onfocus

Anil Dash asked me some great questions and I tried to answer them. You can read me mouthing off about weblogs, journalism, scripting, Amazon Hacks, and where permalinks come from in the first Six Log Interview.

There's a TypePad-specific Amazon Hack (that isn't in the book) on the way...but you should still buy Amazon Hacks to get all of the hacky goodness. ;)

Howard Dean seems to be hopping on the cluetrain with his Net Advisory Net. (The name is almost a recursive acronym like GNU.) The initial roster includes prominent blogospherians Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, and David Weinberger (a Cluetrain author). It's the intellectual property/social software/non-bs dream team. [via boingboing]

Another snapGallery: surreal scenes of Hurricane Isabel at Langley Air Force Base.

The Crazy Signs of Scotland. A quick snapGallery with "Interesting and silly Scottish signs from a North American perspective." (And I thought Canadian signs were confusing!)

Amazon just added a new method to its XML API called TextStreamSearch. This method lets you send an arbitrary bit of text to Amazon, they analyze it for keywords, and then make product recommendations based on that text. This would let you send, say, an entire weblog post and get product recommendations based on that text. I think it could be useful for creating very targeted advertising based on a page's contents. (Sort of like I'm doing on my quotes page.) You could also monitor IM conversations and pop-up product recommendations based on what people are talking about. I haven't tried it yet, and it'll be interesting to see how accurate it is. [via AWS newsletter]

Update: I created a page to test the Text Stream search. You can try it yourself. (There seems to be a limit on the number of characters, but I haven't narrowed it down to exact numbers yet.)

Erik Benson pointed to Joel Spolsky's write-up of his office design. He is building an office like it's 1999, very nice! (Looks like a Monster Office project. ;) It will be interesting to see how the space adapts to use.

Weblogs Inc. No comment. (I need to get me one of those fancy links-only sidebars.)

Badge Swap looks like fun. Heather also put together a beautiful new site for her photographs: hchamp.com.

I added a couple of new features to ORblogs, a site that points to Oregon weblogs. ORphotos is a group photo space for sharing pictures taken in Oregon. If you're in Oregon, stop by and post a picture. If you're not in Oregon, stop by and see what Oregon looks like. ;) I also added a discussion forum. I thought I'd put it up and see what happens. This should provide a spot for answering some of the tech questions that come up frequently in email. And I hope that some of the participating weblog authors will help steer wherever ORblogs may be heading.

Check out Andy's new web application: upcoming.org. It lets you track events (concerts, conferences, etc.) that you're going to—and browse events that others have said they're going to. He calls it a collaborative event calendar. All of the events are organized by location and user, and you can keep a list of your friends on the system (and see what they're up to). He has everything available as XML, so you can add your own upcoming events to your site with some fetching and parsing.