Tag: internet

Categories
Culture

LibraryThing

I can’t remember how I found this, but LibraryThing is a site where you can keep (and share) a record of the books you own. You can rate, review and tag them, find other people with the same books, get recommendations, discuss books and all that kind of webby goodness.

I just started an account to try it out and added a few books that came to hand, and quickly found it was strangly addictive. Initially I thought I might just use it to keep a record of books I was reading at the moment, but then I went and imported a list of books which I’ve bought from Amazon or told them I own, so that blew that plan. And then I added a few other favourites and books I thought were interesting. Pretty quickly, my library reached 95 titles. At this point I really have to make a decision whever I intend to do this seriously. If you add more than 200 titles, you have to pay a subscription ($10/year or $25 for life), and I’d reach that extremely quickly if I started trying to catalogue every book I own. Or even a decent selection.

I’m still not entirely sure what the point is, but as I say, I found it surprisingly addictive. And brilliantly simple to use, particularly if you have the book (and so the ISBN number) to hand.

Categories
Culture

Bleep music store

There’s a lot to like about Bleep: high bit-rate non-DRMed mp3s, the ability to listen to the whole track online before buying (it automatically pauses after thirty seconds and you have to start it again, but I’ve found that if you open another tab in the same window and have that tab at the front, it just keeps playing), and the neato little customisable music players you can insert in your own site, like this:

or like this:

Yes, I know, by putting in the players I’m just providing them with free advertising, but I still think it’s quite cool.

But how the hell are you supposed to find music you like if you don’t already know what you’re looking for? There are no genre listings (admittedly, there is a rather limited range of genres they sell, but any kind of hint would help), no ‘people who bought this also bought…’, no idea of where to start other than to poke around at random and see what you find.

I guess I’m just not hip enough to be their customer.

Categories
Culture

Supernature

At PFFA a while back, Melanie was complaining about a ‘best of the 70s’ compilation thtat was all one-hit wonders and disco. And how there was a lack of ‘Skynyrd, Doobies, CCR, Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Aerosmith… [list of overblown guitar-rock acts continued for half a dozen more names]’. As though Skynyrd ever made a piece of music as good as this:

or indeed this:

Categories
Culture Me

A super-glamorous new look for Heraclitean Fire

Which isn’t actually going to happen. I was working on a new look for the blog a while ago, but came to the conclusion it was going to be just too memory-intensive. It’s heavy on the graphics, and because it uses lots of sharp-edged high-contrast shapes, you can’t compress the images very much without getting lots of glitching.

Anyway, I thought I’d produce a mock up to show you. If I’d worked it up into a full WordPress theme, I daresay I would have tweaked various things, not least the text styling. But it’ll give you the idea. I’ve done it as a PDF, although I don’t know why really.

Categories
Culture Other

9rules Writing Community

9rules strikes me as potentially a great idea. It’s basically a conglomeration of blogs, each of which has been approved as reaching a certain standard of quality.

The 9rules Network is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.

They have periodic application periods when they winnow out the sheep from the goats and accept the sheep. The approved blogs are then sorted by subject.

Since blogs are many and multiplying, any way of finding the good stuff has to be a good thing. But I decided to look at the blogs which have been accepted into the 9rules Writing Community. It hasn’t given me great faith in their quality control. One of the various principles they claim for themselves is that

A nicely-designed site might draw readers in, but it’s the content that keeps them coming back.

But given that at least two of the ten in their ‘writing community’ are blogs which are nicely designed but whose content is seriously poor (1, 2), I find myself unpersuaded. The most likely scenario is that the people who selected the blogs just weren’t very literary by inclination; my point really is that they aren’t doing their credibility any good.

In the interests of balance I’ll point out one more 9rules literary blog, PoetryReviews.Ca, where they review Canadian poetry books and seem to do a good job of it.

But generally the 1rule which is most important seems to be ‘style over content’. Perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps the many good blogs that can be found among my long poetry blogroll just haven’t applied, so 9rules don’t know what they’re missing.

Categories
Daily Links Me

Deliciosity

You’ll have noticed the daily ‘Links‘ posts.

They’re done through the ‘daily blog posting’ function on del.icio.us, which automatically posts a list of new bookmarks I’ve added in the past 24 hours. I’ve also added a new page where you can see all the tags I’ve used and browse my bookmarks that way. I’m not really using it as a place to store bookmarks where I can find them again, just as a log of anything on the web that tickles my fancy.

There’s a permanent link to the tag list in the sidebar.