onfocus

Life update:

• Television - Increasing, needs improvement. Reading this.
• Caffeine - Gone. I miss good coffee.
• Bark Pile - Huge, still in driveway. I blame 90 degree weather.
• Book - Home stretch.
• ORblogs - New feature: Hot Topics.
• Dogs - Funny. Still small.
• Weight - Up, dammit.
• Photography - Stagnant.
• Weblog - Lists only.

Webvisions was fun, and the ORblogs lunch was great too. I don't mean to blog-drop, but how often do you get to dine with folks like Alan, Cat, JD, Matt, and Michael? It was great to hear what everyone's up to, and I'm hoping we can all get together in person more often. We agreed that it would be fun to have an official Oregon weblogs event sometime.

Today a truck dumped seven cubic yards of bark in our driveway. We did ask for it. But you don't know how much seven cubic yards is until you see it. Sitting in your driveway. Ahh well, lots of landscaping to do. The garden is going to look great. (I keep forgetting to take before pictures.)

On April 14th, 2002 I launched the Weblog Bookwatch—a look at the most frequently mentioned books across the blogosphere. (original post) Since then, the bookwatch has dutifully scanned the blogosphere day in and day out, noting book ISBNs (and Amazon CD ASINs) and the blogs where they were spotted.

In 2002 there were a fairly manageable number of blogs to scan. Between April and December 2002 there were 36,790 unique citations across 5,207 unique weblogs. Just to give you a sense of the size today, the Bookwatch scanned 47,512 weblogs today between the hours of 12am and 6am. I have a database with over two million citations in it, and it's growing exponentially.

I got an email from my ISP today informing me that I was over my bandwidth limit. I thought that was odd, did I get Slashdotted and not know it? My logs didn't indicate any spikes. Nope, the problem was traffic from my machine. In other words, scanning close to 50,000 weblogs every six hours tends to use some bandwidth. That got me thinking about whether or not I can afford to keep the Bookwatch running.

But what about all that sweet Amazon cash? It's true that the book links on the Weblog Bookwatch are an associate link to Amazon—and I get a cut when people buy books through them. But it has never been a big money maker. In Q2 of 2005 I made $118.67, which isn't even close to covering a month of hosting with my current setup.

I've enjoyed clicking through the sites to read what people are saying about books that show up on the page. But the Bookwatch can't keep up with the entire blogosphere anymore, and there are a couple of great services with more resources that track book mentions across weblogs (and much more!): All Consuming and Technorati Books.

I learned a lot about weblogs and gathering data while running and tuning the Bookwatch, and now it's teaching me about when an experiment should end. So as of today, the obidos-bot has crawled its last site. It's been a fun app, but it's time to say goodbye to Weblog Bookwatch. Thanks (again) to weblogs.com, Blogger, and Amazon for publishing data in an easy-to-use format.

I'm going to be heading to Portland on Friday for the Webvisions conference. If you're in the area, and interested in where web design is heading, this one-day event is a great way to stay in the loop. There's also talk of an ORblogs get-together during the lunch break, and I'm hoping to meet some of the folks behind the sites I read regularly.

I've seen the shirts. I've heard the references to skills in magic and a delicious bass. And I finally the saw Napoleon Dynamite this week and I didn't get it. There were a few surreal moments in the film that I enjoyed—especially the scenes at the chicken farm. But a few sparks does not a movie make. My only conclusion is that I've passed some cranky threshold and I'm not to be trusted.

A friend gave me some great advice about sunburns. She said I should take a hot shower with the water as hot as I could stand it. I hadn't heard of this before, and it just sounded painful. And it was. But it worked! The hot shower took the constant sting out of the burn, and it's been much better since. Who knew? (I'm guessing you shouldn't try this for very serious burns, I'm not a doctor, YMMV, etc, etc.)

Note to self: sunscreen is very important, especially for a ghostly pale person like yourself. If your wife takes the sunscreen to another location, stop everything and go buy more. Especially before you spend the day at the coast—or you will end that day in pain. The Sunburn Threat Level in late June is lobster red. I repeat, sunscreen.

A funny punchline is still available for some geeky joke: wontscale.com. (Remember, it's not a joke if it doesn't have its own .com.) I don't know about you, but I'd like to see platform.wontscale.com where platform is your least favorite platform or internet celeb. Benchmark the laughter.

Update: Someone registered the domain. I'm getting ready to laugh...

I'm going to have to turn in my weblog badge and spellchecker if I don't post here, so hopefully this post will keep my blogger-status active. I'm alive and well, still working on the book. It's taking all of my time and energy to string sentences together in another medium and that's why I'm not stringing here. I am posting links on a fairly regular basis to my Yahoo! 360 weblog: 360 Flip.

In my off time right now I'm reading about daily life in the Middle Ages (er, Medieval Era) in Europe especially during the plague. I've always been interested in history, and this round was sort of kicked off by reading Connie Willis' Doomsday Book. The story was good, but I was much more interested in the factual bits about history throughout than the characters—they seemed a bit flat. Just reading the facts isn't quite as entertaining, but I feel like I'm getting more out of it.

I'm also reading The Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto. He's making the case that it's the meta information about property—and the surrounding legal system—that makes generating capital possible. Sounds dry, but it's making me think about money, information, and the idea of a semantic web in a new way.

Back to Word...

Anyone out there know of a simple, easy-to-use WAP emulator that works with Yahoo! Mobile? I'm trying to get some screenshots for Yahoo! Hacks, and I've tried a bunch of different emulators. The Yospace Emulator has been the easiest to use, but it doesn't seem to support Yahoo!'s cookies—I can't log in. I've registered and installed about five different Nokia developer kits, and still can't figure out how to fire up their emulator. My own phone, the Sony Ericsson s710 has a fantastic browser, but I can't find an emulator for it—and the T610 emulator errors out when connecting to Yahoo!

Ideally it'd be nice to find an emulator that would also be able to receive SMS messages as well, but I'd be thrilled with a simple WAP emulator that works. If you have any ideas, please send them my way. Thanks!

Update: I may have to resort to actual photos of my s710:



Update 2: A big thanks to AJ for recommending the Openwave Simulator! I can log in at Yahoo! with this emulator, and I think it'll work well for screenshots.

There's a new pup running around our house...





Her name is Phoebe, and she's an Aussie mix. She's getting along with Luna really well, but the cat is officially ready to move out.

Mike Doughty is on tour, and he's posting some great tour photos on his blog, Mike's Blog. Each night he has everyone in the audience hold up their glowing cell phones as he snaps a pic. Check out the pictures on My Hectic Week in Rock. Cell phones are the new lighter. He'll be in Portland this Wednesday.