Month: May 2003

Often I am asked, “Jeff, what exactly is alt.country?” My pal Jim always cringes at such questions. The  way he primarily categorizes music is “Good music” and “Bad music”. But, for those who are interested in the genre (or at least get in the neighborhood), you should check out http://www.nodepression.net. No Depression is a magazine that follows alt.country. For a taste of the artists they typically feature and a glimpse at the articles from past issues, check out http://www.nodepression.net/archive.

Here’s another page with a pretty good description, some links, and a short list of artists.

Blogging in the corporate world

Read ‘n Blog.

Tiernan Ray of eCommerce Times in Wireless Newsfactor: Why Blogs Haven’t Stormed the Business World. I gotta roll, so I’ll let the rest of ya handle this one.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

This link provides an interesting perspective on blogging and the corporate world. I agree that current blogging tools are creating heaps of information that are largely uncategorized. However, I will take a search engine indexing blog content over not capturing tacit information any day.

[Tom Pierce’s Blog]

Death to Smoochy

Rented Death to Smoochy over the weekend. I found it fairly lame. I chuckled a couple of times but on the whole it was pretty consistently unfunny. Robin Williams’ performance was plain bad, which was really surprising to me. I liked Ed Norton. Maybe it could have used some more Danny DeVito. My wife checked out after 15 minutes. I pushed through out of principle.

Searched added

Added search to my blog this evening. Works like a charm. I was at Borders this evening and noticed a cool little O’Reilly book called Hacking Google. Flipping through it I noticed that Amazon has a web services API. I could see some cool stuff being done with the Google and Amazon web services APIs. Even though I’ve got zero time to mess with it, I signed up for Google dev key and an Amazon web services token.

I’d like to write something that would make it easier for me to manage my wish list as well as add my CD ratings to Amazon for every CD I own. That way, Amazon’s rec engine would have the complete picture of what’s going on in my collection.

I’ve heard that old cue cats can be turned in to general purpose bar code scanners. If so, and if someone’s got a service that maps UPC to ISBN for books and whatever unique IDs are there for CDs, then I could just scan my book or CD and it would magically get added to my Amazon wishlist, listmania list, or whatever I needed, courtesy of my little Perl program.

Another example of how personalization, something typically associated with portal or qualitative data, can be used to make the delivery of quantitative data more effective.

…seamlessly integrate islands of data while eliminating traditionally labor-intensive efforts to find the right bit of information to truly understand what business decisions must be made. “We’re trying to provide our business people with information at their fingertips. We want to get out of the business of doing repetitive things,” said Balter. “We’re trying to personalize [business intelligence], so instead of them having to weed through every report, they’ll have different responsibilities within their department. [Brian Fonseca, InfoWorld]