Filed under Technology …

May 23 2012
Leave a comment
Books, Internet, Software, Technology

Reading Lists for the Modern Web

I’m a really big fan of the Readability service. They recently opened up an API to third party developers. Yesterday Arc90 labs (the original creators of Readability) released a related service called Readlists. You can read the full release post, but basically it’s a dead simple curation service. You choose a set of links to web content over some topic and collect them into a reading list. Once you have such a list the service will collect and transform them into a number of different formats – you can send them to a Kindle or iPad or get a standard, DRM-free ebook that you can email, save and share.

Readlists is one of those services that seem really simple in retrospect but fulfill a very interesting (and innovative) niche. What’s more, it’s executed very well, both in terms of functionality and design. Readlists satisfy a real need – tablets are great reading devices but a lot of interesting content is spread out over multiple pages on the Web. It would be really nice if there was a straightforward, simple way to collect all that distributed content and send it to your tablet. Readlists does that very well (it’s not quite perfect since they have to email the ebooks to your iPad).

Equally importantly, the experience for curators is also well crafted. All you have to do is paste in some links and (optionally) provide a blurb for each one and you’re all set to go. You can share easily on Twitter or Facebook or just send a permalink to your friends. The permalink isn’t human-readable, but that’s fine – it means you can change the title of your reading list if you find yourself collecting different kinds of articles than what you started with. There is practically zero friction involved in collecting and sharing (given you have a Readability account). There are no customization options and in this case I think that’s a good thing – there’s less work for the curator to do and you can move on to more important things (like your next Readlist).

I’ve created a Readlist called “So you want a PhD” which is a collection of articles about graduate school. Though the creation process was dead easy, there are some concerns I have. I don’t see any analytics so I can’t tell how many people are seeing or reading my list. It also seems like Readlists can be updated indefinitely, which is great, but raises the question of how do I tell readers there is an update? One of the properties of the Web is that everything is potentially a work in progress – change and evolution are at the heart of web content. It would be great if I could opt in for some sort of notification when a list changes (possibly via RSS or email). Of course these things add more complexity to the service, but I think that these additions are worth it.

In conclusion, I think Readlists are a great idea for the modern web. Along with devices like the Kindle and iPad and services like Readability and Instapaper we’re moving to an increasingly readable, seamless web. We can discover great content on a laptop or desktop and seamlessly move to a tablet or other more comfortable reading device (or vice versa). There are still unanswered questions (such as changing lists) but I think we’re taking steps in the right direction. There will certainly be challenges as we move into a world of multiple devices in different forms but it’s good to know that the Arc90 folk are meeting the challenges head on.

Apr 29 2012
Leave a comment
Software, Technology

Sunday Selection 2012-04-29

I know it’s not Sunday in most parts of the world, and it’s almost not Sunday anymore here, so I’m going to slip this in quickly.

Around the Web

How Geniuses Think I’m always interesting in what drives ingenuity and creativity. This doesn’t go very deep into details or give exact references, but it’s a good set of points about how creative, insightful thinking works and how we can get some of it into our own thinking.

Walking the Line Between Good and Evil Andrea Kuszewski is quickly becoming one of my favorite science writers. This article is probably one of her best. It takes a look into modern conceptions of heroes and villains, what their psyches are like, what sets them apart and (most importantly) how close they actually are to each other.

Stop working more than 40 hours a week Productivity is always an interesting battle. Is it really worth working as much as you can if you’re not getting any more done? I’d like to think that there is a peak point in the number of hours after which productivity. After that you should take a break and relax. I haven’t looked up the research to see if its true, but I do like the idea of keeping my sanity.

Apr 25 2012
4 Comments
Internet, Software, Technology, Writing

Looking beyond blogs

Every few years there seems to be some new blogging platform that’s going to solve all (or at least some) of the problems of the old ones. A few years ago Posterous made a splash with its idea of being a hub for your social media and driving everything by email. A few weeks ago a new, invite-only platform called Svbtle made the rounds (disclaimer: I signed up for an invite to check out the new hotness). Svbtle aims to take some of the pressure of blogging by allowing you to save quick, private, spur-of-the-moment “ideas” as well as more permanent, public posts. Though I love to see new platforms and all the innovation brought to bear on web publishing, I have some nagging doubts. I’ve been blogging on and off for about five years and I’m starting to think that blogs are the wrong model.

To be clear, they’re not the wrong model for everyone and everything. But they’re certainly not the end-all and be-all of web publishing. As I start measuring the lifetime of my blog in years instead of months, I’m starting to get just a bit frustrated by a platform designed for immediacy. Blogs are fine if you’re writing about what’s happening in the world right now. Blogs are great if you want an online diary of your life. Blogs are wonderful for documenting the growth of your project and community over the years. However blogs are perhaps not so great for people who want to use their writing to augment their thought process. They are not all that great if there are a handful of topics and ideas that you keep revisiting and refining over time.

For example, I’ve written about writing for the web and publishing models before. This will be the third in the de facto series. However, the posts are widely separated in time. In a typical blog format they won’t appear side-by-side unless I remember them and put in links. It would be great if I could have a single web page, at a fixed URL that holds the evolution of my thoughts on the matter over time. As a visitor to the site you could see each of the versions, not just the most recent one. You could comment on each of the versions, or on the combined document. While we’re at it, I’d also like to see paragraph-level comments and version histories (but with a UI better than standard diff).

What I’m describing is more of an essay platform than it is a blogging platform. However I don’t want stiffly siloed platforms either. I’d like to be able to post articles like the one about what I learned in my first semester of graduate school. These posts would fade into the background over time, just like a normal blog. Writers like Craig Mod do a good job of creating large, permanent articles surrounded by smaller “satellite” articles. But when I last asked him (over Twitter a few months ago) he maintained it by hand. Another solution is two have two separate sites like Dustin Curtis does: one for permanent works and one as a traditional blog. But personally I’m of the opinion that software should do as much work as possible and I’ve already separated some of my writing.

The strange thing about the web is that it is both ephemeral and permanent. Today’s hot articles will be lost and forgotten tomorrow. And yet nothing that gets put online ever truly gets deleted. What I want is a writing and publishing platform that reconciles these two opposite natures. There are other technical and interface aspects I could highlight, but they’re orthogonal to the overall purpose of this platform: let me post time dependent pieces which can be archived after a few days, but also let me have long running, heavily edited works.

I don’t know that such a platform exists. I also don’t know for certain that such a platfrom doesn’t exists. I suppose that the only way to really get what I want is to build it (after all, talk is cheap, show me the code) and I hope one day I’ll actually get around to it. Till then I’ll keep thinking about how we can support writing and publishing for the bipolar web (and linking back to older versions). I’d love to hear what you think about the matter.

Apr 11 2012
Leave a comment
Biology, Technology

Staying Alive

I’m not a religious person, I’m not particularly spiritual either. When I do meditate it’s to calm my mind more than anything else. There is one thing I do believe in: Life must be preserved. Life gives rise to intelligence and intelligence gives rise to sentient beings capable of experiencing and understanding the Universe. While “live and let live” is a part of this, there’s another, perhaps even more basic component: we should take care of our own lives. In particular, we must take care of bodies because we depend on them so much. Unfortunately this is easier said than done.

Part of the problem is that there are large gaps in our understanding of how our bodies work and how they are affected by our environment. We’re not sure if sugar is toxic, we’re only just starting to understand how aging works, our brain is still a place of great mystery. On top of it much of our decisions about our bodies are driven by convenience and market pressures rather then science.

However, each day we learn more and more about how to preserve our bodies and our lives. We learn that our bodies are made for endurance running. We learn that just half an hour of exercise on a daily basis can dramatically reduce our chance of disease and increases our quality of life. We learn that reducing caloric intake greatly extends the lifetimes of worms and that humans share many of the same metabolic pathways. And there are people trying to help us live longer, perhaps forever.

As we learn more about our bodies, about disease and health I hope we can also rethink our ideas about health, life and death. Perhaps one day we’ll realize that simply being disease-free is not enough. We’ll understand our bodies well enough to be able to determine what each individual’s optimal body state is and how to get there. Perhaps one day “normal” will be defined as “optimal” and not just “not sick”. And maybe, just maybe, one day we’ll start to think of death as a disease, the last human disease and work to eradicating it.

The effort to preserve and optimize our lives brings its own challenges. What happens to agriculture and food supply chains in a world of health-conscious eaters? What happens to the planet’s natural resources (especially the scarce ones) when there are fewer deaths and large numbers of healthy, active people? If we do get on the path to eradicating death, how many people will the Earth support? Will it finally force our hand and push us into colonizing other planets?

Who knows?

I think we’re entering (and maybe we’re already in) a golden age of biology and health science. Backed by incredibly precise biochemical tools and powerful computational strength we’re going to have an unprecedented amount of knowledge about how our bodies work and react to various conditions and inputs. How are we going to use this knowledge? Will it substantially improve the condition of the human race? I hope so.

Live and let live. Let’s start with ourselves.

Apr 08 2012
Leave a comment
Biology, Productivity, Technology

Sunday Selection 2012-04-08

Today’s selection is something of a health special. For better or for worse our minds are intimately tied to our bodies. Until the day we have seamless uploading technology we’ll have to take care of bodies if we want our minds to work well. And in order to do that we need to know about how our bodies actually work and what’s good for us.

Around the Web

Is Sugar Toxic? The title is perhaps deliberately inflammatory, but the notion behind is perhaps just as troubling. Is is possible that sugar (not just high fructose corn syrup) is not just harmful in large quantities but something that’s dangerous by nature?

Humans: hot, sweaty, natural-born runners I’ll be the first to admit that I’d be happy if I could get away with doing no exercise at all. Unfortunately that’s not the case. The good news is that evolution has equipped us with the systems we need to be powerfully capable runners. Being a regular runner doesn’t require superhuman feats of dedication – it’s in our genes, we just have to tap into our latent biological potential.

From the shelves

The Four Hour Body I don’t really agree with Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Work Week ethic, but I do like the compendium of practical health and fitness information that he’s assembled in this book. While some of his advice is probably best taken with a physician’s advice this book will give you some great ideas and actionable guidelines for becoming healthier and stronger.

Moving Pictures

What Would You Do With Your Own Google? That, is a very good question. Cure cancer? Cure aging? End poverty and world hunger? We’re living in a world of unprecedented computational power and incredible amounts of data to crunch. What could we learn from all that data and how can we use it to change the world?

Tagged , , , , ,
← Older posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 338 other followers