onfocus

So I'm doing better at cutting back TV now that Hell's Kitchen is over, but I had to tune into Tommy Lee Goes to College last night. The premise of this reality show is that Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee has to go to college for some reason, get into the marching band, live with a roommate, and pass some classes. The fun part is that it all takes place at my alma mater—The University of Nebraska at Lincoln. I wanted to see how UNL looked, and how the producers portrayed the school. I got an email from my Dad after the show (also a UNL alum) and he mentioned he was glad they didn't show cows and barns. Most national TV shows tend to find the one cow somewhere in the Lincoln city limits to let everyone know Nebraska is farm country, while in reality Lincoln is just like other cities its size with running water and everything. The show was typical reality-TV stuff, but I set up a Tivo season pass anyway because of the school connection. Go Big Red!

I had lunch with Lisa Ede today and we talked about weblogs, Amazon reviewers, podcasts, and more. I always leave our conversations with a lot to think about. She's studying citizen reviewers—those folks like you and me who offer opinions on products at Amazon or on our weblogs. She recently gave a talk called Online Citizen Book Reviews and the Circulation of Cultural Power and posted the text to her weblog—...my ISHR talk.

In her talk she asks a very interesting question:

What motivates someone to submit the 1,282nd review of The Poisonwood Bible to Amazon.com?

And I stumbled across a similar question on the Freakonomics authors' blog in a post called Why do people post reviews on amazon?:

Take the latest Harry Potter book, for instance. It has been out about a week. So far there are 1,385 reviews at amazon, and another 385 at bn.com. What's in it for reviewer 1,385?

I thought it would be fun to try to answer this question, because I think what motivates reviewer 1,385 or reviewer 1,282 is very similar to what motivates an anonymous blogger to post about what they had for lunch today. (I had a ham and cheese sandwich.) I came up with three potential motivations:

I think one motivation for reviews in general is building reputation, though it's not a great answer for reviewer 1,385. The chances a review in the middle of the stack will be read are low, so it's probably not a good strategy to post reviews to popular books if you want to bolster your Amazon reviewing identity. Also, it's no easy task to break into the Amazon Top Reviewer list, though it may be easier to gain fame/reputation with a body of offbeat reviews.

Another possible motivation—and you'll have to stick with me on this one—is that some might want to more closely tie their identity with a particular product. Because our identities are often tied up with the products we buy, music we listen to, books we read, it makes sense that some may just want to add a piece of themselves to an official page for a particular product. It's a bit like leaving an offering at a shrine for a particular deity. This is basically the concept of commodity fetishism, and I think Amazon benefits from this effect.

Another potential motivation occurred to me after reading about Jeremy Heigh's distinction between conversation and philosophical voyeurism on a kottke.org post in The present future of conversations. I think an act of philosophical exhibitionism can help people organize their thoughts or simply help them feel they're contributing to the common good. If I expose my thinking (as I'm doing now), and it sparks someone else's interest, or leads them down another path, I've contributed something to the world. And if I can explain to someone else why the Harry Potter book is good or bad, I make those thoughts more concrete in my own mind.

Lisa likened the 1,282nd review to the scene in Network where everyone throws open their windows and screams, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. And I do think there could be a social motivation that's trying to ease a feeling of isolation.

So now that I've tried to gain whuffie, paid homage to Amazon by associating my identity more closely with it, and now that I've helped myself clarify my thoughts by exposing my internal monologue—and hopefully helped others in the process—I can end this post.

Watermelon update...

cool, Yahoo! Hacks is available for pre-order at Amazon!

We took the dogs for an early morning hike today, and I snapped a few photos along the way.

Some friends from Sebastopol came up to visit this weekend, and they brought their golden retreiver, Sasha. Sasha is about four times the size of our little pups so we weren't sure how they would all get along. But Phoebe and Sasha became fast friends and lots of dog cuteness ensued.

I enjoyed JD's post You Are What You Eat earlier today and thought it would be fun to do my own photographic inventory of our garden.



This year we have two of the biggest tomato plants I've ever seen. sk mentioned she's had to hack them back several times to save room in the garden for other stuff.



We've already had a couple of cucumbers from the garden this year, and there's a whole pile of them out there.



Haven't had good luck with bell peppers either here in Oregon or in California, but they're doing fine so far. I think this is going to be a yellow pepper.



We've got tiny little watermelons on the vine. We haven't planted them before, so it'll be interesting to see how they do. And here's a shot of the dogs from tonight for fun.



We have a blackberry bush that's full of berries right now, but once it's done we're taking it out. The blackberries have taken over that part of the garden, killing the raspberry bush this year. And they have the most evil thorns of all the berry bushes. Next year it's all about strawberries—I'll get the bush-type berries at the farmer's market.

I just got back from a quick trip to Nebraska, and I posted some photos at Flickr: pb's photos tagged with nebraska. I was complaining last Thursday about 90 degree weather in Oregon, but Oregon doesn't have anything like that kind of heat plus humidity. I knew I'd been spoiled by west coast weather, but I didn't realize how bad until now. I was constantly amazed seeing people playing softball in 100+ degree weather, but then I did that sort of stuff when I lived there. Weather tolerance is relative I guess.

Life update:

• Television - Increasing, needs improvement. Reading this.
• Caffeine - Gone. I miss good coffee.
• Bark Pile - Huge, still in driveway. I blame 90 degree weather.
• Book - Home stretch.
• ORblogs - New feature: Hot Topics.
• Dogs - Funny. Still small.
• Weight - Up, dammit.
• Photography - Stagnant.
• Weblog - Lists only.

Webvisions was fun, and the ORblogs lunch was great too. I don't mean to blog-drop, but how often do you get to dine with folks like Alan, Cat, JD, Matt, and Michael? It was great to hear what everyone's up to, and I'm hoping we can all get together in person more often. We agreed that it would be fun to have an official Oregon weblogs event sometime.

Today a truck dumped seven cubic yards of bark in our driveway. We did ask for it. But you don't know how much seven cubic yards is until you see it. Sitting in your driveway. Ahh well, lots of landscaping to do. The garden is going to look great. (I keep forgetting to take before pictures.)

On April 14th, 2002 I launched the Weblog Bookwatch—a look at the most frequently mentioned books across the blogosphere. (original post) Since then, the bookwatch has dutifully scanned the blogosphere day in and day out, noting book ISBNs (and Amazon CD ASINs) and the blogs where they were spotted.

In 2002 there were a fairly manageable number of blogs to scan. Between April and December 2002 there were 36,790 unique citations across 5,207 unique weblogs. Just to give you a sense of the size today, the Bookwatch scanned 47,512 weblogs today between the hours of 12am and 6am. I have a database with over two million citations in it, and it's growing exponentially.

I got an email from my ISP today informing me that I was over my bandwidth limit. I thought that was odd, did I get Slashdotted and not know it? My logs didn't indicate any spikes. Nope, the problem was traffic from my machine. In other words, scanning close to 50,000 weblogs every six hours tends to use some bandwidth. That got me thinking about whether or not I can afford to keep the Bookwatch running.

But what about all that sweet Amazon cash? It's true that the book links on the Weblog Bookwatch are an associate link to Amazon—and I get a cut when people buy books through them. But it has never been a big money maker. In Q2 of 2005 I made $118.67, which isn't even close to covering a month of hosting with my current setup.

I've enjoyed clicking through the sites to read what people are saying about books that show up on the page. But the Bookwatch can't keep up with the entire blogosphere anymore, and there are a couple of great services with more resources that track book mentions across weblogs (and much more!): All Consuming and Technorati Books.

I learned a lot about weblogs and gathering data while running and tuning the Bookwatch, and now it's teaching me about when an experiment should end. So as of today, the obidos-bot has crawled its last site. It's been a fun app, but it's time to say goodbye to Weblog Bookwatch. Thanks (again) to weblogs.com, Blogger, and Amazon for publishing data in an easy-to-use format.