| What I'm Up To |
| 2/21/99: Mostly moved into new apartment. |
peterme surf  |
| What I'm Browsing |
| February 21, 1999 Jesus Was Gother Than You. Shouldn't that be "Gother Than Thou"? Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard. Acne, creator of the 'funsite' Netbaby, is a Swedish all-purpose design firm (graphics, clothing, game consoles, video art, etc.) I dig the minimalist aesthetic on their site. Comics! I've been researching Web comics, and have been pointed to some cool URLs. If you've got some good leads, please email me. Jonni Nitro is the story of a kick-ass chick assassin. It's a Flash movie digitized from actual video. Cool effect. Hellboy: A Christmas Underground is a well-crafted comic that kept me reading through all haunting four episodes. Flash required. February 17, 1999 More on evolution: the talk.origins archive is filled with information useful for combatting idiots who proclaim Creationism. My favorite statement: evolution isn't a theory, it's a fact. The Principia Cybernetic Web is a way-nifty hyperlinked information space. I particularly enjoyed following the links in the evolution area. It's a good thing to know you'll be able to toast your bagels in the next millenium. Is San Francisco too preservationist? The L.A. Times has a pretty good piece on how the city's dogmatic love of the old might be turning it into a dated urban theme park. February 16, 1999 Smart Frog features a parasitic business model--when buying from Amazon of CDNow, click to those stores through Smart Frog. Smart Frog gets the affiliate fee, and will, in turn, kick back 5% of your purchase to you. Seems like skimming pennies to me. A sneak peek at the Palm V. It doesn't bowl me over, but it's probably time to upgrade from my Professional. "I Couldn't Think Of Anything Else To Do With It, So I Put It On The Web." Moonmilk is the Web home of Ranjit Bhatnagar. I remember Ranjit's HTTP Playground from when I first got on the Web in early 1994. Ranjit's Playground features a number of links from "the old days," including one to Mark-Jason Dominus' current home--MJD once published The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a zine of random thoughts, that I quite enjoyed. MJD now seems to be something of a Perl god, if that's your bag. A fun diversion is Java on the Brain, which includes a collection of fast, well-designed arcade games written in Java. February 13, 1999 Real-world surf: Paulina, a film I reviewed after seeing it at the San Francisco Film Festival, is now being released in theaters nationwide (in San Francisco, you can see it at the Lumiere.) For more info, check out this long feature from the SF Bay Guardian. And if you have a chance to see this film, do so. The Black Death is still among us. Read about the plague at Medscape. [Free registration required... and worth it!] February 12, 1999 Barbie as art icon. February 10, 1999 Scott McCloud features an innovative Web comic on his obsession with chess. February 9, 1999 I've got total object lust. Need top tier graphic and information design? For all your communication needs, from print to Web? Then head over to 3Across, the design firm run by Jennifer Anderson. And tell her I sent you. Search quicker: hotbot.com/text altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?text February 7, 1999 An excellent interface design resource: detailed lecture notes from a course on human-computer interaction, covering, well, damn near everything. February 6, 1999 Physics is dreamy! Yours truly has a mention in the latest issue of JOHO, which otherwise focuses on how getting knowledge can be achieved through telling and hearing stories. http://my.buttcheek.com/, is a totally randomized news portal. And even though it had no knowledge of what I'm interested in, I spent 30 minutes reloading headlines. What does that say about personalization? February 5, 1999 A photo Web zine pieced together from submissions you enter. Really well-edited. I don't know how frequently it's updated. An online journal worth reading. A tightly-designed and well-written Web exhibition on classic arcade games. Obtuse, goofy, psychedelic art site. [Flash required.] A cool personal zine site with nifty graphics and things to say. Information explains the laws of physics. [Beware: high-minded thinking ahead.] February 4, 1999 The magic is over. The auction has ended prematurely. Still no idea exactly why.[Note: Since this was first posted, the auction has been re-instated! Back in business!] From Windowseat: A feature about how Minnesotans play "duck, duck, gray duck," whereas the rest of the planet plays "duck, duck, goose." (Scroll down a bit on the page to see.) Yes, Minnesotans are freaks. But we knew that. I love regionalisms. New Yorkers don't stand "in line" for a movie, they stand "on line." Californian's say "right on," in response to most anything. Instead of "very", Berkeleyan teenagers and college students say "hella." Bostonians say, "wicked." If you've got others, let me know. Rykodisc, possibly the largest "indie" record label, has just released 150 songs from various artists (including Frank Zappa, Louis Armstrong, and Bill Hicks) on MP3, available for download at $.99 per track. Um. This is brilliant. And obvious. Pirating MP3s has become such a nightmare (how many FTP sites have you been turned away from?), that for the right price, people will pay. February 3, 1999 Learn from others mistakes--search the Woodworkers' Central accident survey. For the most interesting results, leave all fields blank except select 'need medical attention' for accident type and check 'get all reports.' Cool Site Award report: the award is now up to $5100. That's a good deal of money. I'm not bidding anymore. February 1, 1999 The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things... DIRK, An open-source cognitive web. Webzine Smug has eBay's Cool Shopping Site of the Year Award up for auction *on* eBay. I'm planning on bidding--how about you? If you want more information, head here (and make sure to click the link at the bottom to find out "what really happened.") Todd Levin has a piece titled, "Does That Make Me Gay?" which will ring true in the hearts of straightfags everywhere. I, too, have never learned to tap a keg. The Washington Post asks writers to refute truisms like, "a watched pot never boils." My favorite is "The Earth is Flat." Previously Browsed... |
| What Is Up |
| January 25, 1999 [this piece permanently lives at http://peterme.com/index012599.html] Note: This piece was written for Stating the Obvious. If you already read it there, please skip down to see recently posted essays. Welcome to "My" Parlor Harkening back to the classic "electronic newspaper" conceit dreamed up at the beginning of the network revolution, a centerpiece of any portal worth half its market cap is news personalization (you can usually recognize it by the annoying prefix "my"). You provide some demographic data and check some preference boxes, they serve up your customized set of linked headlines. In an effort to achieve what pundits and analysts call "stickiness," the links are nearly always limited to the news portals can co-brand or host on their servers, which typically means bland reporting from Reuters. By confining you within their castle walls and placating you with whatever content gruel they've managed to hoard, they baldly flout this technology called the "Web," which is explicitly designed to leverage the power of interconnectedness. Bucking the trend, however, are Snap and MSN. These two forgo the Roach Motel model by being so bold as to feature links to content and news all over the web -- instead of just to stories housed in their own databases -- and in the process provide a superior content experience. With their rotating lists of external headlines, Snap and MSN essentially offer smart, updated bookmark pages. Business news from my.yahoo.com means factoid reporting from a wire feed; at Snap it means linked headlines to news, analysis and opinion from Business Week, CBS Marketwatch, Bloomberg and others. A friend at Excite scoffed at this model, noting that they tried outside linking once, only to discover that Wall Street cares about two key portal statistics: page views, and the length of time users spend at the site. Snap sees things differently, of course. "We like stickiness as much as the next portal," explained Andrew Hyde, Snap's CFO, "but we don't want to rein in our users. We would rather make our service so relevant that they don't need to user other portals and keep coming back to use Snap as their window to the web." Hyde explains Snap's policy as "putting the users first." And for good reason. The Web is bigger than any one site can ever hope to be (yes, even Yahoo!), and it doesn't take long for users to learn that. When offered the choice, whom would you rather be -- the spider traversing her own strands on the web, or the fly stuck in it? Recently Up January 13, 1999: Maintaining Search Context November 24, 1998: Whither "User Experience"? November 16, 1998: Odds and Ends October 26, 1998: Interface Design Recommended Reading List October 13, 1998: Webpardy Web98 East! Notification Would you like notification of new material? Just email me. |