The Hits: A Smart Playlist

iTunes’ Smart Playlists provide lots of great ways to listen to music. Here’s one I’ve been toying with recently. There are two criteria:

• My Rating is 5 stars,
• Last Played is not in the last day.

You’ll get a handy list of all your favorite songs that you haven’t listened to today. Put it on shuffle and you have your own radio station playing only A-List jams. I call it “The Hits.”

This works well with a discovery I made today: on 3G iPods (and Minis), you can rate songs on the fly. While a track is playing, click the wheel button twice and use the scroll wheel to add a rating. Next time you sync to your computer all those ratings will show up in iTunes, too.

Pre-9/11 Misdirection

If Democrats want to win this election, they need to stop focusing on what President Bush did before September 11 and concentrate on what he did afterward. It’s easy to use hindsight to fuel speculation, but this president’s weakness is what he’s done since that day. Revisting the months before we were attacked won’t change the fact that it happened. Get the country to realize what the president did to the country as a result.

Kinja, Please

Internet hot spot of the week Kinja has been getting a lot of attention. My quick review: I like it. I’m not sure I prefer it to Bloglines, but it provides a different enough experience that I’m going to keep using for a few more days and see if it sticks.

Overview

What is Kinja? According to their about page:

Kinja is a weblog portal, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web. Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex. Or they can create a convenient personal digest, to track their favorite writers.

Weblogs are much talked about, but still challenging to navigate for the average web user. Kinja is designed to bring weblog writers to a broader audience, by making it easier to explore topics, posts and writers.

That’s how the Kinja crew describes it, but it’s better just to see it in action. Here’s my public digest. I add all the weblogs I read, and then it puts them all together in order, with the most recent posts at the top.

Usability and Interface

Kinja’s best attributes are that it’s free and it’s easy to use. You don’t need to know what RSS is to use it — you just type in a site’s address and it does the work for you. The main page sports a clean design by 37signals (though it’s broken in IE 5.5, but I won’t dock many points for that). The user experience feels fresh and unintimidating, and you only have to look at a few unobtrusive text ads.

There are, though, a few elements that I don’ t like:

• The excerpts for each post are too short. I’ve found that it often doesn’t give me enough of an entry to decide if I’m interesting in reading the whole thing or not. True, it’s not supposed to be a hardcore aggregator, but I’d just like another sentence or two.
• The little thumbnails only work for a handful of sites. I can’t quite tell where it’s getting the images for them from, and I like them when present, but the blank boxes are distracting.
• It groups entries by weblog alphabetically instead of sorting them in true chronological order.

The Friends Test

Kinja has caught the eyes of the main players, but there’s a large, often overlooked segment of the weblogging world that has a lot of experience with exactly this sort of thing: LiveJournal. One of its main features is the ability for me to add another LJ user to my “Friends” list. Every entry made by one of my friends shows up on my Friends Page. It works so well that, for most LJ users, the Friends Page forms the center of their experience. It gives you an idea of your audience. When you write an entry it feels like you’re writing to people, not just publishing into the ethers of the web.

LiveJournal Friends Pages not only keep people apprised of their buddies’ posts, but also the conversations they’ve started. At the bottom of each post is a numbered link to any comments people have left. I go to my page, read new posts, and then scroll down to see if the comment counter has gone up. The usefulness of this would skyrocket if it also let me mark entries I’m interested in and then bumped those to the top of the page whenever a new comment was made. If Kinja could accomplish this on the scale of the world wide web, it would have be a truly amazing app. I know I’m becoming a bit of a broken record on comment management and notification, but new services like Kinja really have a chance at innovating weblogging.

Jason Kottke and Tom Coates have already brought up the exciting potential that comes with everyone’s Kinja digests being optionally public. LiveJournal has been doing this for years, and it works very well. Find a friend, click over to his page, and read what he reads. Find someone whose stuff you like, and add them with a few easy clicks. Kinja could make this easy by identifying posts made by registered users and providing a little icon pointing to their public digests (like Kottke’s done on his “Not Recommended At All” blogroll). The web is a big place, but features like this connect people. Comment bumping and interlinked digests could push Kinja from neat tool to community portal.

The Bottom Line

If you read more than 3 weblogs regularly, Kinja is for you. Consider also that Yahoo! News and The Washington Post come in RSS along with all major weblogging apps, and its usefulness applies to almost anyone who wants their own personal flow of information.

NYC Cheers for Self

New York City is making a bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Today they released their campaign logo while (I can only hope) chearing for themselves in the exact same pose. Quoth the press release:

Our goal was to create a symbol for New York’s Olympic bid that would be instantly understood by anyone who saw it from anywhere around the world. The image speaks to the ethos of a city celebrating the Olympic Spirit, and nothing could say it better for New York than the image of the Statue of Liberty, with her outstretched arm holding the torch, joined to the arm of an athlete lifted in celebration.

The Mystery of Rampo

My VCR may or may not be hooked up correctly. I’m sure I plugged in the cables, but I’ve never tested it because I really don’t care. Except that now it’s the only clock in the apartment that hasn’t sprung forward, and I can’t change the time without using the onscreen menus. I was thinking of just unplugging it.

I don’t own many movies on VHS anyway, but there is one item in my collection that has kept me tied down. Thinking about it this morning I strolled over to Amazon and was delighted to learn that it’s now out on DVD.

The Mystery of Rampo is a beautiful film. I strongly recommend it to all. Now there’s almost no reason to ever fire up my VCR again. Oh, alright, there is that reason, because of course it’s still not out on DVD.

Catwoman Spy Photo

Today being April Fool’s Day, lots of websites are going to try to make little jokes like announcing they’re going to offer email accounts or that Jackie Chan’s son goes to your college.

On an unrelated note, I’ve obtained a super secret spy image of the costume that Halle Berry will be wearing in the upcoming Catwoman. I assure you this is a real, undoctored photo of the actual costume and not an April Fool’s Day joke.

Star Wars Trilogy DVD Set

The original Star Wars Trilogy is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com for 40% off. I still haven’t bought Episodes I and II so that if Lucas decides to only release them along with III in a boxed set I won’t have to buy them again. Usually, though, I prefer to have the original release rather than boxes or collector’s sets.

The Old Dominion

After much, much deliberation, Katherine and I have decided to stay in the DC area and she has accepted her offer from the Industrial/Organizational Psychology doctoral program at George Mason University.

TypeKey and the Benefits of Centralization

The internet’s all a-tizzy over this new TypeKey hoozitz. While I understand the worries over security and downtimes, there are some areas where centralization can provide useful tools.

TypeKey is Six Apart’s upcoming solution to comment registration and hopeful comment spam panacea:

TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.

The main uproar centers around people not liking the idea of having to trust one central service with their comments. What if someone hacks in and steals everyone’s email addresses? What if the server crashes and I can’t leave any comments? What if Six Apart decides to translate all posts into Newspeak? Doubleplusungood!

A useful feature of LiveJournal, a centralized weblogging service, is the “friends page”: one single location that tracks the most recent posts of everyone I’ve designated as my “friend.” Since every entry is hosted and managed by LiveJournal, a fresh page can be whipped up automatically every time a new post goes live. This sort of setup is very hard to accomplish across decentralized pages (though kwc’s movabletypo has it going).

Weblogs are great at facilitating broad discussions but bad at keeping them going for very long. On most pages, once an entry gets a little old people forget to go back and check for comments. Great discussions die long before their prime just because they fall below the page break. Decentralized solutions like notification emails or post-by-post XML feeds don’t scale well if comments flood people’s inboxes or they have to manage hundreds of feeds in their newsreaders.

I’ve made a hasty mockup of a way that TypeKey could solve this. The server could keep track of every post I comment on using my TypeKey login and build a page that lets me monitor activity on those entries. It could even generate a single XML feed of comments on all the entries I’m watching. I’d only have to go to one place to monitor my online conversations and I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping track of every little discussion I’m interested in.

Six Apart hasn’t announced any plans for this, as at the moment TypeKey is aimed at helping site administrators and not users, but it’s a tool they could certainly offer. I strongly believe that the biggest failing of weblog discussion is that it’s too hard for people to keep track of comments across all the pages they read. A simple, centralized tool could fix all that.

Zombie Government

Having seen the other movie about people rising from the dead this weekend, I realized that our society is dangerously unprepared for zombie attack. When Independence Day came out, a slow news week resulted in a story that the United States government had no plan in place for how to handle an alien invasion. That’s right, were the planet to be invaded by aliens or overrun by the living dead, our government would just be improvising.

With this in mind, it will be very important that we surviving citizens have our heads in the game while FEMA figures out what to do. Zombie movies teach us that not only will we be fighting against scores of walking corpses, but also against power-hungry alpha males who will screw over small groups of survivors at the earliest possible opportunity. This can be prevented, but Americans must be prepared. What we need is a basic understanding of government so that we’ll be able to rule ourselves as we move from refuge to refuge, first in small packs and eventually, God willing, in small communities which will be responsible for rebuilding human society once the zombies have all been rounded up and burned.

At the first calm moment, the group should be called together to agree on the rules. Since anyone could be eaten by the undead at any moment, leadership will be important but fleeting. As such, government should be simple and justice harsh.

I propose the following rules for government:

1. All Living People shall be free to do anything they please, except to cause harm to another Living Person.
2. Anyone who has been bitten by a zombie or accused of such shall be confined to a secure, guarded cell until such time as:
   1. He has survived long enough, as determined by a majority vote, that it is unlikely he has been infected,
   2. He dies and rises again as a zombie, or
   3. He dies and does not rise again.
3. Any Living Person who becomes a zombie shall be killed immediately.
4. Punishment for all crimes shall be exile.

As you can see, Article 1 defines the law of the land, and there is only one crime: harming another person. (This is the “Harm Principle” espoused by John Stuart Mill.) Passive actions like leaving gates unlocked obviously lead to harm and as such are illegal. If a loved one gets bitten by a zombie, it can be tempting to conceal that bite from the rest of the group. As this will inevitably case the group harm, concealing a zombie bite is also illegal under Article 1. The Harm Principle also protects innocent citizens from attack or rape by others in the group.

As it is quite possible that members of the group will get bitten by the undead, Article 2 requires that they be quarantined for the safety of the rest of the Living until they’re sure the accused is not going to become a zombie.

Inevitably someone in the group is going to turn. Article 3 reminds everyone that the zombie is no longer the person it was and should be dealt with quickly.

The government structure is simple to allow maximum freedom for everyone. Only those laws that are absolutely necessary are in place, and as such must never be broken. Per Article 4, the only penalty for breaking a law shall be exile. The severity of such a punishment should communicate how important it will be for everyone to adhere to the law. The group’s life will often depend on being able to trust each other to keep them safe.

This set of laws will serve populations of any size long enough to get them to safety, meet up with other groups, and establish secure settlements. Once a sufficiently large population has been gathered it may abandon Article 4 in favor of a court system with more than one type of punishment. The ideal way for them to do this will be to create laws as if under a Veil of Ignorance. This theory of John Rawls dictates that people framing a government should create laws without knowledge of the demographics of the society they’re going to be living in so that all laws are equitable for all people. Indeed, they will have no way to know what their own population will be like, as new survivors will be showing up constantly, changing the makeup of the society daily.

With a little preparation and good leadership, we’ll get through a zombie attack with our BRAAAIINS intact.