Thanks Joel Johnson over at the new BoingBoing Gadgets site for being geeky enough to post about this Credit Card Money Clip concept. Freakin cool.
BTW, I’ve been reading Joel’s stuff since his days at Gizmodo, and then Dethroner. Joel is cool.
Photo credit: Roger Arquer.
I’ve always been a fan of lists of popular sites, particularly the most popular in a given niche. For me, If I’m into a certain subject I can simply go to a web page and get a good general idea of the who’s-who in that space.
Techmeme’s new leaderboard launched yesterday and it’s the hot thing being talked about on a lot of tech blogs right now. Essentially, it’s a list of tech sites, blogs and news sources, weighted by how much space headlines from those sites have occupied on Techmeme over the past 30 days.
That’s all cool and I like it. However, that list is NOT as important as some people in the tech-osphere are making it out to be.
Problem is, it will become more important as time passes, the more weight (ie. mindshare) the A-List bloggers give it - sorta like how Google’s PageRank became important in search engine optimization circles.
Personally, I like the Techmeme Leaderboard already, because I like reading about things in the tech space.
But I’ll argue that the most important element on that page right now is not who’s at the top of the list or what site is at # 77, it’s the accompanying OPML file.
We’re opening the TalkNewMedia.com forum to new members. It’ll be a BETA mode for about two weeks so we can slowly roll out some features we’re working on, like a main blog, miniblogs for each member, various syndication tools, interaction between the site and several social networking & publishing platforms via API, etc.
TNM (TalkNewMedia) will be my main project site for quite a while from now on. Anything tech, new media or Web 2.0 related that I have to say will be said there and this blog will revert back to being my personal blog.
Slashdot has a blurb up about how ISPs are selling their user’s online behaviour (their clicks and other data) for millions to companies who parse the data trying to figure out what you’re likely to do/buy next. My thoughts:
1. Companies will find that internet users are a bunch of freakin perverts. Just look at any list of the most searched for words/terms on the internet.
2. They’ll never get it right since there’s no right answer. The data miners may gain some insight and may see a minor breakthrough or two, but no matter how the data is sliced, diced or mashed, it’ll never reveal all it’s secrets.
These companies use math and analytics to try and predict what we want or what we will spend our next disposable dollar on. Math is an absolute science, with a few oddities to keep the geeks guessing. Look at Einstein’s E=MC2 and read the following quote from a plaque that hung on the wall of his office at Princeton:
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Oh, the irony.
Ok, by new media, I don’t by any means mean (ugh) that this new site I’m working on is going to be a technology innovation. It’s definitely not. I’ll be the first to squelch that assumption.
I’m using SimpleMachines (SMF), an out of the box, open source forum software with a free template, slightly modified with a sprinkling of web 2.0, URL rewriting and new media stuff for the main community aspect. There’ll also be a wordpress blog that feeds off of/into the forum. Nothing groundbreaking there.
But! As with most of these newfangled new media/web 2.0/uber geeky sites - it’s how you envision the userbase using them, and watching in awe at how wrong you were with those visions that makes it live and grow.
Look at Twitter.com (my twitter stream) as an example. Glorified shoutbox. Definitely not a new concept, but it’s the way it’s been adopted and currently being used by the geek and tech influencers that makes it awe inspiring.
TalkNewMedia.com is mere hours from opening to the public in it’s fragile, WTF, BETA form, and it will be big (crosses fingers & toes).
Goddammit. I signed up for Twitter.com and I think I’m getting addicted.
It’s a sure sign that the site is damn cool.
