onfocus

Sweet! Alf over at HubLog, hooked up Amazon.com Citations and Touchgraph: TouchGraph browser for Amazon Citations. He set it up as a bookmark, so you can launch it from any Amazon page. He also has an example set up using the book I mentioned: TouchGraph citations for Moral Animal. Since the data isn't available via the API, he must be scraping the HTML.

The coolest part: double-clicking a book reference brings that book up in the graph, and you can see which citations the books have in common.

Talk about the LazyWeb in action—thanks for the fun, Alf!

Update: Looks like the citations feature may be in flux at Amazon, so the HubLog TouchGraph browser isn't working at the moment. (It was fun while it lasted!)

Cool new Amazon feature: Amazon.com Citations.

Amazon scans every book in the Search Inside the Book program looking for phrases that match the names of books in our catalog. We make a note of these "citations" and display them to you...

For example, a book I'm currently reading—Moral Animal—contains references to 96 other books. This feature can help situate books within a larger context than the Customers who bought this item also bought-list can. I hope they make this data available through the API so we can see some Touchgraph maps of book-citation connections.

And they should start scraping the URLs mentioned within books too. And while I'm wishing, how about citing weblogs that cite books? ;)

I talked with UO Journalism student Tony Lucero a few days ago, and he included some of our conversation in an article about weblogs in the University paper: Web logs transform expression methods. (Though I call them weblogs.) He mentioned that he's been following Blogger since I was working there, and we talked a bit about that time. I was surprised at how much he knew about the company, but I guess we did have a webcam on every desk back then.

Jesse James Garret resurrected his blog: jjg blog!

onfocus.com turned six sometime last week. Adding thoughts and photos to this space has been a part of my life for a long time. I don't see an end in sight.

Thanks to the Internet Archive, here's a look at what this site has looked like over the years—

Matt's placing some blame on himself for TiVo-ad backlash posts like mine. The PVRblog post that I linked to was picked up and syndicated across many blogs, and Matt feels like he could have kept the negative reaction from happening: Behind the website: when you're at the helm of a shitstorm. Even having a more detailed view of the feature now, I still feel the same way. Will the genuine concerns of weblog authors be dismissed as irrational or reactionary every time they're voiced against a bad business practice? I hope not. (Though maybe I'm just being reactionary to the reactionary label?)

I've been a happy TiVo customer for over four years (I recently bought a Series 2), and I wouldn't watch TV any other way. (Even when I'm cutting back.) But I'm going to have to seriously look at the other systems out there now, or give up on TV entirely. PVRblog: TiVo to add banner ads to service when fast forwarding. Psst, people want technology that helps them avoid ads, that's why they're buying TiVos in the first place.

wordPhoto needs help or Michael is going to have to shut it down.

As a non-academic, I love to hear academic labels for things. Did you know that written text that sounds like oral speech is called a hybrid register? That's the best title for a blog I've heard in a long time. Hurry—it's still available!

Laura Gurak gave two talks today at OSU and both were weblog-centric. She described the UThink weblog project at the University of Minnesota, and the exclusively-online weblog academic journal she edits. She also mentioned a system for describing the features of any electronic discourse grouped into the attributes speed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity.

Because I somewhat obsessively note books that are mentioned in talks, I have a list from her talks today that I give you with no context whatsoever:

• Victorian Internet by Tom Standage
• Electric Rhetoric by Kathleen Welch
• Network Nation by Hiltz and Turoff
• Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle
• Computers as Theatre by Brenda Laurel
• Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig
• Yale Web Style Guide

Some other interesting reading that she mentioned—

• CultureCat (by Clancy, a Ph.D. student in her department)
• The Web Credibility Project at Stanford
• Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes

I met and had lunch with Laura today where we discussed everything from weblogs (of course), to disruptive academic technologies, to the tyranny of templates, to tech avatars.

I've been working in and around (and publishing my own) weblogs for so long now that I've had glasses and glasses of the blog kool-aid many times over. I already know the benefits of sharing stuff freely in a public way, even though my writing isn't perfected and polished here as I would strive for in a book or article. It was really surprising to me to hear resistance to the concept of weblogs from the OSU faculty.

Update: The OSU Barometer covered her talk: Leading Internet scholar addresses blogs in education

It's late notice now, but Laura Gurak—editor of a scholarly journal about weblogs called Into the Blogosphere—is speaking at OSU tomorrow in MU 206 at noon. The title of her talk is Steering Technology or Technology Steering?, and is about managing technology in our personal and professional lives. She's the author of Cyberliteracy, and a book about online protests, Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace. It looks like she has a weblog at LauraGurakBlog. Her talk is open to the public.

I took a break from my TV-fast to watch Frontline tonight. It was another excellent program about the media by Douglas Rushkoff called The Persuaders. It reminded me of this quote by Marshall McLuhan:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commerical interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

I think McLuhan's point is that anytime we consume electronic media, it's giving control of our senses over to a third-party temporarily. Right now you've entrusted me—some random guy in Oregon you probably don't know—with your eyes and attention. Your nervous system is processing this post and evaluating these words. Once *every* message entering our consciousness is paid-for by a commercial interest, we've given away our ability to have an authentic culture. What's hopeful about this view of media is that the choice is ultimately ours; we have some power over how much control over our nervous system we give out.