bruce Sterling on his (now) old weblog, Wired is starting up some sort of blogging venture and he'll be moving his weblog there to help out. Keep an eye on http://blog.wired.com/ (not active yet).

Beto was an early Blogger user and he stopped by the office with a video camera one day in 1999. I figured that footage was lost, but he's turned it into a fun little movie: In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History. The beginning of the pseudofilm is hysterical. It's like watching home movies for me, and it's hard to imagine that anyone else would be interested—but the early Blogger users were a loosley connected community, and those were fun times. It's great to have a snapshot of that time and place—just an ordinary day at the office—and it brings back great memories of working with Ev and Meg. Thanks, Beto! [via megnut]

Here's my original post about this footage from 2000.

Amazon Hacks got a nice mention in the New York Times. Scroll down to "Amazon Fun" on that page. (NYT registration required.)

Thanks to Matt, I'm now working in a mixed-OS world where the mouse can flow freely between the machines, and one keyboard rules them all! (Made possible with Win2VNC.) Windows and Macs living together—mass hysteria!

Great idea for a weblog: PR Bop. Tara is picking out the "best" of the thousands of press releases each day. [via several weblogs]

I'm not sure what it means, but I like the sound of it: Schleichwege durch Amazonien. I ran this article from Financial Times Deutschland through Babelfish and standard (mis)translation hilarity ensued: "The US programmer Paul Bausch has himself such offered for its InterNetable Handy built...Perhaps for read rats the best book-tap at present." I agree, read-rats will find this InterNetable book about the Amazon handy-built.

I chatted with Doug Kaye about Amazon Hacks last Wednesday and you can listen in. It was for his great IT Conversations series. (He also has a good interview with Jeff Barr from Amazon about web services if you want an Amazon double-feature.)