jakelodwick:

I registered a new domain, Hybrowse.com, and hacked together a little prototype. And dammit, it worked — by putting every Etsy item’s tags (and “materials”) into a big database and letting you browse them venn diagram-style, you can find some really unusual products. I already linked to Octopus Necklaces, but here are some more:

• Pink + Green + Beads
• Clothing + Men + 80s
• Taxidermy + Shadowbox
• Sparrow + Pendant

And so on and so on, forever! You can combine the tags any way you like. You’re not stuck in a rigid tree of categories, like on most ecommerce sites, where you can only move backwards or forwards. With Hybrowse you can go from A to (A + B) to B.

I like it.  What if you could browse both Netflix and Etsy and the 998 other as-yet-unavailable sites simultaneously?  Any reason to keep them in separate buckets?  Shouldn’t Netflix be another tag just like Etsy is?  And then I could see all of the cute animal movies and pieces of art at the same time.

rickwebb:

Hybrowse: Etsy: Art + Original Painting + Portrait + Oil + Animal

Hybrowse is proving to be a lot of fun.

Agreed.

I like this feature of recommending your friends to be included in the Directory.  I wish they were public.  So here’s my public version.

Last week I nominated Rick Webb.

This week I nominated Ted Roden.

I like them both because they offer frequent unpredictable, slightly at odds with the status-quo, observations about things that I never would have thought of myself but with which I always agree.

Are there really two lives?  The one we’re living and the one we want to live?  With our subconscious Lizard Brain(tm) in the way? I feel like I’ve overcome that little problem.  Anyone else?

emmawelles:

fitzroy:

Time Breakdown Of Modern Web Design

This is why I don’t do web development anymore.

I whole-heartedly disagree with this pie chart.  Cross-browser development has never been easier.  The modern browsers are all pretty good, including IE, even if it is a hell of a lot uglier.  With awesome tools like jQuery you almost don’t even need to test in IE, and who the fuck cares about tables vs divs anymore or W3C compliancy.  Not the sane web developer.  If you’re banging your head on these things, it’s your own choice.  But making beautiful, usable, interactive, fun websites that work is totally doable and actually quite a pleasure.

stevenf:

Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.

In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves. A lot of thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say, “Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse interface can’t be the end of the road? What’s next?”

Then “next” arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself included) that we looked at it said, “What in the shit is this?”

Excellent entire article.  Read it.

I could go on and agree point by point, but really, this is all just a healthy reminder to me that I am forever loyal to the New Guard.  Let me never be caught on the Old side of the changing of the guard.  Ever.

tedroden:

An nytlabs production based on code from my book… written in an hour or so this morning.

Nice, Ted!

merlin:

MultiMarkdown

In case that last thing seemed too cryptic:

1. Woo, everybody look at me: I wrote a bunch of pages. Whee.
2. MultiMarkdown. Dig it.

Seriously. If you’re not at least trying MultiMarkdown for writing stuff? Damn. Dude. Try it.

Personally, it’s changed my game — it’s how I think now. Can’t imagine writing more than a paragraph in anything that doesn’t do MMD.

Seamlessly integrated with TextMate (and, much later in my version of The Process, Scrivener), MultiMarkdown is the no-look Quicksilver of BS-free writing.

Viz: Check out Fletcher’s sample document to see how this becomes this. Gold.

This sold me.  Though it took a bit of digging to figure out how to do it, now when you look at your own previous days’ entries on 750words.com it will be passed through MultiMarkdown.

emmawelles:

In terms of getting new messages, the MySpace Shot is the single most effective photo type for women. We at first thought this was just because, typically, you can kind of see down the girl’s shirt with the camera at that angle—indeed, that seems to be the point of shot in the first place—so we excluded all cleavage-showing shots from the pool and ran the numbers again. No change: it’s still the best shot; better, in fact, than straight-up boob pics (more on those later).

I love OkCupid’s data analysis so much.

OkCupid is awesome.  When I was online dating I always wished that OkCupid had a larger Seattle following, cause they are clearly the most interesting of the dating sites.

Who are you?

merlin:

Day 11 of the zero draft reboot. Daytum says it’s Miller Time.

I’ve been trying to think about what would be interesting to display on a profile page for 750words.com, and this would be the basic place to start.  Not sure what Session Count to Beat is… maybe the hoped for word count to beat tomorrow?  But how to determine it?