widdershins

My top 15 Furled items

After using Furl.net for more than a year and a half, I've saved 2,280 items.  It's always surprising to notice when large numbers of other people find one of the items useful.  All of the various forms of recommendations, search results, etc. on Furl are sometimes a great way to find those things you didn't even know you were looking for.  [Disclosure: the development team working on Furl works for me.]

Below are the top 15 most viewed items I've furled:

1. Libby Hoeller: The Complete Story (538)
It's official: the Web is a collaborative fiction created by sex-starved pinheads with too much time on their hands.

2. Donnie Darko explained (516)
Salon supplies extensive annotation on the film Donnie Darko

3. Planes, Trains and Plantains (249)
The Greatest Essay Ever Written

4. The Stripper-FAQ, How to become an Exotic Dancer (232)

5. Print Screen on Mac (220)
Nice tips for print screen, print portion, print window on Mac OS X. I can never remember these.

6. How to unlock a Cingular Treo 650 (213)
calling 866-287-6131, telling them wanted to use prepay SIMs abroad and telling them the IMEI (under the battery) of the phone

7. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (149)
Ursula K. LeGuin's classic short story

8. Collyer brothers (122)

9. Zenra Ballet 2 (118)
Something Awful review of Japanese sex ballet DVD

10. A Rwandan Hero: Paul Rusesabagina (114)
The exceptional case of the Hotel Mille Collines and the 1,000 people saved from violence in Kigali, Rwanda in 1994

11. 2005 Honda Accord Hybrid (111)
Review at TheAutoChannel.com

12. My Thong is Showing... (NSFW) (106)
When cameraphones meet thongs, two unexpected cultural forces give birth to a web site....

13. ourTunes (104)
iTunes file sharing

14. Salwar kameez (97)
How to buy custom tailored traditional garments from India/Pakistan via eBay (Theresa Nielsen Hayden)

15. Brannock Device (95)
The Brannock Device is the standard foot measuring tool for the world's footwear industry.

Watching Justice

George Soros's Open Society Institute has started up the Watching Justice web site to report on the doings of the US Justice Department, drawing on a list of watchdog sources that it openly shares. The degree of commitment to transparency is inspirational and badly needed. And, naturally, the web site uses a blog-style format because it's an excellent format for regularly updating an interested community. Now they need to add RSS and Atom feeds. [via MetaFilter]

And why should transparency in government matter? As Matt Welch wrote recently:

Above all, Bush's attitude toward sensitive information has remained consistent from his pre-9/11 behavior: Transparency is overrated, secrecy is a virtue, and post-Watergate reforms curtailing the government's ability to snoop, prosecute and act freely are a serious obstacle to protecting the country.

These beliefs don't make him venal, just wrong. History has shown that a government that acts without the checks and balances of scrutiny is a government that abuses its power. Secrecy is often just another word for "it would be embarrassing for me if you saw that." And transparent examination and debate, however untidy, unlocks the genius of distributed, free-flowing intelligence—one of America's biggest competitive advantages—and gives citizens their deserved seat at the decision-making table.

Who knew?

As blogs, wikis, and other forms of small-scale self-publishing on the web continue to proliferate and gain in visibility and acceptance, more traditional media are starting to suffer. Om Malik points out CNET is losing readers, while Gizmodo and WiFiNetNews are gaining. Compare also Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. The trends are shaping up clearly.

[via Anil Dash]

Search engine news

If, like me, you've got a keen interest in the search space nowadays, here are some of the best sources I've found for keeping abreast of new developments.

The dailies

I check these three every day. Between them, all of the search engine news comes out very quickly.

Internet News is not solely focused on search, but does a good job of pulling together search news primarily, from many minor sources. I've found this an indispensible resource.

Wired founder turned journalism professor John Battelle is working on a book about the search industry and is keeping an excellent searchblog along the way. Don't forget to follow the comments.

Search Engine Lowdown is a news blog put together by Andy Beal, a search engine marketing executive at KeywordRanking.

Other sources

Other sources I check occasionally, but not as constantly, include Pandia Search World, Topix.net's search engine news aggregator, and the tech news headlines at CNET News.com (although you may prefer them via an RSS feed).

Blogs of note

And, finally, these are some noteworthy blogs I check in on or follow with my favorite RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire: Tim Bray, Rich Skrenta's Topix.net weblog, Josh P.

del.icio.us/mg

The really interesting stories get links added into my bookmarks. You can see only the search-related ones, if you like. For now, I've got them appearing in the sidebar of this blog although performance from feedroll is still awfully slow sometimes, so I don't know how long I'm going to put up with that. My bookmarks are also available via RSS subscription: in full or search-only. If you're not familiar with RSS yet, check out Peter Adams' excellent summary of RSS.

Happy searching, y'all.

Free Salon

And speaking of slick deals, subscribe to salon premium and get paid $2.

Slick deals

At Slick Deals, there are daily updated details of ridiculously cheap deals (often after rebate) on cool gear.

Thoughts on social networks

Sure, signing up on Orkut is fun, but there's no there there. The only ongoing activity well-supported by the system so far is the competition to have the biggest friend count (which the system foolishly encourages by printing number of friends after one's name and by listing people consistently in descending order of friends). That's certainly not going to continue to engage most people's interest over time. There are communities, but there isn't enough basic functionality to use them for anything other than an expression of one's interests. It will be interesting to see if they can get some useful functionality into this site or whether this YASN (Yet Another Social Network) will just fade into disuse or misuse.

The real value of social networks, generally, has to do with the loose connections: people you have a distant or tenuous connection with, who by way of the social network, become more closely tied to you. Much is said about the alienating tendencies of computer-mediated communication, but this is one of the ways that the net brings people closer together. Sometimes it's by creating a channel of contact that wasn't there before. Sometimes it's by making explicit a connection that was only there implicitly, unobserved. YASNs can do this, as can blogs. Some of the blogs I follow most closely are written by friends of friends, or by friends I only kept up with occasionally before. Through Orkut and LinkdedIn, I've reestablished connections with several wonderful people I thought I had pretty much lost contact with for good. All of this is bringing people closer together.

Sucked in by the Orkutsphere

I've been off-blog the past few days after having been sucked in by Orkut. It's a new social network service (like Friendster or LinkedIn), set up by Google. If you're a friend of mine, let me know and I'll be glad to send you an invite. Meanwhile, Orkut invites on the open market are going for $3.40.