Gadgetopia

Amazon moves to front line of shaping 'Web services': We're using the Amazon API on this site, so I can vouch for how cool it is. "Over the past 16 months, Amazon has inspired about 30,000 developers to invent myriad ways to extend Amazon's visibility on the Web. 'Amazon basically ...

Amazon SimpleDB™- Limited Beta: Amazon has announced SimpleDB, which allows you to build a database in the cloud and query it from anywhere. It s not SQL, however, and it s not relational it s structured data. Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. ...

If the library were like Amazon.com: Funny.

Amazon Payment Services: Anil Dash has information on Amazon's push into payment services. Apparently you'll be able to use Amazon to process payments for anything on your Web site.

Amazon Light: This guy has taken the Amazon API and made and entire Web site out of it. Via Metafilter.

Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services: My understanding of how this works is that you can upload a disk image of a machine, and it will live at Amazon on some virtual, uber-server, and run there. Cost is $0.10 per hour (or $2.40 a day, ...

Amazon.com Research Services for Microsoft Office System: No more research for creating bibliographies or footnotes. The Amazon Research Pane download for Microsoft Office 2003 allows you to search for Amazon products from within Microsoft Word or Excel documents, and to insert product information and footnotes into documents and spreadsheets. The ...

Amazon Unbox to customers: Eat sh*t and die: Cory makes a pretty compelling case that Amazon Unbox (which I liked), is evil and wrong. Amazon Unbox's user agreement isn't just galling for its evilness -- it's also commercially suicidal. No sane person will agree to this. Amazon Unbox user agreement ...

Another NY Times v Tasini? Amazon's Book Search Hits a Snag: There may be a hitch with Amazon's new book search service. "...the Authors Guild is up in arms about Amazon's new book search function. [...] Amazon apparently has the agreement of the publishers to provide this feature. However, the ...

Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon S3: Huh. Neat. Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from ...

Amazon.com Unbox Video: Well, here it is: bona-fide (read: actual Hollywood movies) video rental over your PC. Is this the first real entry here? Did Amazon actually beat Netflix to the plate? For all the press Google gets these days, Amazon is tearing the house down in my view. I ...

Amazon wraps up best holiday season to date: Is the coming-of-age year for online retailing? Amazon.com said Friday it finished the best holiday season in its history, capped by a single-day record in terms of units sold...The nation's largest online retailer said it set a single-day record with more than ...

Hacking Amazon: Here are some excerpts form the O'Reilly book Amazon Hacks. Great stuff, complete with code samples, etc. I'm impressed with the "hacks" books (Google Hacks is another one) very little theory, all practical examples. A lot of developers (myself included), learn best by reverse engineering. Give me ...

Amazon.com: Welcome: Amazon is getting into the movie short business, much like BMW Films of yore (which I re-watched the other day still great). I watched the first film Portrait and it's cute. This holiday season Amazon.com brings you Amazon Theater, an exclusive collection of five short ...

ONLamp.com: A PHP Web Services Client: Handy tutorial on how to write a PHP client for the Amazon Web service using PEAR's SOAP module.

Amazon Plans Search Service To Drive Sales: Everybody is rushing to search these days. "Amazon.com Inc. has quietly established a beachhead in Silicon Valley to develop its own Web-search technology, a plan that could pit it more directly against Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in an emerging battle over who ...

Can't Edit Without A License From Amazon: Nice. "...the USPTO granted another single-action ordering patent to Amazon that also covers the use of buttons to expand/collapse sections of a form, as well as the use of an EDIT button to (you guessed it!) present data to the user for editing..." ...

Google, Amazon in a war of search words: Two Internet heavyweights are scrapping it out for top talent. Oh, to have a computer science degree... "Google and Amazon.com are fighting for top computer scientists on Google's home turf: search results. When Web surfers use Google to search on the name ...

After Delving Into 33 Other Lines, Amazon Finally Gets Around to Food: Anyone else think they're stretching a little thin here? I've never thought grocery stores worked well on the Web, unless they were local store serving a local customer base, and even then it's tough. Amazon introduced a grocery ...

Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books: "Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved." ...

Amazon.com: Books / Search Inside the Book: Looks like Amazon's search plan has actually come into being. Publishers weren't too happy about this when it was announced. "A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to ...

Amazon Askville takes on Yahoo! Answers: first look: Amazon is heading into the Answers space with Askville. Google ended Google Answers last year. Yahoo Answers kind of sucks, for reasons I explained here. The only one I ve had a good experience with is LinkedIn Answers, a site on which Aaron ...

Amazon.com: Most Edited Wikis: Amazon now has a little wiki embedded in their book pages (all of them? some of them? I don't know). Here are the most edited wikis on the site. The top entry in the list makes sense given its publicity of late, but there are some ...

I just bought a couple of books from Amazon and they have a pretty nifty "Share the love" program going on right now. You can send a list of the books you bought to any number of email addresses (I'm guessing there's no limit; though there might be), and those ...

Amazon’s S3 Web Service, our #1 cause of failure: Unfortunate. Using Amazon’s S3 has about the same cost and complexity as hosting the images ourselves, but we had thought that the reliability of Amazon would be significantly higher. But that now seems wrong. [ ] S3 is supposed to be for ...

:: anacubis ::: This was certainly interesting, but couldn't get any actual value out of it. Fun to look at, but what's the point? (Then again, what's the point of Tara Reid?) "anacubis has integrated the Amazon and Google search APIs with the anacubis™ Viewer to deliver an innovative and ...

Amazon.com Tech Jobs: Ted's Blog: I love whiteboards. Given this, I want to go work at Amazon: "The elevators here are cool. They've got whiteboards on all the walls. It means they act as fairly anonymous forums for people to converse. Sometimes there are stick figures or comments about the ...

JSPWiki: AmazonInterview3: Here's a report from a guy who just interviewed with Amazon. Yikes tough questions, although whiteboards in the elevators still makes working there worth it. What would be your advice for rapid growth sites such as FriendsterDesign a web based email system. Describes pieces, components, design, large ...

I tried out Amazon's Unbox service tonight. It was perfectly adequate -- I got exactly what I paid for with no drama at all. I purchased the first episode of Firefly for $1.99. I probably could have started watching it after five minutes or so, but I let it download ...

Publishers Grudgingly Cooperate With Amazon Database Effort: Amazon wants all publishers to provide digital copies of all their nonfiction titles so customers can search for a term anywhere in the text when shopping. Publishers have issues. "Publishers cite three major concerns about the project, dubbed Look Inside the Book II. ...

Amazon.com: Gadgetopia: The Kindle Store: Due to my association with Federated Media, Gadgetopia is available for purchase at the Kindle Store (along with all the other FM blogs). For only $1.99 per month, you too can read Gadgetopia on your Kindle. What s kind of neat is that Gadgetopia now has ...

Amazon should run reverse affiliate links. When you search for or look at a book on Amazon, they should have a little box that says "If you like this book, you might like these blogs..." Better yet, let people upload their OPML file to their Amazon profile. Then they could ...

You know the "obidos" that you see in every Amazon URL? I've been seeing it for years, and always thought it was odd, but never knew what it was. Well, according to Joel Spolsky's book, "obidos" (little "o") is Amazon's custom-built e-commerce system that they've been laboring over since they ...

Gates' Corbis sues Amazon over copyrights: Two of the richest men in the world are suing each other. Add this to our list of soap operas: "The suit contends the defendants, through Amazon's Web site, have been selling celebrity posters and photos that are illegal reproductions of photos copyrighted by ...

Direct Link to Amazon.com for Book Price Shoppers...: How long before camera phones are banned in Barnes and Noble? "'Now, shoppers can take out their Nokia 3650 camera phone at Barnes & Noble, Border's, or just about any other book store, and just take a picture of the ISBN on ...

Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers: Amazon accidentally posted the real names of anonymous book reviewers on their site, and in the process, revealed that the whole user-submitted review process is garbage. But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called ...

It s been another year, so it s time to re-evaluate my theory that Wikipedia is becoming a standard reference and will soon be the number one hit for notable people in the world. Consider my two previous discussions here: The Formation of a Standard Reference from two years ago. The Formation ...

Amazon is selling the largest published book in the world. At a size of five by seven feet it weighs in at 133 pounds and costs $10,000. Ironically the book, Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom, is nearly as large as the country it is about. You ...

Amazon.com: Playing With Fire: Music: Kevin Federline: Amazon lets customers supply their own tags for products. It's a great idea in theory -- create a "folksonomy." Sadly, with K-Fed, all rational thought goes out the window. I especially like the tag "music to make you long for the sweet release ...

Replacing my home backup server with Amazon's S3: Zawodny is documenting his switch from local backups to pushing all his data out to Amazon's S3 service. He makes the economic case that shutting his computer off when he's not using it would save him money on electricity and parts. I'm ...

Alexa Site Thumbnail / Amazon Web Services: This is brilliant. For $0.20, you can access 1,000 thumbnail images of Web sites from an Amazon Web service. The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service provides developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites. It offers access ...

E-books are getting a boost at BookExpo: Here's the latest update on the state of the e-book market. "To those who say it's ridiculous to read a book on computer, Nick Bogaty, who runs the Open eBook Forum trade group, retorts: 'Five years ago, you'd say I prefer getting mail ...

Amazon Mechanical Turk: I can't believe I haven't heard of this before, given that's almost a year old. Amazon's MTurk service is an API to match people up with Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for them to complete and get paid. HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that ...

Amazon.com The Kindle Store Bestsellers: The most popular items in Gadgets, PCs & Consumer Electronics. : According to this page, Gadgetopia is the third-most purchased blog in its category Amazon Kindle store. There are 14 sites in this category, and Gadgetopia is ahead of sites like Scoble, Crunchgear, Techdirt, etc. ...

Google eyes book search: Google isn't taking this Amazon Look Inside the Book thing lying down. "Google is in talks with several publishers to build a service that would allow Web surfers to search the full text of books online, according to a report this week from Publishers Weekly's online ...

Colorblindness & Usability: A Case Study of Microsoft, Amazon & IBM: I didn't know colorblindness was so prevalent. I am one of the 10% of the male population who is colorblind. Approximately one million people visit Amazon.com each day. If we assume that half of these visitors are male, then ...

My office is moving to a new building in a few days. We have at least 100 programming books of many flavors which we have accumulated and for which we have no more need. One of them, Teach Yourself Web Publishing With Html 3.2 in 14 Days by Laura Lemay, ...

Amazon.com's rent-a-grid: Jon Udell tries out Amazon new S3 service and is impressed, saying "it just worked." As the blogosphere quickly noted, the EC2 rate of a dime per instance-hour works out to $72 per month for the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU with 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB ...

What are Statistically Improbable Phrases?: I'm a little slow on the uptake here, but this is pretty interesting concept over at Amazon. It's essentially tagging, but generated by a computer. Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside! ...

I've mentioned before that when it comes to music, I really can't say what my tastes are. I know what I like when I hear it, but I can't really classify myself as being a huge fan of a certain band or a certain genre. AudioScrobbler seems to be designed ...

Do you put more value on information you pay for? Do you pay more attention to something you paid, say $5 for, than something you read for free on the Net? A friend and I were having this conversation the other day, partly related to my post from a couple ...

Shelfari: Invitations and updates: From the official Shelfari blog, posted yesterday. We ve seen the recent emergence of complaints about Shelfari s invitations feature, and it s quite distressing. [ ] It s been about five months since we last touched our invitation design. In June we looked at a number of different designs with ...

About a year ago, I opined that Wikipedia was quickly becoming a "standard reference," meaning it was a base repository of information about a subject -- the starting point. This is reflected in how high Wikipedia rates when searching for notable people. What I think this points to is the ...

Apple's iTunes Music Store is down right now; all links redirect to this page. Guess that means Rob's comment is on the mark, and the heat will be turned up a bit for Amazon's Unbox. I'm thinking it'll be better than perfectly adequate.

isbndb.com - free ISBN database: A thing of beauty underway here: The goal of the project is to create a multilingual database of books with well defined remote access protocols and free individual access. Think Amazon API for every book ever written. Database. Books. My two favorite words. Via ResearchBuzz.

Kirtas Technologies, Inc: This company makes automatic book scanners that scan while turning the pages of books. This must be what Google Print and Amazon are using. There's an animated GIF on the front page that goes really far into explaining what their machine does, plus a video demo. Via ...

My Wired News Wishes for 2004: Some great idea here. Tim for President. I wish that the various web services data vendors (including Amazon, Google, EBay, Salesforce.com, and many others) would realize that they comprise the building blocks of a future "internet operating system", and act accordingly, engaging with each ...

I was on that site about Web typography, and I clicked an Amazon link. The image above is what happened, which is pretty neat. It was unobtrusive, and it set a cookie so it didn't bother me again. (I had to clear the cookie, in fact, to get the screencap.) ...

A9.com Search: nai sioux falls commercial: So Amazon creates their new Yellow Pages search engine, claiming: A9.com brings Yellow Pages to life by adding 20 million images I search for my company (link above), and I find the results illustrated by a dozen pictures of multi-family homes and aerial shots ...

Gadgetopia readers, I come to you for your help. I am looking for a 11 x 17 movie poster of The Net the 1995 movie starring Sandra Bullock. I have looked, and been unable to find it (please don t ask why I need it all will be revealed ) ...

I liked this article not because of the obvious (Amazon has launched an e-commerce consulting business) but because of the following observation regarding purchasing off-the-shelf online store software: "In e-commerce, the build formula is far more successful than the buy formula ... E-commerce and online transactions in general are rife ...

Ruby on Rails chases simplicity in programming: CNet finally gets around to reporting on Rails. It's Hansson-worship at its most blatant, but still a good read. His goal with Ruby on Rails is not to create a sophisticated development framework that the engineers at Google or Amazon.com will flock to. ...

movabletype.org: News: Six Apart clarifies Movable Type licensing: "...for personal, non-commercial users, Movable Type is free to download and use. We don't consider an Amazon wishlist link or a PayPal donation link to be a commercial use of your site, so you're free to update your weblog and maintain your ...

Media Manager: This is a pretty hardcore Movable Type plugin. The Media Manager plugin allows users to manage and review a list of CDs, DVDs, Books and/or any product from Amazon's product catalog using a fully integrated, simple to use interface. It seems simple on the surface, but look at ...

All Consuming: This site trolls through RSS feeds looking for ISBN's and uses them to calculate what books are being discussed in the blogosphere. Here's our page. We've mentioned books on this site before, but the only ones that show up here are the ones we've linked to with our ...

Spam Suit Highlights Need to Police Affiliates: So, if I'm reading this right, Amazon or Google could be in trouble if I spammed a bunch of people to get them to this site so I could make money of the affiliate marketing? Or is my agency relationship with them not ...

Microsoft's Portable Media Center is set to release today. Digital Media Thoughts reports that two units, the Samsung Yepp (pictured here) and the Creative Labs Zen are already listed at Amazon. These are neat little doo-dads, but it seems like a device for a pretty small niche. You'd need to ...

Recently I was looking around for a sport watch to replace my $10 Wal-mart disposible model that had died and on which I spent $3 on a replacement battery that was unable to resurrect it. That's a post for another day. Anyway, I ran across the Ironman Triathlon Data Link ...

Forget one-to-one, keep it impersonal: I never did quite understand the "personalization" craze either. I'd rather sites not know who I am, actually. The maths is simple. On one hand, though the theory assumes low costs, in practice personalisation needs more cash than most companies realise - Amazon spends many ...

Amazing Ants Ambush Prey from Foxholes: It seems a species of ant native to the Amazon has figured out that by working together they can bring home some very large meals. Good news for the ants. Bad news for every other bug that lives in their part of the forest. ...

Userscripts.org - Universal Repository: Here's a site full of Greasemonkey scripts for about everything you could ever imagine. I like this one, that automatically switches all Amazon affiliate links in the page you're viewing to your own affiliate ID. Sneaky. This one for Blogines continually checks your feeds in the ...

Crooks slither into Net's shady nooks and crannies: This is comforting. In other news, the sky will fall today. Organized crime rings and petty thieves are flocking to the Internet like start-ups in the go-go '90s, federal authorities say establishing a multibillion-dollar underground economy in just a few years. ...

Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins to save the planet: Al Gore is joining Kleiner-Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley VC firm that was an early investor Google, Amazon, AOL, Netscape, etc. Kleiner-Perkins practically created Sand Hill Road. The recovering politician, environmental activist, and Nobel laureate is adding another title to his ...

CNN.com Specials: These new CNN commercials are hysterical, but that's not the point (but they are funny as all get out think of the ESPN SportsCenter commercials, just about CNN...) They have me wondering about the future of embedded video formats like Real, Quicktime, and Windows Media. These clips ...

Google Spam Filtering Gone Bad: Funny things going on with Google. Seth Finkelstein has identified what he calls a "GoogleNack" when a Google results page trips over a spam site and removes a big chunk of the results. "The suppressed sites should be quietly removed from the items returned. ...

If you've been following the search engine wars, the latest craze the kids are into these days is providing thumbnails of the web sites that return in search results. Google, however, sticking to the 'less is more' approach, doesn't have this feature. Chu Yeow points us to a Firefox extension ...

Spending too much time reading weblogs and RSS feeds? Go to All Consuming to see what books are being talked about on the net, then go check something out from the library and take a break from your monitor. All Consuming is a website that visits recently updated weblogs every ...

Amazon.com e-Books & Docs: Programming: Here's an interesting trend in programming books: cheap little PDFs that show you how to do one very specific thing. Consider some of the titles on this page: Creating a DataGrid and Updating Its Records on the Fly Accessing a MySQL Database with a VB.NET ...

In the comments on Deane's latest bit of Spolsky-worship, I had postulated that, given the idea that thick clients for the web can provide a better experience, and Firefox's increasing market share, 2006 could become the year of XUL. There was a great link posted on digg this morning that ...

At some point, I think every web jockey has scoped out the CSS Zen Garden for a little inspiration (I dig this one). It's a great example of the power that comes from the separation of style from content, and the proper use of semantic markup. Judging by this link ...

Macintosh OS X 10.3 Panther: no Microsoft web fonts?: Ho ho, you may build a better OS, but you can't have our fonts! Try to imagine a world without verdana, Dave, just try. "I'm not sure about this, but Apple may have stopped including the Microsoft core web fonts in ...

Sorry for wasting away your Friday, but you really should check out Pandora. Can you help me discover more music that I'll like? Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in ...

Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia: An interesting few paragraphs on the history of the IMDb. The database started out in 1990 as a collection of shell scripts created by Col Needham which could be used to search the FAQs posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies. In 1993, a centralized e-mail ...

Google Print: Amazon releases A9; Google releases Google Print. It's an arms race. To use Google Print, just do searches on Google as you normally would. Whenever a book contains content that matches your search terms, we'll show links to that book in your search results. Click on the book ...

I've been reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" as an eBook in Microsoft Reader. It's been a great experience, and I'll write more about it later, but today I went looking for other eBooks at Amazon, and I was amazed at the prices. Consider: The Complete Idiot's ...

PHP: URL Howto: This is a little known but great feature of the PHP Web site. If you write in a PHP.net URL, like http://www.php.net/links, first this URL is matched against the PHP.net pages. If there is a page named links.php, then you'll get that page immediately. This type of ...

John Wiley & Sons, publisher of the infamous "For Dummies" tech books, is slated to release an unauthorized biography on Steve Jobs "iCon Steve Jobs : The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business'' and The Steve is not liking it a bit. So in retaliation Apple ...

If you have a four-digit name (or less), there's a new pastime called "Vanity TinyURL." If you remember, TinyURL is a redirection service that cuts down any URL by keying it to a code at the root of the TinyURL site. They're up to four characters now, so you can ...

The Australian Bible Society has just released the SMSBible, with all 31,173 verses of the Holy Word translated to phone-speak. Some examples: Genesis 1:1 In da Bginnin God cr8ed da heavens & da earth. Da earth waz barren, wit no 4m of life; it waz unda a roaring ocean cuvred ...

Defensive Design for the Web: How to improve contingency design...: I read this book over the weekend. It's essentially 40 usability guidelines sorted in nine categories and supported by hundreds of screencaps of sites you've probably visited. I've done a bit of usability reading in the past, so it was ...

Digital revolution leaves Google feeling quite flush: Amazon may have whiteboards in their elevators, but Google has the baddest toilets on the planet. The noted Internet search engine has recently installed digital toilets at its Mountain View offices [...] And not just any old digital toilet. Japan's Toto, the world's ...

20 Year Archive on Google Groups: Here's an oldie but a goodie that I stumbled on again today. Google mined its Usenet archive for the first mention of various events and pop culture icons. For instance, the first mention of Michael Jordan was dated to February 1993 by some guy ...

Microsoft's Worst Nightmare: Business 2.0 has a good article on the new front in the browser wars: rich client apps. Firefox has XUL, which is a language to create applications within the Firefox browser. This article explains why Microsoft should be worried about it. [...] Firefox's open platform gives it ...

onfocus.com : snapGallery: This little gem was written by Paul Bausch author of Amazon Hacks and it demonstrates two things I've believed in for a long time: (1) the underestimated power of Windows scripting (the only people fully exploiting this are virus writers), and (2) the publishing model ...

JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank: I don't know what's more odd -- that this exists at all, or that you can buy it on Amazon for $20,000 (I actually stumbled across it while browsing -- don't ask). The JL421 Badonkadonk is a completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank. ...

mozdev.org - copyurlplus: index: This is a really handy extension. It lets you right-click on a Web page and copy the document's title and URL (on separate lines) to the clipboard. If you have text selected, it'll copy the selection too. The Copy URL extension enables you to copy to ...

I was in Barnes and Noble tonight, and I noticed a few things. There were four books on the shelves having to do with Mambo and/or Joomla (I refuse to add the exclamation point). This is the first time I've seen books on those systems in my local store. I ...

Logitech: X-230: I normally don't post just to laud a product, but these speakers are amazing. My old 2.1 (two satellites and a subwoofer) setup by Altec Lansing was slowly dying. The power cord had a short, and you had to jiggle things just right to get any sound. Time ...

The Mozilla Foundation has released the 0.8 release of my favorite browser. However, perhaps in order to escape withering criticism from owen ;-), they have yet again changed the name of the browser to Firefox. The new release marks a significant milestone on the development roadmap towards the highly anticipated ...

I just bought some really cheap software: it's $199 retail, and I got it through an Amazon reseller for $17.90 plus tax. The seller had a great feedback rating. I was still a little wary, so I emailed him before buying and asked what the catch was. No catch, he ...

I don't really like radio DJs. I never have. But this morning, after I dropped my son off at school, I heard something on the local FM station, to which I just had to respond. The morning crew was going over news briefs, and the last news item of the ...

The Great Library of Amazonia: Here's a fantastic article about multiple efforts to catalog all of humankind's published knowledge, from Amazon's Search Inside the Book to Project Gutenberg to the Internet Archive. This stuff gives me goosebumps. The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I've ...

Matt Webb has postulated a fascinating theory about the dot-com bubble, and why so much money got thrown after so many crazy ideas. A great article and a must-read for web folks. The huge influx of cash at the turn of the millennium led to the whole Web being built ...

Two Selections from Seth Godin: I stumbled on this e-book over at Amazon. It's a short, free, PDF from Seth Godin (Permission Marketing, Purple Cow) about an attempt to improve a specific Web site that sells CD duplication services. Godin claims that too many designers just put up a site ...

Practicing Programming: This article isn't as focused as I'd like it to be, but it does reinforce the fact that software developers really don't practice at all -- we kind of just learn as we go along and learn from our mistakes. The fact is, we investigate and pick up ...

The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide: This is a short but interesting piece on the "damage" that PowerPoint has done to discourse and presentation skills in the last ten years. "Once upon a time, a party host could send dread through the room by saying, 'Let me show you ...

Interview with George Clooney - On Career, Sex And Politics: Ever wonder what stars think about all the stuff written about them on the Internet? Well, this is one of the most simply inventive things I ve seen in a while: Esquire sat George Clooney down to surf the Web about ...

The third era starts here: This article is a good overall introduction to where the Web is headed. It's worth reading if you think the Web is going to stay a "come-and-read-my-Web-page" affair: The programmable web is different for two main reasons. First, instead of going to look at a ...

A long time ago, in the wee hours of the morning, I made a post to Gadgetopia entitled Fake Escrow Sites. It was a posting about how crooks use fake escrow sites to cheat people out of money. It was just one or two sentences, and it linked to a ...

There's an accepted theory in SEO: put keywords in your URLs. This is so accepted, that no one questions it and content management systems routinely have modules, extensions, and allowances for users to create keyword-rich URLs. But, does this work? Does anyone know for sure? I've been casually looking for ...

Pay To Play: Fair Price for Good Community: Josh Clark nails another good post today as he discusses a new communal bike rental program in Paris. For 29 euros a year, you can check out a bike for 30 minutes whenever you need one. He discusses why the city of ...

I was browsing through Google Video last night (that's where the Duron post came from), and I got to thinking that there's so much good stuff in there, but there's a bunch of crap too. And none of it is really organized beyond the general search that comes with it. ...

Is comprehensive-ness a point for, or a point against, a technical book? I used it think it was an advantage the bigger, the better but as I get busier and my company accelerates, it s increasingly a liability. I ve started to be greatly attracted to smaller books or ...

At what point does a usability flaw become unethical? If a usability flaw continues to cause people to do something undesirable to them but very desirable to you and you know this and don t change your interface at what point do you become a massive tool? I m left ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...