this is sippey.com

A friend just pointed me to a feature I hadn’t seen on Amazon:  concordances.  They’re pulling the most frequently used 100 words, and displaying them like a tag cloud.  Here are the top 100 for I Am Charlotte Simmons, the new Tom Wolfe book that I’ve yet to throw across the room.

adam  again  am  another  anything  arms  away  bed  beverly  big  black  boys  came  charlotte  coach  come  daddy  door  down  dupont  enough  even  ever  everybody  eyes  face  fact  felt  first  front  fuck  fucking  gave  get  girl  go  going  good  got  great  guy  hand  head  herself  himself  hoyt  jojo  knew  know  let  lie  little  long  look  looked  looking  man  mean  moment  momma  mr  night  nothing  now  oh  people  put  really  right  room  say  saying  see  seemed  shit  side  simmons  smile  something  still  students  take  tell  thing  think  thought  three  time  tip  took  toward  turned  two  vance  voice  want  wanted  went  white  word

NB:  Both “fuck” and “fucking” made it into the top 100.  Nothing against those words, mind you, it’s just a pointer that Wolfe may be trying a bit too hard. As usual.

I usually don’t post little tips like this, but this one is just too simple, useful and undiscoverable to pass up.  Courtesy of the 43 Folders discussion list:  subject line editing in Outlook:

First, double click the e-mail (or hit enter) to open it in a separate window. Then put your cursor on the subject line and start typing. That’s it. You can add your own reference - date, project number, whatever - or change the subject line completely. Whatever is going to be meaningful to you. Use as many words you like. When you’re done, Ctrl+S to save.

Go nuts.

Kottke on Tumblelogs:  “older style weblogs that feel very much like these tumblelogs with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.”  I used to do a lot more of this (filtered for purity), and it’s why sippey.com (and now sippey.typepad.com) started up in the first place; as to distinguish it from essays at Stating the Obvious.  Tools obviously influence content (a la Jason’s point about MT and post titles), and I think a lot of the “tumblelogging” that used to happen in a blog context has now shifted to tools like delicious, where the workflow is streamlined for bookmarking, quick commenting, tagging and distributing. 

And regardless of the etymology, I like the sound of “tumblelog,” since it almost implies a katamari approach to content creation.  More on top of more on top of more on top of more…

Sometimes, crowds aren’t so wise.  Case in point, tagyu.com, which is learning from what other people have written to make tag recommendations on user-supplied content.  It works if you’re writing about things that geeks are writing about…but that’s about it. 

Case in point. Input:  “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree.”  Output:  “php programming pear.”  I’m not necessarily knocking the concept or the implementation – other than to note that this will have limited utility until there’s a broader corpus of tagged content.  And tags today are the realm of early adopters…like people who have a high likelihood of using the words “pear” and “php” near each other.  Will be interesting to track this over time…six months from now (and after a holiday tagging season), has the output for that pear-tree situated partridge changed?

Dear NYTimes.com,

Purely on faith, I ponied up for a year of Times Select.  While you actually figure out what the product is beyond Tom Friedman, the least you could do for subscribers is kill the interstital ads when clicking from an external site to an individual story.  Please?

Sharing is caring,
Michael

Exhibit one:  Anil on The Flip 2k5, or “Yahoo bought everyone on my buddy list, and all I got was this t-shirt.” [1]  Exhibit two:  nine years ago in Suck, the pitch for wordprocessor.com.[2]  Connecting the dots is an exercise left to the reader.[3]

[1]  Note to self:  more charts, less talk.
[2]  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:  it’s wonderful to have Suck re-runs show up in your LiveJournal friends page.  It’s like it’s coming from an old pal….
[3]  Up with footnotes.

Odds and ends.

• I must have some kind of reputation for being an insatiable gadget person.  I have no idea where people could have gotten that idea, but no, I’m not rushing out to buy a video iPod.  Who wants to pay $1.99 for music videos?  And besides, I just got a Nano for my birthday.  It’s so thin…
• Top three moments of Web 2.0, for me:  Mary Meeker’s High Order Bit (40 some-odd slides in 15 minutes, how can you beat that?  You can’t.), Mena’s description of LiveJournal, and the teen panel where the girl from UC Berkeley was clearly flirting with the surfer boy with the deep voice.
• I’m a bit worried that once again there are t-shirts commemorating parties.  “Hey!  Let’s tempt fate!”  Jesus, people, don’t wake the bear, he’s resting.
• Bloglines now has keyboard shortcuts, and there was much rejoicing.  Apps that encourage information consumption should afford speed reading.
• Lost.  You’re watching this, right?  Where the hell did Desmond run off to?  And why does the bunker have a brand new washer/dryer set, while everything else seems to be from 1980?  And, more importantly, is this story Locke’s or Jack’s?
• I’ve been trying to read fiction again.  Recently knocked back No Country for Old Men and Everything is Illuminated, both worth reading (despite what Caterina said).  I’m about 1/7th of the way through I Am Charlotte Simmons, but fully expect to get about half-way through and then throw the book across the room like I’ve done with every other Wolfe book I’ve read.  would love to be proven wrong.
• What I really want to read, though, is Peter Morville’s book, Ambient Findability.  I mean, how much more Web 2.0 could you be?  Actually, if I could read that while wearing one of those t-shirts, I’d be set.

Here endeth the bullets.

For the GTD in Outlook folks (and you know who you are), there are two videos up on Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows from PDC 2005 that are worth watching.  The first one shows off Outlook 12’s new “to do bar,” which is viewable when you’re reading email, and the ability to right-click and automatically create a task from a message.  The second one shows off the integrated RSS reader, and the rebuilt search implementation.  (It’s.  About. Time.)

Outlook 12 isn’t getting the UI overhaul that the rest of the Office suite is (the changes in v11 were probably enough for most folks), but the simple “right click, make task” feature will be addition enough…