Up in Ontario

Links from the Remainder Bin

I have an ever-expanding folder of items labelled 'To Blog' that dammit just needs to start coming out. So now, here comes the first installment, in brief: all the hoo hah that I've been meaning to write about over the past few weeks but haven't had the chance to write about.

• Want to be notified of something sometime in the future? Well then, check out FutureMail from Ben Sinclair, and get ready to divorce your email from the present. Once you go through the light registration process you can set the application to email you or send you an RSS feed for any topic at any time. Use it for simple things like remembering birthdays or take a chance and create a digital time capsule.

• If you want to totally geek out for an hour, and you can stand watching high-quality video at 3” x 3”, then you will love this behind the scenes look at the computational management model of Google. I kind of liked the video up to the point when the presenter, Jeff Dean, mentioned that Google runs so many machines and serves so many queries in so many data centres that they have run up against the speed of light as a limiting factor and consideration in how they build their business. Then I loved it.

• Chris Anderson, the fellow who started much hullabaloo when he coined the phrase The Long Tail to describe the effect of abundance on choice in culture and the emergence of millions of dozens of markets, seems to have a knack for describing the problems and conditions of our current life, as he demonstrates again in The Three Body Problem: how working for a living, maintaining some semblance of a life and writing a blog often pull is divergent directions.

• The Word on Word-of-Mouth: A UK survey conducted in conjunction with World Book Day reaffirms that word-of-mouth is the strongest force in book sales alongside recognizing and wanting to read another book by a favorite author. Twenty-five percent of people responding said the last book they read was based on a personal recommendation from someone else (with the percentage rising to nearly a third among people under 35). Six percent cited advertising as the major factor in their selections; seven percent pointed to the cover design. Trying to harness that information to a positive end, "As part of World Book Day 8m postcards are being distributed to enable one in seven Britons to recommend a book to a friend," the Guardian reports.

  (If anyone knows where this snippet is from, please let me know so I can properly attribute it. I know I didn't write it.)