Jul 2002, 39 entries

I made it to page 120! Another successful month with the Novel Accountability Program.

I’m sitting at Top Pot racing against time to get my 10 pages a month this month. Luckily, I have one more day tomorrow. Last night, I still had 5 pages to go… now I’ve got less than 1.

Unfortunately, it looks like I still won’t be done with part two, which I was hoping I would be. It’s very close though! Francie has just entered the room and discovered Jude’s secret. And the dogs are howling on the water.

Using onfocus.com’s new Media Watch feature, I’ve created the same type of application as Book Watch, again named after it’s mother and father in an embarrassingly uncreative way: Media Watch. Have fun.

Like Book Watch, this relies on onfocus.com’s unique service to create a list of asins that are popular in weblogs around blog land.

What I’ve done is retrieve his list via his xml feed, then found news information using the Google API, and found the item information via my Amazon API. The result, a constantly changing of list of media items (music, dvds, videos, software) that are generating buzz around the weblog community, with links to current news items via google.

Bertrand Russell constructed a contradiction within the framework of elementary logic itself, showing that the idea of sets or classes of numbers do not necessarily have to follow conventional rules of logic. Here’s an excerpt from Godel’s Proof:

Classes seem to be of two kinds: those which do not contain themselves and those which do. A class will be called “normal” if, and only if, it does not contain itself as a member; otherwise it will be called “non-normal.” An example of a normal class is the class of mathematicians, for patently the class itself is not a mathematician and is therefore not a member of itself. An example of a non-normal class is the class of all thinkable things; for the class of all thinkable things is itself thinkable and is therefore a member of itself. Let “N” by definition stand for the class of all normal classes. We ask whether N itself is a normal class. If N is normal, it is a member of itself (for by definition N contains all normal classes); but, in that case, N is non-normal, because by definition a class that contains itself as a member is non-normal. On the other hand, if N is non-normal, it is a member of itself (by definition of “non-normal”); but, in that case, N is normal, because by definition the members of N are normal classes. In short, N is normal if, and only if, N is non-normal. It follows that the statement “N is normal” is both true and false. This fatal contradiction results from an uncritical use of the apparently pellucid notion of “class.” Other paradoxes were found later, each of them constructed by means of familiar and semingly cogent modesof reasoning. Mathematicians came to realize that in developing consisten systems familiarity and intuitive clarity are weak reeds to lean on.

Evident without proof or reasoning; producing certainty or conviction upon a bare presentation to the mind; as, a self-evident proposition or truth.

America is based on the self-evident truths that state that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Euclidian geometry is based on similar self-evident “truths” like “for a given line, and a point outside of that line, only one straight line that is parallel to the first line can be drawn through that dot.”

Another self-evident, but ultimately unprovable, statement that many systems are based on is, “0 does not equal 1”.

I’d like to look more closely at the axioms and truths that systems believe in without proof. If, at some point in the future, any of these self-evident truths was proved to be false, it could turn our whole world upside-down.

I have been thinking about some of these things in response to Godel’s Proof.

The concept of trusting your friends more than strangers goes back a million years, but with the semantic web, and these new web services, it has come into a whole new light.

I love the idea of automating trust. Find your 5 most trustworthy friends. Do you trust their friends? You probably would, but maybe not as much as your original friends. Do you trust the friends of the friends of the friends that you trust? Perhaps, but not as much. The web of trust concept is hinged on the assumption that this network of trust exists, and is reliable.

When you’re looking for a new book to read, or a new car to buy, or a new place to work, don’t you ask your friends before almost anyone else? More often than not, it has been proven that people find jobs not through their friends, but through their friends’ friends, because they are more likely to have their feet in an area that you’re not familiar with, while still having a strong bond of trust between you and them (supported by the fact that your trustworthy friend trusts this person).

I’m currently in the planning process for creating a website that plays on this idea. There are some considerable technical challenges, but that’s what makes it fun.

Further Reading:

Advogato’s Trust Metric: This site has already implemented something very similar (if not more complicated) than what I intend to do.
The Semantic Web in Breadth: mentions the idea of a web of trust in relation to the semantic web.
How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web: I don’t think Google will do this (since their success hinges on the fact that they stay relentlessly focused on search), but the idea itself is bound to happen.

We’re changing the interweb: Slate has a good explanation of what web services are, why they’re cool, and how they’re going to change the internet (and life). Unfortunately, they found out that my server’s flakey. Read more here: Tangling the Web—How Web services are changing the Internet.

What do you plan to do with the next 17 years of your life? On February 1st, 2019 a 1.2 mile wide astroid may collide with earth, causing a continental-sized explosion, reducing us to dark-age conditions.

In a way, I feel excited about this possibility. How will my life change, and how will this world change, if we can conclusively determine that life on this planet will be largely destroyed in less than two decades? I think it will greatly improve the quality of life. 17 years is enough time to live the rest of my life, and it would be worth the shortened lifespan to witness such a significant event.

Read more here: Asteroid May Hit Earth but Don’t Panic

I’m waiting 24 hours to see if I can shake off this new idea I have for a website. I found the perfect domain name for it, and I’m a sucker for a good domain name. Zoot!

If, 24 hours from now, I’m still as excited about this idea as I am now, I’m going to start.

More Amazons? The third in a series (one and two), now we have a third. What’s the saturation point for simple Amazon sites on the world wide web? I’ll always see Alan as the father of the simple Amazon.

Faking Intelligence: A new robot named Doc Beardsley is nowhere near having artificial intelligence, but he is good at faking it. He can look at the person speaking, match their words to a database of questions, each with pre-programmed answers, and even fills awkward silences with his own “thoughts”. Read more.

This is evidence that soon jobs that only require a limited vocabulary (waiters, house keepers, and maybe clowns) may have robot equivalents not too long from now.

Many people believe that a good writer can make anything interesting. Give them a topic, say, the size of margins in a standard Bible, and they can make it interesting. Is this true?

Can you imagine a writer who could make anything interesting? What kind of interesting things would they write? Would they call up the history of margins, how margins are defiled in Sunday school with satanic doodles, how they have contracted and expanded over the years in accordance with an equilibrium brought about by the cost of paper and the sizes of margins in popular literature? Would the writing be clever or funny or informative or at least novel—or would it be all four? Is interesting the same as any of these things, depending on the person? This line of thinking makes the writers of Seinfeld the fathers of good writing. But is Jerry Seinfeld a good writer, or a comedian? Are they the same?

I used to think that good writers could make anything interesting… all through school I thought I was a good writer and therefore was afraid of no paper assignment. From History to Japanese to Contemporary Fiction class, I aced most papers because I wrote them in a way that I believed to be interesting. And I got good grades. But they were crap. Everyone, including the teachers, knew it, but because these papers at least didn’t suck in the same way that a typical bad paper sucked, they had no choice but to give me high marks.

I don’t believe good writers can make anything interesting at their whim any more than a good listener can find every conversation they listen to interesting. Subjects, like material objects, come with differing potentials for being interesting, and a good writer has an eye for this. He avoids the things that are believed to be interesting but actually aren’t, and seeks those things that are believed to be boring but actually aren’t.

Readers, us, read their work and are surprised at the things they’ve magically made interesting and attribute that to their ability to make anything that way, but in actuality they have just found the things that have been there all this time but which we haven’t yet discovered or experienced ourselves. At least, that’s where I stand today.

Unless the Lord builds the house,
They labor in vain who build it;
Unless the Lord guards the city,
The watchman stays awake in vain.
It is vain for you to rise up early,
To sit up late,
To eat the bread of sorrows;
For so He gives His beloved sleep.

(comments about amazonlite.com removed… see that site or kokogiak.com/amazon for updates.)

Is Amazon Hot Or Not: Jim from the riotous Hot or Not website has integrated his keyword search to include results from Amazon. I found some interesting results with mullet.

I added another version of Book Watch: Google & Amazon Search, where, instead of getting the asins from onfocus.com, you can search Amazon. This allows you to get Google information on any type of query. The downside is that it’s pretty dang slow.

I’ve made the Book Watch interface a little more generic by including the ability to search through Amazon’s catalog and retrieve search results from Google for each asin returned. It turns out, though, that there are quite a few asin lookups happening here, not to mention the google results, so it’s very slow as a result.

O’Reilly Was Here. I now know for a fact that both Jeff Bezos and Tim O’Reilly have visited Mockerybird. If you are either of them, or another extra cool and generous millionaire, please check out my 60 Gs proposal. Thanks.

Here’s the O’Reilly article, which is interesting in itself since it tells some of the back story for how Amazon ended up with a Web Service. I was at the meeting where he presented his idea to our department a few months ago, and I really do think he had a huge part in the fact that this actually got made. Maybe Jeff owed him a favor for the 1-Click patent debacle.

Alan gets a cease and desist letter from Google. He has since redesigned the site to please them, but I can’t help but feel jealous of his accomplishment. Alan can forever consider himself cool enough to have made Google get defensive.

Alan just walked over to my desk (he works down the hall) and let me know that his Amazon Light application is #1 on Daypop and Blogdex. Radical! This should be evidence enough to a few people over here at Amazon that the need and hope for a cleaner, simpler interface to Amazon is there. Yesterday, when I wanted to do a quick search, I went to Alan’s site instead of our site, because it was perceived as being more convenient. I’m curious to see if the popularity of the Amazon Light feature sticks around, or dies down in another week or so. I hope it sticks around.

A list of applications that are using the new Amazon Web Service.

All Consuming: Tracks what the weblog community is reading.

Amazon Light: Wonder what Amazon would be like if it was as simple as Google?

Simple Search: Add Amazon search capability to your website with only 3 lines of javascript.

Similarities Map: Search for an item and see its immediate similar neighbors clustered together in a dynamic image.

Share Your Media Collection: Add items to you collection so that your friends can borrow them.

Name Game: A game where you think of as many movies that an actor has been in, or books that they’ve read, against a clock.

Similarities Map: Search for an item and see its immediate similar neighbors clustered together in a dynamic image.

BookPost, a new one by Paul, allows you to post about an Amazon item from a bookmarklet (as long as you’re writing from an application that uses the Blogger API). Brilliant. The meeting of APIs.

PHP Amazon Search: an elegant search engine in PHP, with source code samples.

PyAmazon: A Python wrapper for the Amazon API. Source code available here.

Java Amazon Search Demo: this demo is an applet which allows you to search through Amazon’s catalog and even save ASINs with your session to print out later on. Nicely done.

.NET Setup Instructions: A quick tutorial on getting Amazon’s Web Services working in .NET.

Hot Or Not: Jim from the riotous Hot or Not website has integrated his keyword search to include results from Amazon. I found some interesting results with mullet.

Reviews Pop-Up: an elegant implementation of a javascript popup that pulls in item information and reviews, so that you don’t have to leave the page you’re currently viewing. I especially like these implementations that enable you to integrate the API with your weblog.

Amazon Browser: Another nice implementation of a Java similarity browser powered by TouchGraph.

Amazon Search in Flash: a beautiful and unique interface to Amazon’s catalog via Flash. This is one of the more interesting finds in the last couple days, definitely give it a look.

Amazon RSS: This application generates rss feeds based on keyword or browse node so that you can subscribe to them and, via your RSS news reader of choice, always know when a new result turns up.

Simplest Shop: Was created with PHP, Amazon Webservices and uses a caching layer. Features search, categories search (try searching for “digital camera” in the camera shop), 3-4 level deep categories, product features, reviews, chatting, and also product features and prices comparisons. Very cool.

Dirt Cheap Rekkids: Allows you to create a wishlist and receive a daily email for really cheap deals. I only wish it would pull in all the items from my wishlist automatically.

Not Yet Hooked Up:
Here are a few other cool applications that use Amazon data, but have not yet been hooked up to the API.

AMZN-Vista: A beautiful app that allows you to surf similarities dynamically.

I’ll add to this list as I find more examples. If you know of new examples that use the Amazon API, let me know.