Zulli tracks Sandman painting's progress online

Author Neil Gaiman was talking on his blog this week about Michael Zulli, the visual artist who illustrated the last arc ("The Wake") of Gaiman's old DC/Vertigo comic series The Sandman. Zulli has apparently finally gotten sick of the continual requests for new Sandman paintings, so has declared that he is doing one more, then calling it quits - the grandest, largest portrait yet, in fact, lifesize and done in oil. The interesting thing, though, is that he's decided to document the actual process of painting it, and has created a webpage where you can follow along with the painting's progress as he's actually painting it. Fascinating, and something definitely worth checking out.

Threadwatch: "Wikis are cool, but man are they complicated"

Nick W. of the group marketing blog Threadwatch posted an excellent and unusually long entry this week concerning wikis, a subject which has garnered considerable thought at my main journal myself recently. Nick basically had the same problem a lot of us creative types are having right now: he's heard of wikis, and in theory they sound cool, but he doesn't know how to use them, or what software he needs to host one himself, or even what really he could make a wiki about that would hold people's interest. So, he went about getting answers to all these questions, then fully documented the process and put it up as this very informative blog entry. Thanks, Nick, for thinking of us!

Nick mentions an astute criticism of wikis that I have myself; basically, that the learning curve for wiki markup (the actual things you type to get bold-faced text, bulleted lists, etc) is quite high, and not intuitive at all, and that even the interface at a wiki page for all your options (the "previous version" page, the "edit" page) can be intimidating to most new visitors. I don't know enough about it to know it for a fact, of course, but I would guess that this system is so complicated because wikis are a product of the academic world, where there is this complicated and formal way of keeping track of all the changes made in a scholarly document. That said, for wikis to become anything more than simply an academic playtoy, a developer's going to have to come up with a way to run a wiki and let people navigate through it in an intuitive, plain-language way.

Ultimately Nick asks a question that a growing amount of creatives are asking as well: Just what is the worth of a wiki beyond the scholarly uses? He comes up with the same conclusion as me, and as a lot of others, which is that a level of restriction must be placed at the root of a wiki, in order for it to begin to have practical applications beyond the academic world. Once you do that, then you start having some intriguing ideas for actual applications of a wiki. Here's one to chew on, for example:

The HR department of a large corporation creates a wiki on the company's intranet, so that staff members can collectively create an online employee benefit handbook. Whenever one particular employee changes one detail of the plan, then (like full-time employees with ten years' tenure getting 12 days of vacation now instead of 10), they can just jump on the wiki and change it themselves, instead of submitting the change to a manager, who submits it to another manager, who passes it on to a typesetter, who changes it for the next edition of the handbook, a year from now. Then the HR department could start an intranet blog as well, and simultanously post new wiki changes to it (for employees who want to subscribe via RSS, and briefly see the latest), as well as adding it to the online wiki (for employees who have a specific question, and want to go look it up).

There are all kinds of practical applications for wikis, in fact, if you squint hard enough and look around at the world around you. But it all starts with controlling the wiki from the beginning, so that not just any random anonymous schmuck can go in and change something without anyone else noticing. Anyway, I encourage you to check out Nick's post for more, including an exhaustive list of links to wiki resources, that he stumbled across while doing research.

Live From Meg's Party, part 4: Daniele!

Part 4. Poor Daniele - her male friend, a tech developer, says, "You do Audioblogs? Right on - interview Daniele, she's quite interesting," then walks off. So I do, and he's right, she is quite interesting - turns out she's a porn star. Why am I always meeting porn stars at Meg's parties, man? (Yes, the URL for her site is mentioned in this podcast.)

Live From Meg's Party, 3: Adam

Part 3. Adam, a friend of Meg's, a singer and a writer. Here, he tells us why he bothers to pursue both, and what he thinks of Chicago's artistic community. Roughly three minutes in length.

Live From Meg's Party, 2: Josh

It's Friday night and I'm at my friend Meg's party, over in Bucktown, Chicago. I'm kind of drunk and kind of high and I'm having all these interesting conversations with all these interesting people. And then I remembered, "Ah, that's right, I have Audioblogger, I can just catch these conversations as they happen, and post them for all of you to hear. So that's what I'm doing.

Part 2. Josh, one of Meg's roommates, has lived most of his life in Israel, and only three years in Chicago. Here, he tells us how he ended up here and what he thinks. Also, Josh gives a response to Lewis Lazare's recent accusation that Chicago isn't an international-enough city to support a publication like Time Out. Roughly four minutes in length.

Live From Meg's Party, 1: Raphael

It's Friday night and I'm at my friend Meg's party, over in Bucktown, Chicago. I'm kind of drunk and kind of high and I'm having all these interesting conversations with all these interesting people. And then I remembered, "Ah, that's right, I have Audioblogger, I can just catch these conversations as they happen, and post them for all of you to hear. So that's what I'm doing.

Part 1. Raphael, a guy sitting next to me and sharing a joint, pontificates on his almost ten years as a Chicago bike messenger. He tells us his most dangerous experience, and how he managed to get bandaged up without health insurance. Roughly two minutes in length.

What a surprise - Yahoo promoting websites that don't need promoting

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Steve Rubel noted in his blog recently how Yahoo Search is now offering up select recommendations of RSS feeds at their site; the one he caught the other day was for CNN. He was wondering out loud whether these recommendations were picked randomly by Yahoo, or if they had set up prearranged partnerships with the sites being promoted; the entry then attracted the attention of Helena Maus, a member of Yahoo's PR department, who partly said in response: "...The third party sites we've included are culled from some of the most popular RSS feeds available on MyYahoo! and again based on editorial decision [not prearranged partnerships]."

That's all fine and good, I suppose, but begs an important question - why bother promoting websites that everyone already knows about? The entire point of the internet is that people are seeking things they don't already know about; Yahoo promoting CNN is like American Idol promoting Pepsi, and who the hell online wants that? Well, okay, I suppose you could be cynical and talk about the millions of morons at Yahoo who have never heard of this strange creature called CNN; I prefer to be an optimist, though, and believe that the majority of people online already know about such "underground" websites as the New York Times and Amazon. I urge Yahoo, instead of simply promoting the top 10 websites in existence or whatever, to expand this list of recommendations, and to provide choices that could be of benefit to those of us who aren't drooling idiots.

Blogger.com brown-outs bad enough to make national news

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Okay, so I wasn't just high - Blogger.com, the host of my page, really has been going through a whole series of profound slowdowns with their service in the last couple of weeks. It's gotten so bad, in fact, that it's come to the attention of the mainstream media as well; here's InfoWorld's take on it, for example. (Okay, so InfoWorld ain't exactly the New York Times, but you see my point - it's not just a bunch of pissed-off Blogger customers talking about it.) Biz Stone, a staff member of Blogger, addressed the issue at the company's blog this week, claiming that it's not a lack of equipment that is to blame, but rather the lack of actual electricity to run all the equipment. (Man, I'd hate to see that utility bill.) And even nicer, Mr. Stone admits that Blogger staff members' blogs have been facing the same delays, and that even the staff itself is pissed off over it. Anyway, I guess we'll see how long it takes for them to solve the problem.

'Long Tail' author starts blog

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Have you heard of the term 'long tail' yet? It was the subject of a lengthy article in Wired magazine's October 2004 issue, written by one of its editors, Chris Anderson. The basic idea is that our world is rapidly changing from one fixated on mass markets to one comprised of an infinite amount of niches, and that companies (as well as individuals) can take advantage of this shift, using web technology. An example: Most physical bookstores base their budgets on the idea that the top 10 percent or so of all books published in a given year (the 'Da Vinci' crap, the 'Tuesdays With Some Dead Guy' crap, etc) will generate the majority of the bookstore's revenue. Amazon, however, bases their budget on the other 90 percent of those books published per year, many of which may only sell a dozen copies nationwide. Since they're not bound by space limitations, like a physical bookstore, Amazon can then sell these millions and millions of books that may only get purchased a dozen times a year, and make profoundly more money than any physical bookstore could hope to achieve.

Anyway, Mr. Anderson's publishing a book later this year on the 'long tail' issue, and (surprisingly enough) has started a blog supplement for the book as well. This is not necessarliy just for business people, by the way - he also goes into how the 'long tail' theory can be applied to the arts, education, etc. Anyway, it's an interesting read, but contains really long entries, so be forewarned; RSS is definitely the way to go with this one. (Thanks to bBlog for pointing this out.)

Rollup computer screens - video just added

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Yesterday I was talking about Polymer Vision, one of several companies attempting to make a commercially-viable "virtual paper" type computer screen, and the recent five-inch prototype they completed for use in cellphones and other mobile devices. Well, the company just added a video as well today, for those who would like to see it in action (it's at the bottom of the page). Thanks to Gizmodo for pointing this out!

Odeo details released

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Evan Williams, one of the founders of Blogger, has decided to take on podcasting as his next project, through a company he's started called Odeo. At this week's "Etech" developer's convention he finally did a public presentation on the service; MAKE magazine recently ran a synopsis of the talk, along with a number of photos of Odeo in action. As I guessed in the past, the company is simultaneously going to serve both podcasters and those who want to listen to podcasts, in what looks like a heavy dependence on Macromedia Flash to make it all work.

According to the MAKE entry, podcast creators will be able to record directly through their web browser if they want, via an application Odeo has developed; they can also upload standalone files if they'd rather do it that way, or use a phone to record their casts, much like Audioblogger currently works. Podcast owners will also be able to publish associated notes for a particular cast, and even charge money for subscribing if they want. Users, then, will be able to play the files in real time in their browser if they want, or download them (in both MP3 and WinMedia formats), search for specific topics by tag, post comments to the page where the original podcast can be found, and of course subscribe to different podcasts so that they're automatically delivered, which is where 'podcasting' got its name to begin with. For those who are curious, Williams says that there will be a combination of free and pay accounts for Odeo, and they're also going to start a related service, matching podcasters with advertisers if they want to do such a thing.

I'm excited!

Internet tech: What's old is new again

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CNET has an interesting article up right now, showing how such seemingly "outdated" technology as JavaScript, dHTML and CSS, when used in a smart way (like you see with Google Maps, Gmail and Flickr) is tending to beat the pants off competing cutting-edge technology. The article makes a really good point about why such "retro" techology is suddenly being used to great effect again: namely, because developers already know these technologies back and forth, almost all browsers in existence now support such old technologies, and they were simply good, reliable technologies to begin with. It's a thought-provoking article; I encourage you to check it out yourself.

Indie rock, prepackaged on a USB drive

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How cool is this? Independent record label Magnatune has recently partnered with Hanna Micron to offer what they're calling TunePlug - little USB drives, preloaded with music from the label, which you will eventually be able to purchase at retail stores, much like current CDs (or, that's their hope, anyway). $70 gets you ten complete albums from the label, with no downloading involved - simply plug the USB drive into your computer, and you're ready to go. (They have other options as well, including a $20 "sampler" with only a couple of tracks from each album.) And even better, once you've transferred the albums to your hard drive, you're left with a half-gig USB drive that you can use over and over for personal tasks. How smart! They're selling music cheaper than you can get it at iTunes, promoting ten bands on their label simultaneously, eliminating the need to download those 140 or so songs piece by piece off the internet, and giving the customer something extremely useful as a leftover bonus. It makes me wonder what other kinds of artistic organizations could take advantage of such a product as well. (Thanks to the always excellent Gizmodo for pointing this out.)

Rollup computer screens soon to be reality (maybe)

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From the New York Times: Researchers at Philips Polymer Vision have developed a rollable computer screen, and claim that it could theoretically be commercially available as soon as a year from now. (Check out the article for a photo of the screen in action.) The technology is based on the "virtual paper" concept from science-fiction, that a number of competing companies are working on right now; that is, instead of electrical impulses fired at a piece of glass, virtual-paper screens employ billions of actual tiny little physical pieces of black-and-white paint chips, sandwiched between two layers of plastic, with an interface that lets a computer flip them back and forth at will. (Think of old digital alarm clocks from the 1970s, but taken to an insanely more complicated scale.) The idea, then, is to build such a rollable screen right into the side of a cellphone or mobile device; whenever a person needs to see more information than what can comfortably fit on their usual screen, they can simply unfurl the rollup screen and read it that way. Their latest prototype measures five inches diagonally when unrolled (or over twice the size of a Palm Treo screen) and is the thickness of a sheet of paper; even more interesting, they claim that the screen absorbs about 40 percent of ambient sunlight, making it profoundly easier to read outdoors than the typical glass screen.

I've been saying for years that this is the only technology left to invent before we see the literary equivalent of iPods; that is, devices that make electronic text as easy to access and read as paper text, without your eyes going all bats**t after twenty minutes of staring at it. And now we may actually see this technology on the commercial market, less than a year from now. Hmm, hmm, hmm...

Huge new list of PR bloggers

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Constantin Basturea recently created a Bloglines public account, featuring over 160 PR bloggers; it includes personal blogs, consultancies and corporate entities, spread over 17 countries. (He's also created an FAQ about the list, for those who are curious about how it was put together, and how to best use it.) It's a great resource for those like me who are seeking such blogs but don't quite know where to turn. (Thanks to Neville Hobson for pointing this out.)

Co-create new products with your customers

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There's an interesting article at Reveries right now, encouraging companies to approach their research-and-development departments in an entirely new way; instead of sending out marketers to find out what the general public wants, and then building the products in hermetic secrecy, they encourage businesses to actually invite their smartest customers in and help develop new products from the ground up. The article details a number of large companies who have done this already to great extent, although I think the most interesting one concerns BMW; a couple of years ago they put an online toolkit up at their website, allowing customers to suggest ways that BMW could incorporate new technology into future cars. Then the company identified the 15 smartest customers of the thousand who participated, and actually flew them over to Munich to participate in a series of meetings with BMW's engineers. The customers, of course, were thrilled to have such a direct experience; BMW, on the other hand, got millions of dollars' worth of cutting-edge ideas essentially for free (or, well, for the price of an airplane ticket, which when compared to traditional R&D budgets might as well be free).

I'm planning on doing this myself, in fact, with the arts center here in Chicago I'm trying to open right now; we're going to have both a formal way for customers to suggest new projects for the center (basically, a stripped-down version of white papers), as well as an informal way (namely, to buy a staff member a drink and talk their ear off, with staff members instructed to take these conversations seriously indeed). And hey, why would a small business not do this, frankly? It makes your customers profoundly happier, and therefore more loyal; you're getting a ton of new ideas for free; and most importantly, you know for a fact that these are things customers actually want, not necessarily your staff sitting around a conference table, hoping that maybe these are the things your customers want, or maybe not. I'd encourage all small-business owners to give the subject some thought as well. (Thanks to the always lovely Jennifer Rice for pointing this out.)

3 of the top 6 baristas in America are here in Chicago

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Well, the Specialty Coffee Association of America's 2005 United States Barista Championship is finally over; were you as glued to your television screen as I was? The exciting news is that half of the top six finishers this year (Ellie Hudson-Matuszak, who placed second; Matthew Riddle, fourth; and Amber Sather, sixth) are all from Chicago...and not only that, they're all from the same coffeehouse too! Specifically, they're all staff members of Intelligentsia, which should come as no surprise to those of us who live in Chicago; Intelligentsia, in fact, is legendary for their fussy baristas, their boot-camp-style training program, and the "latte art" they construct on the tops of their coffee drinks (basically, when you pour the milk in a way so that it creates a fancy pattern on the top of the drink). Huzzah to Intelligentsia! Hopefully next year that East German judge won't be nearly so harsh to you. (Disclosure: I hang out at Intelligentsia way too often myself; all three people mentioned in this entry are acquaintances of mine. Thanks to both Chicagoist.com and Gapersblock.com for pointing this out to me.)

iMarkup to make a comeback?

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There's an interesting article in Slate this week, discussing a piece of software called iMarkup that made a big splash in 2000, was bought by Microsoft, and then was promptly never heard from again. In basic terms, iMarkup lets a person go to a web page, mark it up like one would mark up a paper document (highlighting various phrases, adding "StickIt" notes, inserting commentary, etc), then save it as a proprietary file. Then, whenever this file is made available to another person who has iMarkup, when they go to that page themselves they'll see the commentator's markups too. Paul Boutin, the article's author, opines that iMarkup never really took off because it was mistakenly marketed as a collaborative business tool, when in fact it's easier in a work environment to simply type up one's comments in a separate document and email it to a co-worker that way. In the days we live in, though, Mr. Boutin has offered an intriguing new use for iMarkup; namely, so that bloggers, especially political ones, can offer commentary concerning the contents of another webpage, without the reader having to hop back and forth between the original article and the blogger's commentary.

Granted, Mr. Boutin opines, a number of big changes need to happen before something like this is viable; iMarkup needs to be embedded into browsers, for example, or available as a free plugin, to make it as convenient as possible for the general public to use. Also, Mr. Boutin rightly points out the thorny legal issues involved with such an activity; would such a markup be considered a legitimate journalistic reference? Or would courts treat it more like they do the DJs who sample music, as an illegal use of copyrighted material? It's all very interesting to contemplate, I think; those who are interested should definitely check out the original article, which includes screenshots of iMarkup in action.

Portable high-tech shelters for the homeless?

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As reported by Gizmodo: One of those tasteless morning radio shows recently had a "pimp my shopping cart" promotion, obviously making fun of the homeless; the finished cart has such amenities as GPS, an alarm clock, a heater and a refrigerator, all powered by built-in solar panels. (Check out the Gizmodo article to see photos of the finished cart.) I think it's obvious that I find the whole thing rather offensive, but it did give me an idea: Couldn't something like this be built in a serious way, so as to provide actual temporary shelter to those who don't have shelter, like the homeless or victims of natural disasters? Obviously it's too progressive an idea for the US, but such a project would be perfect for forward-thinking countries, like in Scandinavia; I could see such a shelter being of crucial benefit, for example, to residents of Copenhagen's anarchic "Christiana" community. Just something to chew on...

Wanna help write the new Watchmen script?

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For those who don't already know, Alan Moore's seminal '80s comic series Watchmen is finally getting made into a movie - and the director will be none other than Paul Greengrass, director of Bloody Sunday and the more recent The Bourne Supremacy. Here's the really interesting thing, though: As revealed in a recent interview with Chud.com, the production company has already set up a bulletin board for the upcoming movie, and are highly encouraging Watchmen fanatics to detail there exactly what it is about the series that they love so much, and what parts of the series they feel absolutely must be brought over to the movie version. According to Mr. Greengrass, he and the other producers will be reading this bulletin board on a daily basis, and absolutely will be basing part of their script on those elements the participants consistently say are the most important to them.

Wow! Talk about something that should've been done with comic-based movies for a long time, yet never has before. And this is especially important in the case of Watchmen, not only because of the complexity of the original comic, but also because of the unusually obsessive fans for what is now a twenty-year-old comic book. (I'm one of those unusually obsessive fans, by the way.) Here's your chance to directly tell the filmmakers exactly what you want to see in the upcoming movie; I highly encourage fellow Watchmen fanatics to go sign up for free and to depost their two cents there. (Thanks to Bookslut for pointing this out; man, you guys had a lot of entries about comics today! I love it!)

MSN and Yahoo: "We loves them RSS feeds!"

Readers
of my main journal will know that I originally learned about RSS earlier this year in a kind of embarrassing way - basically, only after the web portal MyMSN started letting users subscribe to them. (I don't have home internet access, so up to then hadn't realized that there were web-based RSS readers in existence; soon after I started using MyMSN, though, a reader alerted me to Bloglines, which is what I currently use.) Well, as reported by Ziff Davis' eWeek magazine, apparently both MSN and Yahoo have really caught the RSS bug recently, and are quietly starting to offer services that may change the entire future of RSS' popularity.

MSN, for example, instead of attempting to beef up their portal site, is starting a brand-new service instead, which according to them is eventually going to become a full-featured web-based RSS aggregator, just like Bloglines currently works. And even more interesting, those with an account will be able to add RSS feeds based on searches they've done at MSN search, just like such places like Technorati.com currently do. (That's the only part they have working right now, in fact - you can click here to try it out yourself.) Meanwhile, Yahoo is sticking with their own portal, MyYahoo, as the means for users to subscribe to RSS feeds; recently, however, they changed the mobile version of their portal so that one's RSS feeds can be directly delivered to a cellphone or other mobile device. (Be warned that this is a stripped-down version of the portal, with not a very good interface, and with it only delivering the first 1,000 characters of any given RSS item. Those with full-featured web browsers on their mobile devices would be wise to just continue logging in to the main version. If you do visit, look for your feeds under the "Headlines" category.) It'll be interesting, I think, to see how these two new services will affect the growing awareness and popularity of RSS feeds on the web. (Oh, and thanks as always to Steve Rubel for pointing this out. How do you get so much good information, Steve? Oh, that's right, you subscribe to 1,800 feeds, I forgot.)

Purina offering pet-oriented RSS feeds

Pet
company Purina recently announced a whole slew of new RSS feeds for the various columns they regularly publish at their website. Included in the feeds are advice columns concerning cats and dogs (not only adult pets but special columns for kittens/puppies and older animals too), as well as a bulletin board where Purina customers can post photos of their pets and stories concerning them. Owners of dogs and cats might want to check it out. (Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing this out.)

Book: "Nazis THIS close to having nuclear bomb"

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little off-topic, but fascinating nonetheless: Economic historian Rainer Karlsch, in his new book Hitler's Bomb, is claiming that the Nazis had a crude version of a nuclear bomb actually invented and working in the final months of WWII, and successfully detonated the device at the Ohrdruf concentration camp, just south of Berlin. Now, granted, you shouldn't get your historical erasers out just yet: Karlsch cannot directly prove that such a device was invented, but instead bases his claim on historical and circumstantial evidence - such as the radiation levels currently found at the Ohrdruf facility, as well as recently-declassified documents from the KGB concerning such a test. Also, Karlsch makes it clear that "Hitler's bomb" had far less power than the eventual A-bomb that Americans created; Hitler's didn't even achieve fission, as a matter of fact, and only ended up killing a couple of hundred unlucky Jews who happened to be near the bomb when it went off. Still, though, the entire prospect is a little frightening, as far as I'm concerned. (Thanks to the Associated Press for pointing this out; readers can find a ton of more information about this subject there.)

The world's newest blogger? Why, the king of Cambodia, of course

Okay,
try to follow this one: Yesterday, blogger Dan Gillmor reported on a new report by the Federation of American Scientists, which claims (based on information from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service) that Cambodia's King Sihanouk is now running his own blog, and that he himself is the one actually typing and posting the entries. Of course, you'll need to be able to read Cambodian to actually verify this yourself, so I guess we're just going to have to take their word for it. Does anyone know if this is the first case of a national leader maintaining their own online journal? I'm curious to know if anyone else has ever done something like this.

UPDATE: Mr. Gillmor's readers answered my question! There have been, in fact, two other personal journals kept by national leaders before this: one from the Ukraine's Viktor Yuschenko, and another by none other than Tibet's the Dalai Lama. It should be noted, by the way, that none of the three seem to be what we traditionally consider a "personal journal;" that is, they all seem to contain occasional entries by the leader in question, but in general are run by someone else. Still, though, I think it's amazing that the leaders of three countries now have used blogs to communicate with their citizens, no matter how limited a fashion that might be.

Hooray! Gmail now working for Palm Blazer

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lot of people already know that Google recently created a plain HTML interface for Gmail, for those of us who can't afford no fancy-pants modern compooter, with all the bells and whistles that make the dynamic version work. (My primary computer at home, for example, is still an old Mac Centris running OS9, if you can believe that.) Those of us with Palm Treos also know that the HTML version was originally not working in our built-in browser, Blazer, when it first went online. Well, good news - I just checked it a couple of minutes ago, and it's finally loading correctly. Fellow Treo nerds of the world unite! Just like a lot of other cool websites, no special URL is needed; just go to the main signup page and their site will automatically detect what browser you're on, and deliver the interface most useful for your particular device.

Think you know the future of tech? Wanna bet on it?

Here's
some interesting news: Yahoo has started an online game, allowing people to bet on what kinds of online technology they think are going to become huge in the future, and which are going to fizzle out and die. Based on popular "virtual stock market" games that have been around for years, participants get an imaginary $10,000 when they sign up, which they can then "invest" in the particular technologies they think will become explosive in the near future. The intriguing thing, though, and what makes it such a smart promotion for the company, is that the means by which different technologies are valued is tied directly into how many people around the planet are searching on that subject at the Yahoo search engine. They use as an example the issue of podcasting; if MTV's "Total Request Live" was to start a podcast, for example, and suddenly millions of teenagers jump on Yahoo to find out more about podcasting, then your "investment" goes soaring through the roof. It's free to play, and it's not just bragging rights at stake - they're giving away a bunch of prizes, too, like Mac Minis and others, although I'm not sure if it's to random players or those who specifically do well. (Thanks to MAKE magazine for pointing this out.)

Quixote! Get yer Don Quixote!

Bud Parr of the litblog "Chekhov's Mistress" has started an intriguing new website - called 400 Windmills, it's an open call for people around the world to read Cervante's masterpiece Don Quixote at the same time (starting this April) and then to blog their thoughts and comments as they're doing so, all in one central location. You don't have to be a scholar, or even know anything about DQ, to be a participant; you just have to be an enthusiastic reader, who wishes to join the group conversation that will be taking place this year concerning the book. (Disclosure: Mr. Parr is an acquaintance of mine, and most likely I'll be participating in the project as well - in fact, since I'll most likely be reading the Gutenberg edition on my Palm instead of a paper version, I'll likely be posting the converted .pdb files to the site as well, for fellow Palm owners who don't want to go to the trouble of converting the text files themselves. Many thanks, by the way, to Scott Esposito for ooriginally pointing this out.)

"Blair Witch" creator starting another half-assed project

From CNN: Daniel Myrick, co-creator of The Blair Witch Project, has started a new online television show. Called "The Strand," the episodes are filmed exclusively on the famous boardwalk in Venice, California, then posted to their site for 99-cent downloads, much like Apple's iTunes store. Says Myrick, "The webisodic format allows me to do so much exploration of characters and story without constraints on language or topic."

Remember when all us underground artists were excited about "Blair Witch?" Remember when we thought the filmmakers were cutting-edge geniuses, and not just a couple of stoner art-school flunkies who accidentally stumbled ass-backwards into the opportunities of their lives? Remember when we actually believed that these filmmakers were going to do something with this opportunity, instead of wasting it away on such shlock as "Blair Witch 2" and the horrific Fox television show "Freakylinks?" Yeah, me neither.

Another dot-commer starts a spacecraft company

From USA Today: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has recently purchased 165,000 acres of land in Van Horn, a desolate mining town in west Texas, and is planning on starting his own spacecraft company there. The company's called Blue Origin, and Bezos is being fairly secretive about it (he declined to comment for this article, for example), although he did grant an exclusive interview last week with the Van Horn Advocate, a weekly local newspaper whose entire staff consists of the dude who runs the local Radio Shack. Bezos' announcement now follows those of Elon Musk (founder of PayPal, and owner of SpaceX), John Carmack (creator of the videogame "Doom," and owner of Armadillo Aerospace), and Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft, and the main investor of SpaceShipOne).

Sick of all these billionaire white guys starting spacecraft companies? Hey, look on the bright side - at least they've all stopped running for President.

Experiential vacations all the rage

Katherine Stone of the blog "Decent Marketing" recently covered an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, showing that the "experience" people have while on vacation is becoming exponentially more important than the sites seen, ultimate destination, etc. The article naturally quotes high-ticket experiences (like touring Italy's wineries by hot-air balloon, visiting the Titanic via deep-sea submarine, etc), but I think that this simple quest for experience is profoundly affecting even the poorest backpacking travelers out there as well. Whenever I self-publish one of my own travel books, for example, the vast majority of comments I receive from readers are never about the churches and museums I saw, but rather the conversations with locals I had, the chances to sneak off to underground indie-rock clubs, etc. You're seeing more and more of this among all strata of international travelers - a desire to not just go someplace so to say that you've been, but rather to get immersed in the experience of it all, whether that's driving a Porsche in the Alps or simply flirting with a cute Scottish boy at a cafe in Edinburgh. (Are there any other kind of Scottish boys, really?) It'll be interesting, I think, to see how the mainstream tourism industry responds to such a change, and especially interesting to see how such backpacking resources as hostels might react as well.

Why Technorati is better than Google (when it comes to certain things)

The exciting news: over 30,000 new blogs are being created per day right now. The bad news: perhaps as many as 40 percent of these new blogs are "spam blogs" - hundreds of blogs owned by a single scumbag, that is, automated to constantly refer to each other, and to simultanously refer to whatever it is that the scumbag is selling, so that their collective linking will cause the scumbag to rate high at a Google search on the subject. Google, naturally, currently doesn't have much of a way to combat the problem, but the good folks at Technorati do - as explained in staff member David Sifry's blog, they're actually watching the referrals that come in to their own search engine, with actual human eyes, and are banning spam-blog providers as quickly as they can get established. Mr. Sifry claims that Technorati is currently catching about 90 percent of spam-blog pings right now; they're hoping that with increased visitor participation, they can get that number up to nearly 100 percent.

Most people, I think, would laugh at someone wanting to start a new search engine at this day and age, one that would directly compete against Google - and indeed, the miserable failures of such overhauled sites as MSN Search seems to justify such skepticism. But Technorati, in my opinion, is doing it the right way - instead of competing against Google on that company's terms, Technorati is building a much more specific search engine than theirs (one just for blogs, to be precise), and are selling it as something that's much more reliable than anything Google could even hope to achieve, precisely because of this human-filtering element. In effect they're saying, "Hey, go ahead and go to Google when you're doing a regular web-wide search - we're happy to admit that they're great at that. But if you're trying to track blogs, or see who's been talking about your own blog, or see what it is that other bloggers are talking about, we simply do a much better job than Google ever could."

Mr. Sifry's blog, by the way, also contains all kinds of other fascinating information about the blogosphere, as recorded by the Technorati search engine. Like: the number of blogs in existence has tended to double every five months over the last couple of years, with the current number now 1,600 percent higher than the number in existence just two years ago. Anyway, it's certainly a lot to chew on, and definitely makes a convincing argument for why you should be tracking your blog through Technorati in the future, not Google. (Thanks to Seth Godin for originally pointing this out.)

Report: 40 percent of internet users erasing cookies regularly

A new study by Jupiter Research claims that up to 40 percent of all internet users are deleting their "cookies" on a monthly basis - the small files that a company's website sends to your computer, to track how often you visit and where you go. Marketing expert Seth Godin questions whether this number could be true - these are the same people, after all, who still can't seem to understand not to click on suspicious email attachments, no matter how many damn times you tell them. Threadwatch's Nick Wilson, on the other hand, assumes that this number comes from the automated programs that will wipe your cookies for you, especially in this growing age of spamware, phishing and the like. (A couple of his tech-intensive readers, in fact, have left comments at his entry pretty much confirming this number, and claiming the growing popularity of automated cookie-removal applications as the reason it's so high.)

In any case, it means the same thing - between this, ad-blocking software and RSS feeds, the ways we've traditionally counted the number of visitors to a website are rapidly becoming as obsolete as an AOL homepage in a MovableType world. I can't even trust my own Sitemeter reports, for example, because they only track the people who physically visit the page; but since my entire page is designed so that you subscribe to it and never physically visit it again, the statistics that Sitemeter gives me are almost worthless (besides learning how many potential new subscribers I might h

Finally, the Laotian translation of my blog can proceed!

For those who don't know, the US in all its history still has never designated a certain language as our "official" one; there's no law, for example, that says that citizens must know English in order to be eligible for government benefits, or that you're required to speak English to a bus driver, business owners, etc., even though English has sorta become our "unofficial" language here over the centuries. There are all kinds of xenophobic groups that would like to change this, of course; an organization called "US English" is one of them, and recently published a fascinating study, based on the most recent Census, on just how many languages are being spoken in America these days, and have put it up at their site as a searchable document. Far from emphasizing their point, in my opinion, the document instead helps us marvel at just what a rich variety of language and expression we have here in the US, and just how great it is that we've never actually designated English as an "official" language.

For those who are curious, by the way, the top three languages spoken at home here in Chicago, where I live, are: English (6.3 million speakers); Spanish (1.2 million); and Polish (186,000). According to this report, there are also 3,900 French Creole speakers in the Chicago area as well, along with 170 speakers of Mongolian. Thank God - maybe now I can finally start figuring out what those Mongolian porn sites I'm always going to are saying. (Thanks to Bookslut for pointingg this out.)

Levy: "Why so many white male bloggers?"

Veteran Newsweek tech columnist Steven Levy wrote a new article this week, questioning why the vast majority of the most popular blogs in existence are by middle-class white guys, given the decentralized and supposedly color-blind nature of the web. The surprising thing to me is that he mostly blames it on other white guys exclusively linking to other white guys, and doesn't even mention what seems to me to be the most obvious reason: Because it's much easier in our society for middle-class white guys to obtain the computer, broadband internet access, and cushy office jobs that allows a person to be a blogger to begin with.

There's this huge problem I see among a lot of people who are hardcore online users, which is that they simply assume it's just as easy for everyone in society to have such online access as it is for them. Let me assure you that this is not the case! I'm a white guy myself, for example, who can't afford home internet access, and I cannot even begin to tell you what a pain in the ass it is to update this blog as a result. Now imagine that I didn't own a $500 Palm Treo (which is, in fact, how I manage to update my blog most of the time), and couldn't afford a personal computer, and certainly couldn't afford the money it costs to go to an internet cafe, and was forced to work a blue-collar job ten hours a day that never gave me access to a work computer, much less the hours upon hours of sitting on one's ass in a cubicle that is needed to do such a blog from work. Now are you beginning to understand why the most popular bloggers out there are a bunch of middle-class white guys?

To me it's not nearly as much a matter of bias as it is of simple numbers - as long as the majority of bloggers overall are middle-class white guys, then naturally the majority of popular blogs are going to be by middle-class white guys as well. This is never going to change, either, until we as a society start taking some expensive, long-term steps to ensure that everyone is getting the same access to the web, no matter what their class or background. (Thanks to Gawker, by the way, for pointing this article out.)

A linked history of viral marketing campaigns

Blogger Rex Sorgatz recently did a commentary about viral marketing campaigns, for the public radio show "Weekend America." As a supplement to the commentary, he also put up a page full of links to past viral campaigns still on the web, agencies who create such campaigns, and other practical resources. It's the most comprehensive central page of links I've come across yet, and I'd encourage you to check it out if you're interested in actually interacting with some of these past campaigns. Mr. Sorgatz has a great line in that entry, by the way, about what it's like to actually watch some of these campaigns unfold: "Sometimes it's strangely addicting, and other times it's like watching your parents dance to Outkast." (Thanks to Site-9 for pointing this out.)

Nielsen on low-literacy website visitors

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen's latest column concerns the issue of low-literacy website visitors - that is, people who can read, but who read more slowly and with more difficulty than the average high-literacy visitor. (Nielsen's consultancy did the research; it was sponsored by the medical company Pfizer.) The most interesting thing they found, I think, is the fact that low-literacy visitors read a website in a completely different way than high-literacy ones; they "plow" text instead of "scanning" it (that is, they're forced to read each and every word of a sentence to understand what it means, versus glancing at the sentence as a whole and gleaning its understanding). This in turn creates what Nielsen calls a "narrow field of vision," meaning that low-literacy visitors tend to not even look at the supplemental columns of text running down the sides of most blogs (links, favorites, contact info, etc). Low-literacy visitors also tend to "satisfice" a lot more than high-literacy ones; that is, they deem the first thing they find at a website "good enough" to answer their question, even when it's clear that it's not, simply because it's too much of a pain to keep reading down the page and seeking the answers they're really looking for. Not to mention, even using a search engine can sometimes be futile for the low-literacy visitor, because they don't know how to correctly spell the word for which they're trying to search.

NIelsen offers some common-sense advice for appealing to low-literacy visitors: use text in your navigation menu that's at a sixth-grade reading level, for example; never include important information at the bottom of a web page, which people are forced to scroll down to see (low-literacy visitors have massive problems, unsurprisingly, picking up where they left off when they scroll); avoid dynamic "drop-down" menus or any other "moving text;" and perhaps the one I'd most recommend as well, which is to simply get rid of a lot of that extraneous crap that runs down the edges of most blogs. (I mean, seriously, I could care less what CD a blogger is currently listening to, so why do so many of them seem compelled to tell me anyway?) The astounding thing about Nielsen's client project, though, was that instituting such low-literacy measures did not affect high-literacy visitors in a negative way at all, or make them feel like the site was "dumbing down" to them; after one rewrite of a Pfizer website, for example, the success rate for high-literacy visitors to find a specific piece of information went from 68 percent to 93 percent, and high-literacy visitors increased their satisfaction rating of the site from 3.7 (out of 5) to 4.8, a near-perfect score. (For those who are curious, the success rate for low-literacy visitors went from 46 percent to 82, and satisfaction ratings went from 3.5 to 4.4.) And this wasn't even for a site that desperately needed such changes; as the statistics above show, over two-thirds of high-literacy visitors were satisfied with the site already, even before it was rewritten.

So how big is this issue of low-literacy visitors? Well, the US Department of Education says that 48 percent of all Americans have a low literacy rate, a number similar to most other industralized nations around the world (except for Scandinavia, where rates are higher). Of course, it's been the high-literacy people who have tended to gravitate towards the web in the first place; based on other research his consultancy has done, though, Nielsen estimates that around 30 percent of all website visitors are low-literacy ones, and that that number can be expected to swell to 40 percent within the next five years. Anyway, it's a typically fascinating essay (as all of Nielsen's essays tend to be), and full of practical advice for you and me on how we can increase the comprehension rate among visitors at our blogs. I encourage you to check it out yourself.

Turn a Pringles can into a camera

By way of Gizmodo.com: A website showing how to turn an empty can of Pringles potato chips into a pinhole camera. For those who don't know, the pinhole theory is how cellphone cameras work as well - it takes a little science to explain fully, but basically if a camera's aperture is small enough (like the hole a stickpin produces in a piece of aluminum foil, for example), then the depth of field for that camera nears infinity, meaning that you don't need a focus knob for the "lens" (the pinhole).

Anyway, the directions for building one are at that site, but much more interesting are the actual images the author (Rowena Dugdale) took with her own, and has posted to the site. They're incredibly creepy and cool, like something out of a David Fincher movie; the mere fact that I could take creepy photos like them myself makes me want to build one!

NYTimes: "Yeah, we might start charging money"

From Nick Wilson of the excellent Threadwatch.org (by way of a reprint at Web Pro News): The New York Times is finally considering charging money to access their website. They're already charging, after all, to get access to the crossword puzzle, and for any article over a week old, and they're still getting 1.4 million visitors a day (compared to the 1.1 million who purchase the paper version). Mr. Wilson, though, has a very good comment to make about it, which is that the entire reason the site's so popular is precisely because it's free, which then not only encourages people to simply read it, but for bloggers to make it the main source they quote and link to when discussing recent items in the news.

Having a no-charge policy, Mr. Wilson argues, is what's created the online edition's reputation in the first place - they are literally one of the most-linked-to publications on the entire planet, which is what draws 1.4 million people a day to begin with. Start charging for content, he argues, and people will merely start linking to USA Today or the Associated Press instead, whenever they want to talk about things in the news in the future. Just look at the Wall Street Journal as a cautionary tale, he says - sure, they may be making a pittance by charging for online content, but barely anyone ever links to articles there when discussing business issues online, and in fact what the WSJ has to say about a situation hardly even enters the conversation anymore, when it comes to online discussions. In effect, Wilson argues, the WSJ is literally making themselves irrelevant when it comes to online business discussions, and the NYT will do the same concerning the entire topic of news, if they decide to go the pay route. A very intriguing entry, just like I expect from Threadwatch, and a subject that would do the NYT a lot of good contemplating.

A novel delivered through email - too bad it sucks

As reported by About.com, a couple of authors have teamed together to offer a mystery novel, completely delivered as a series of emails to you from the various characters involved. Entitled The Daughters of Freya, the plot itself apparently has something to do with people emailing back and forth to each other; that is, it's not usual novel pages that are emailed to you as the novel progresses, but rather emails from the characters themselves (four or five characters total), with the contents of their emails making up the bulk of the actual storyline.

Unfortunately the authors have made the idiotic decision to charge people to read the book, which unfortunately means that almost no one will actually experience what seems like this really cool idea. Underground writers, get a clue! If people won't pay for online content from Stephen King, they're sure as hell not going to pay for online content from some schmo they've never heard of, published by some company that calls itself "Bumper Crop Inc." It's just such a shame, because it sounds like such an intriguing project, one I was looking forward to actually trying it out and writing a review of here later; unfortunately the book will never get mentioned at this site again, though, because there's no way in hell I'm paying eight bucks just to see what it's like.

"Nutrition" labels for websites?

As reported by CNET, Microsoft's done an interesting thing this week - they've created a set of standardized statements, the same from site to site, explaining exactly what a visitor might need to know about the site's inner workings - how the company collects information, their policy on selling email addresses, direct contact information for the company, etc. It's all part of a movement started by the Center for Internet Policy Leadership, to get companies to provide the same standardized transparency information in the same format, on the same place at each website. The hope, then, is that it become like the government-mandated nutrition labels all foods must carry here in the US; by using a consistent font and layout from product to product, you make the process less confusing to the consumer, and easier for them to directly compare information from one company to the next. It's an intriguing development, I think, and one that I hope catches on with other companies out there.

Links Hall starts blog

Links Hall, a legendary performance venue here in Chicago (they were the first midwestern venue for such '80s staples as Karen Finley, Eric Bogosian and Henry Rollins), has started a blog recently, with the aim of pointing out interesting resources for the Chicago-area performance artist. Unfortunately, though, so far it's mostly a series of reprints about upcoming performances, and the last thing I need in my life is yet another group telling me about upcoming performances by yet other groups in Chicago. I'm hoping, though, as more people find out about it, that the blog will actually have more and more interesting things to say. (Thanks to Gapersblock.com for pointing this out.)

Threadwatch: "Wikis are cool, but man are they complicated"

Nick W. of the group marketing blog Threadwatch posted an excellent and unusually long entry this week concerning wikis, a subject which has garnered considerable thought at my main journal myself recently. Nick basically had the same problem a lot of us creative types are having right now: he's heard of wikis, and in theory they sound cool, but he doesn't know how to use them, or what software he needs to host one himself, or even what really he could make a wiki about that would hold people's interest. So, he went about getting answers to all these questions, then fully documented the process and put it up as this very informative blog entry. Thanks, Nick, for thinking of us!

Nick mentions an astute criticism of wikis that I have myself; basically, that the learning curve for wiki markup (the actual things you type to get bold-faced text, bulleted lists, etc) is quite high, and not intuitive at all, and that even the interface at a wiki page for all your options (the "previous version" page, the "edit" page) can be intimidating to most new visitors. I don't know enough about it to know it for a fact, of course, but I would guess that this system is so complicated because wikis are a product of the academic world, where there is this complicated and formal way of keeping track of all the changes made in a scholarly document. That said, for wikis to become anything more than simply an academic playtoy, a developer's going to have to come up with a way to run a wiki and let people navigate through it in an intuitive, plain-language way.

Ultimately Nick asks a question that a growing amount of creatives are asking as well: Just what is the worth of a wiki beyond the scholarly uses? He comes up with the same conclusion as me, and as a lot of others, which is that a level of restriction must be placed at the root of a wiki, in order for it to begin to have practical applications beyond the academic world. Once you do that, then you start having some intriguing ideas for actual applications of a wiki. Here's one to chew on, for example:

The HR department of a large corporation creates a wiki on the company's intranet, so that staff members can collectively create an online employee benefit handbook. Whenever one particular employee changes one detail of the plan, then (like full-time employees with ten years' tenure getting 12 days of vacation now instead of 10), they can just jump on the wiki and change it themselves, instead of submitting the change to a manager, who submits it to another manager, who passes it on to a typesetter, who changes it for the next edition of the handbook, a year from now. Then the HR department could start an intranet blog as well, and simultanously post new wiki changes to it (for employees who want to subscribe via RSS, and briefly see the latest), as well as adding it to the online wiki (for employees who have a specific question, and want to go look it up).

There are all kinds of practical applications for wikis, in fact, if you squint hard enough and look around at the world around you. But it all starts with controlling the wiki from the beginning, so that not just any random anonymous schmuck can go in and change something without anyone else noticing. Anyway, I encourage you to check out Nick's post for more, including an exhaustive list of links to wiki resources, that he stumbled across while doing research.

Zulli tracks Sandman painting's progress online

Author Neil Gaiman was talking on his blog this week about Michael Zulli, the visual artist who illustrated the last arc ("The Wake") of Gaiman's old DC/Vertigo comic series The Sandman. Zulli has apparently finally gotten sick of the continual requests for new Sandman paintings, so has declared that he is doing one more, then calling it quits - the grandest, largest portrait yet, in fact, lifesize and done in oil. The interesting thing, though, is that he's decided to document the actual process of painting it, and has created a webpage where you can follow along with the painting's progress as he's actually painting it. Fascinating, and something definitely worth checking out.