Linkfest III

I've been using del.icio.us for a while now, and it makes me happy. It's probably even more low-tech than this site here, and serves the simple purpose of holding your darn bookmarks somewhere. Every time I feel that I should be reading something, I can just bookmark it and pretend I'd read it. It's like how we used to joke that photocopying the article is equivalent to reading it.

Which brings us to the academic equivalent, CiteULike, which has the huge plus of converting your citations into BibTeX format. [Jstor should be ashamed that another site can pull this info from them and produce a BibTeX citation, but they can't do it themselves.]

Communists may prefer de.lirio.us. As the name is explicitly intended to convey, it's a del.icio.us knockoff, but it is open-source, and has an extra bell or whistle or two. Del.icio.us has a different approach: closed source, but an API which allows other people at other sites to write cute add-ons. This week, de.lirio.us is in much more rapid development; del.icio.us recently got funding from an undisclosed source with undisclosed motivations, which should also lead to more rapid development.

There is zero privacy on both of these sites, which is part of their intent. The above links go to my own bookmarks, so you can see what I've been looking at lately---in fact, if you're in serious stalker mode, there are del.icio.us RSS and CiteULike RSS feeds for my account, so you can know any time I've posted another link or article. As inflated as my ego may be, I can not imagine a single human being having any interest in such a feature, but am amused that the option exists. I was toying around with the idea of writing up an entry about what it means that somebody set up a panopticon and people flocked to it, but didn't have much to say on the matter.

Sometimes when I'm bored, I check the popular page on del.icio.us, but it consists almost entirely of reference works (which is ex post obvious) and computer tutorials.

So, an easy way to do this little festival of links would be to just send you to the del.icio.us page. Go, check the tags, see if there's anything you like.

But since that feels vaguely antisocial, let me point you to a few of my favorites.

E-cards take thirty seconds longer to set up than a standard email, but people are infinitely happier when they get them. Unfortunately, the graphics are always painfully syrupy, to the point that the only way to send them is with a bit of a smirk. I usually send sympathy cards for people's birthdays. So, here's a guy who makes greeting cards that don't suck. He uses Flash animation for interesting visual effects instead of dancing teddy bears, and thus has the first not-kitschy cards I have ever seen.

Do you think you're a geek `cause you know how to disassemble your PC when it's acting up? Whatever, dude. Dan will show you how to disassemble your frigging components. Didn't you ever wonder what's in your power supply? He's also a fan of making fun of technological quacks, which is an easy but always entertaining target. I think he's where I got this link to an enthusiastic parody of the audiophile world. [Speaking of which, I want this for my birthday. Here's Dan's RSS feed.]

While we're on the tech-side, I may as well also mention my main source for news: The Register. It's a Brit journal whose motto is "Biting the hand that feeds IT", and reports on the important developments in the IT world in an appropriately snarky manner. If you think you don't care about tech policy, try subscribing to this feed for a week and see how much you read. [The Register's RSS feed]

Notice my frequent use of RSS feeds; they really are the only sane way to keep up with sites that frequently update. I've discussed RSS in prior posts, but let me give you the e-z it'll-only-take-a-minute setup summary:
Save this file to your hard drive. It's a hand-picked list of the funnest feeds I could find.
Go to Bloglines and set up an account.
Once you're logged in and are on the My Feeds page, click Edit on the right hand side.
Click "Import Subscriptions" and then browse to the above file that you'd saved to your hard drive.

That done, you now have kilos of time-wasting sites, like the New York Times, to sift through. Bloglines also fits the panopticon theme: my own feeds can be publicly viewed (though you can turn off this option), so you can see what I've been reading on any given day.

[My own agenda in pushing for RSS readership is that I don't post very often, so you, dear reader, are more likely to maintain interest if you're notified when I put new stuff up instead of having to check every day. At this point, I'm assuming that all readers get to me through an RSS reader.]

Here's a traffic circle.

I should mention a prior post listing one auditory and two visual sites, which I find to be immensely appealing for their search for beauty and order in the world around us. [I've updated the RSS feeds since first posting it, by the way. This is my fourth reference to Quiet American; can't tell if that's enough.]

And of course, no survey of the Internet is complete without: Porn! [I dare you to click it at work.]