Russell Beattie's just released a service called Mobdex, which serves up eBooks onto mobile phones. I had the pleasure of getting a sneak preview of Mobdex near the end of September, after Russ spotted a post about the Mobile Web on my blog and emailed me. So I've been waiting for him to release it to the public, so I can talk about it ;-) Mobdex is a service that takes "600+ Public Domain eBooks from Project Gutenberg" and re-formats them to be viewed in a WAP browser on a mobile phone.
One of the reasons Russ' project interested me is because I've been reading predictions that Smartphone usage for eBooks will increase, while PDAs will decline. So the Mobdex service has a lot of potential, if you believe those predictions. Personally I'm not so bullish on smartphones as the future for eBooks, but I don't deny that they will become increasingly important for the industry. I just wonder if I really want my eBook reading appliance to be integrated with my mobile phone (I wonder the same thing about my music listening appliance).
One thing that wasn't in the demo Russ showed me a couple of months ago, that he's just now added, is paragraph-level hyperlinks for books. Excellent! This is something I discussed with Tim O'Reilly a few weeks ago. Here's how Russ describes it:
"One of the ideas I liked was per paragraph permalinks so that people can discuss books and sections in their weblogs. So I added that in tonight by ripping off some JavaScript from Simon Willison and there you have it. Books online with permalinks."
Very cool. In my interview with Tim, I talked about this sort of functionality enabling a "social networking experience". For example - I'm currently in the middle of reading Tom Wolfe's new novel, I am Charlotte Simmons. Imagine if I blogged my thoughts on it while I was reading it, with the ability to quote extracts and link directly to those extracts. With the likes of Google and Feedster indexing my posts as I go, it's possible that a discussion about the book would ensue and I can swap notes and opinions with other people - all while in the middle of reading the book. That's the sort of thing I mean by a "social networking experience" for eBooks.
On the subject of emails from bloggers more famous than I... yesterday I was thrilled to receive an email from Jonathan Schwartz, in response to a recent post I wrote that quoted him. How cool is that! I mean how else would a geeky wannabe writer from New Zealand get a chance to network with the COO of Sun or the CEO of O'Reilly Media, other than via blogging? I love the Web.
Jason Kottke on web magazines:
"Before weblogs ruled the realm, a typical way to publish content online was in a Web magazine format. Suck, Feed, Netly News, Smug, Stating the Obvious, etc."
Jason followed up in a later comment with this:
"Suck articles were finished and "professional", which is what's missing (I think) from my online reading these days."
I wrote the following as a comment in Jason's weblog, but I think it's worth publishing here too. It's an interesting issue and I'd be keen to hear your feedback. Here's what I wrote (tidied up slightly):
I wonder if weblogs are making our reading and writing habits temporal and 'always unfinished' (to twist the term 'always on')? Having written an article for Digital Web Magazine (and I must get around to writing another one), I can confirm it takes at least a couple of weeks to 'craft'. Whereas with my weblog, although generally I write carefully crafted long-form posts, it's still of-the-moment and a lot of times it's an ongoing theme I'm exploring (ie it's not "finished").
I would probably write more "finished" articles for my blog if I didn't feel so much (social?) pressure to continually update my RSS feed. As it is, I only write an average of 3 posts per/week anyway, but still...
And same goes for my reading. To participate in the blogosphere you have to keep up-to-date with the RSS feeds in your circle of influence. Which leaves less time for reading "professional" and finished articles.
Back in the early 90's I used to read William S. Burroughs books and for a while I was quite taken with his "cut-up" method of writing. The cut-up technique is a specialised literary form in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text (ref: Wikipedia). I think this was during my Surrealism phase. Oh, it was nothing extreme - all I did was buy the odd Salvador Dalí poster, read André Breton books and watch movies with French sub-titles. The usual University psuedo-intellectual postering.
So I thought it would be interesting to take my 10 most-visited posts of 2004 (as listed in my previous entry) and produce some random cut-ups of the text. In a way I'm applying Remix Culture theory to my own blog... well it's a start anyway :-)
In the interests of keeping the cut-ups brief (the top 10 posts yielded 13,300 words!), I decided to restrict them to 100 words or less.
This is something I've played with before, inspired by Jason Kottke. Here is the text of all 10 of my most popular posts of 2004, in 100 words or less according to Microsoft Word. See if you can spot any trends!
***start***
Most people thought I was nuts. Basically I believe that the Web should be organised around topics, not people. I've read Linked by Albert-Laszlo, I'm convinced. 10 - Personal Blogger. 100 - Social Blogger. 1000 - Community Blogger. A social publishing tool perhaps, because I do converse with other people via my weblog.
"Weblog comments incite duels. Synchronicity for Bloggers
Especially as I not only have to convince business people, but IT people too.
People can produce information, subscribe to information they value, edit each others information. Blogs vs Books?
I do like reading blogs, too. New Generation of Readers
***finish***
For the next one, I firstly ran the text through the Grazulis Cut-Up Machine (via) - and then used Word's Auto-Summarize to reduce it down to less than 100 words.
***start***
parties made people see products - they multimedia and very people to multimedia.
it's people. - kinds tools
Synchronicity Bloggers
pattern - synchronicity. Today Digital Web corps?" Synchronicity for Bloggers
People edit each others information. Information Flow is Knowledge Management. Literary Types
people I nuts. tools.
read discussing products WebOutliner, Lifestyle Hubbie. people doing - they a blog a blog. People world as if Web the old old. people, sheep, herding.
post entitled Knowledge Writing Book a number comments. do reading too. for book mind. like literacy, to as generation readers content consumers books. Blogs vs Books?
***finish***
I think I like the second one better. It's amazing how you can summarize a whole year's worth of weblog posts into 100 words and spot some interesting trends. For example, I didn't realise my literary background showed up so much in my blog writing - but it's apparent in these two cut-ups.
Anyone know of any other web-based cut-up machines to try? This is fun!
UPDATE: It occured to me that some readers may want to have a go at cutting up my Top 10 posts too - a la Tom Coates' recent project with his blog posts. So I offer you the entire text of my Top 10 posts of 2004, as a Text File download (75KB). I'm not expecting anybody to bother, but it would be cool to see what others come up with.
There's a nice meme just started, asking people to list their Top 24 posts of 2004 (via). I decided to check out my web stats and dig out the most-visited posts of 2004 for Read/Write Web. They may not necessarily be "the best" posts in terms of quality, but the people have spoken and the following posts were the most popular. Actually a lot of my favourites did make it to the list, which is great. A few odd ones too, that I wouldn't have picked.
Here is my top of the pops for 2004:
1. Interview with Marc
Canter
2. The Fractal
Blogosphere
3. There is no End
User
4. Weblogs as Avatars: some
thoughts
5. Knowledge Management for
Generation Y
6. Analysing Bloglines
Subscriber Stats
7. Internal Corporate
Blogging
8. A Theory of Synchronicity
for the Web
9. Information Flow
10. A New Kind of
Literacy
11. Fractal Web applied to
Blogging
12. Reaching for the Golden
Ring (or Getting Paid)
13. Multimedia
Blogging
14. Mama don't let your baby
grow up to be a Generalist
15. We're all on the same
page
16. Stasis and
Synchronicity
17. Reliance
18. Notes on Tim O'Reilly's
Oscon 2004 speech
19. Quick thoughts on Kottke's
Re-Design
20. Knowledge Management in the
Real World
NB: I interrupt the list there, because turns out there's nothing after early August - not even the Slashdotted Lucas Gonze interview in October. That surprises me, but I guess it goes to show how much extra traffic Google brings for a blog post in the months following its publication. So to make up for the lack of recent stuff, to finish my Top 24 list here are 4 of my favourite posts from September-November 2004:
* Why Yahoo! + RSS = Good Thing
* Content Renaissance On The Web
There you have it, those are my most popular posts of 2004! I'd love to read other peoples lists. It's a good way to get to know a blogger's interests and themes. Plus, for the writer, it's a handy way to build up a recommendation list for new readers.
I came across PubSub's LinkRank feature for the first time today. It's an interesting new measurement... Here is the official blurb, comparing it to Google PageRank:
"Unlike Google's PageRank system, LinkRanks are not iterative. Rather, we base LinkRanks on a simple formula that only looks at local links - links which are within one or two steps of any target site. Also, it's important to note that we only look at links which are in weblog entries - we don't read any of the other links on the page, like the side bars or blogrolls."
It's also different to Google because unlike PageRank, which is a mark out of 10, PubSub's LinkRank is a ranked list. Like a Billboard chart for blogs (reminiscent of a short story I wrote earlier this year). e.g. my current LinkRank is 2,188 (yesterday it was 2,314). Not bad, when you consider they claim to track 6.7 million sources (3.6 million "active" sources). My recently closed eBook Culture blog has a LinkRank of 888,335 - which perhaps explains its demise. The highest single blogger I found was Jason Kottke at 63 (Amazon.com was number 1).
PubSub's creator, Bob Wyman, did some tracking of Zeldman's blog a couple of months ago. He calculated that Zeldman was hovering at the 600-650 mark at that time, noting that Zeldman's LinkRank had decreased due to "a period of publishing less-then-enthralling content". Bob's conclusion:
"Watching your Linkrank can give you an idea of how well you are maintaining the interest of your particular community of readers. In most cases, but not all, if people find that what you are writing is interesting, they will link to you."
On a related but less positive note, I also found out today that Technorati has not been indexing my outbound links. So for I-don't-know-how-many months nobody would have known I was linking to them, at least via Technorati. That's pretty annoying and hopefully it'll be fixed soon.
PubSub also look like they're doing something with Topic Mapping. They ask people link to a specific URN, because:
"We want to see if we can construct a conversation thread around the topic by using a common URN. For reference, the URN form is based on NewsML (more specifically the URN namespace for NewsML resources), and PSI stands for "published subject indicator" (see XML Topic Maps [topicsmaps.org] and Published Subjects [OASIS]). If this works, we want to try to use this kind of URN to bring conversations together around various topics."
That's reminiscent of various topic mapping ideas people have come up with over the past few years, including my own Microcontent Wiki (remembered more for its entertainment value than any real-life potential!). So PubSub's topic mapping idea is another thing to keep a watch on! p.s. no smart comments asking if I'm being paid to blog about PubSub please ;-)
