I take an embarrassing amount of pleasure in pruning, tweaking and annotating my iTunes library. It’s strangely important to me that all of my songs display the right meta-data for song title, artist, album and so forth.
One of my long term goals is to rate every song I own. At the moment I’ve got 8487 songs in my library, and I’ve only rated 2856 of them.
So, most of the time, I have iTunes playing a particular ’smart’ playlist through Party Shuffle. The playlist looks like this:
When I remember, I alt+tab over to iTunes and rate the currently playing song. I play it through Party Shuffle because, otherwise, when I rate a song in my ‘Unrated’ playlist, it instantly stops playing and disappears from the playlist (it is, after all, only obeying the rules).
My rating system is largely ad hoc, and works like this:
1 star = Awful, and I usually delete these.
2 stars = Not great, but I want to keep it because I have the whole album. Also, it could be a specialty song, like a Christmas song or a novelty track.
3 stars = Average.
4 stars = I like it, and would be happy to hear it once or twice a week.
5 stars = Songs for the ages. If this song was playing on my iPod when I was killed by a bus, that’d be okay.
I’d look worried, too, if I faced imminent extinction. It was apparently painted by the James Bay Youth Action Team (who have no Google juice at all). Maybe a Victoria resident can tell me how long it’s been there? I doubt it’s a re-imagining of the chipmunk, but I’m curious.
The Vancouver Island Marmot is a bit of a poster boy of wilderness conservation in BC. According to Wikipedia, it’s one of the most endangered mammals on the planet, though there’s apparently cause for optimism.
Lee does an excellent job of explaining the US’s somewhat baroque (and if you ask me, highly peculiar) means of electing a president. He gets through the whole video without once saying “electoral college”.
The title of this post refers to an asterisked disclaimer in the video that indicates that Lee’s explanation doesn’t apply to two states: Nebraska and Maine. What’s with them? From Wikipedia:
Two other states, Maine and Nebraska, use a tiered system where a single elector is chosen within each Congressional district and two electors are chosen by statewide popular vote.
So, Maine and Nebraska have a more complicated system?
Move to break hearse cartel sparks transport strike in Malta
A move by the Maltese government to unlock a death grip on hearses by just 11 undertakers met with an indefinite, nationwide transport strike on Monday. Buses, minibuses and taxis blocked major arteries across the Mediterranean island state, notably around the capital Valletta and the tourist area of Sliema, to protest against the decision to offer more licenses to hearse operators.
Hilarious. I don’t usually include the headline, but that one was too good not to.
That’s what can happen in a country of only 400,000 people–the right 11 people can wield a lot of clout. There’s a marketing lesson about influencers in there somewhere.
As it turns out, the Maltese government is just trying to comply with European Union rules to end monopolies in public transport.
Lately I’ve being thinking a bit about doulas, and their re-emergence as a profession in our culture. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, here’s the Wikipedia entry:
A doula is a non-medical assistant who provides various forms of non-medical support (physical, emotional and informed choice) in the childbirth process. Based on a particular doulas training and background, the doula may offer support during prenatal care, during childbirth and/or during the postpartum period. A birth doula is a continuous care provider for labor in many settings. Thus a labor doula may attend a home birth or might attend the parturient woman during labor at home and continue while in transport and then complete supporting the birth at a hospital or a birth center.
1. About to bring forth young; being in labor.
2. Of or relating to giving birth.
3. About to produce or come forth with something, such as an idea or a discovery.
It’s kind of an awful looking word–it reminds me both of ‘prurient’ and ‘nutrient’.
Profound Moments in Life
We employ a doula at what is, presumably, one of the most profound moments of our lives. It’s interesting, I think, that a similar role hasn’t emerged to guide us through another profound moment of our life–our death. This was a role traditionally filled by a priest or pastor, but in North America we live in significantly post-God nations. Who are the doulas of death?
I have some semi-formed thoughts around the association of doulas with New Ageism. In my experience, New Age movements tend to emerge where a receding Christianity has left gaps.
Beyond the comfort of faith, I’m not sure what role the Christian church served in pregnancy and birth, so that thesis doesn’t seem to hold much water. Mind you, speaking of water, we shouldn’t forget baptisms and christenings. So, I’m left with these incomplete statements:
Christianity: As x are to birth, priests and pastors are to death.
New Ageism: As doulas are to birth, x are to death.
If the terms ‘Christianity’ and ‘New Ageism’ are too charged, we could just replace them with, say, ‘100 Years Ago’ and ‘Today’.
Apparently there’s a new phrase in town for TV shows and movies that have crossed the event horizon of just plain silly:
In recent weeks, a similarly ridiculous episode — in this case from the movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — has produced a similar term, “nuked the fridge,” that is gaining traction online. A Google search comes up with 64,000 hits.
In “Indiana Jones,” the hero’s improbable achievement was to survive a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator. Hence, “to nuke the fridge” means to introduce a wildly implausible element to a once-respected franchise, or more generally, to signal the abandonment of past standards of quality.
I’m not sure we really needed a new phrase, but what the heck? ‘Nuked the fridge’ is a suitable replacement, as it seems even more improbably and ridiculous than ‘jumped the shark’.
Last night I had to change propane tanks on the fly, and noticed that the empty tank had some ice formed near its base. This is despite the fact that it was connected to a hot barbecue on a warm summer evening. Here’s what it looked like:
As you use the tank, the pressure inside goes down. As the pressure drops, the temperature also drops because of something called the Ideal Gas Law. Ice forms on the tank because water moisture in the atmosphere is condensed on the cold tank and then frozen.
As regular readers know, we’re writing this book about social media marketing. I’m currently working on the chapter on social news and bookmarking. As part of my research, I’m gathering some real-world numbers about Digg, and just how big the Digg Effect actually is.
To that end, I’m running a survey. Has your site ever been ‘Dugg’? That is, has it ever been featured on the front page of Digg, and suffered a torrent of visitors as a result?
It requires you to look in your stats program (Google Analytics or whatever), and determine just how many visitors arrived from Digg on the day you were Dugg. I’m also asking for the URL of the page on your site that was Dugg, to confirm each entry. If you don’t know how to do this, send me an email and I’ll explain.
As an example, Get a First Life was Dugg on January 21, 2007 and received 10,829 visitors from Digg.
I plan to publish the results (though not your name or email address, obviously) on this site and possibly in the book. So you’re disclosing this data point for the world to see.
It’s okay if your site crashed–I’m interested in how many visitors you actually captured and reported in Google Analytics or your stats program of choice.
UPDATE: I’m only going to accept five submissions per website, to ensure one particular topic or site doesn’t bias the results too much.
And There’s a Prize
As an enticement, one lucky submitter will receive one of the brand-new iPod Shuffles I’ve got kicking around the house. They’ve become a common speaker gift, so I’ve got two or three of them at the moment. I probably won’t get more than 20 or 30 submissions, so your odds of winning are excellent.
If you don’t want the Shuffle, I’ll give $50 to the charity of your choice.
On Twitter, Jeremy linked to this well-written New York Times article by Kara Jesella about BlogHer. Entitled “Blogging’s Glass Ceiling” it emphasizes BlogHer’s strong community ties, appeal to marketers and and an imbalance of power and income among genders in the blogosphere:
These days, there is money to be made, fame to be earned and influence to be gained. And though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site. Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them.
I think Ms. Jesella misses a key point in making her case. The blogosphere is still pretty geeky (arguably, 8 of the 10 most popular blogs according to Technorati focus on technology), and interest in technology has tradition skewed toward men. So, you’d expect that the most money and fame would follow that topic area. I don’t mention this to refute her thesis, merely to suggest an important cause or symptom that she ignored (or had edited out of her piece).
I did, however, want to highlight the fact that this piece appeared in the ‘Fashion & Style’ section of the New York Times. If ever there was a way to reinforce the notion of BlogHer as a female ghetto, it’s to feature it alongside articles on ‘Dining & Wine’, ‘Home & Garden’ and ‘Weddings/Celebrations’.
Julie and I work together on most Capulet projects. As a result, we both get CC’d on a lot of email. In 80% of cases, only one of us actually replies and participates in a given email thread. In many of those cases, the discussion is mostly or entirely irrelevant to whoever doesn’t respond. If they need to know about it, the responder can generally be convey the thread’s gist in a very brief conversation.
It isn’t news to anyone that CC gets abused all the time. In truth, though, when Julie and I both receive email, it’s usually not CC abuse. The sender is just unsure which of us will respond. And I think we like it that way, because we don’t necessarily want to surgically divide our duties and responsibilities.
Wouldn’t it be great, though, if my email app included a button that read “Julie can ignore this message”? Having replied to a message (and maybe its followups), it takes much less attention for me to assess whether she needs to read the thread than it does for her to make that appraisal by having to read the whole thing.
Wouldn’t it be great if we assigned a few trusted colleagues this power? They’d just right-click on our names and choose “Ignore this thread” from a drop-down menu. The message would bypass our inbox and get archived wherever we specified.
Maybe this functionality already exists in some email applications? If so, when can we get it in Gmail?
