I’ve got nothing but love for my Wizz RSS reader. But sometimes it’s still not enough to keep up. The more feeds I add, the clunkier it gets to click my way down through the list. And I find myself lazing out and only reading about half as much as I should.
So, in an effort to help myself better keep up on what’s going on, I’ve put together news.palewire.com, a feed aggregator that blends together the mix of pundits, blogs, delicious feeds and gossip sheets that I dig on. The topics tend toward newspapers (plight of), data analysis and news media geekery. It’s all brought together using Sam Ruby’s excellent, Python-based Planet Venus application, which I previously used to assemble Shawington.com. The one cool add this time around is Ruby’s “meme” plugin, which scans the feed pool for common links and ranks the past week’s most popular posts.
If it’s something you like, feel free to tune in. The site is mostly intended for my personal use, but it would be great if other people found it useful. So, if there are feeds you’d like to see thrown in, or changes that would help make your life easier, just let me know and I’ll try to do it up. I’m sure I left out a lot of great stuff, and I’m always out to improve my media diet.
This week marked the launch of Shawington.com, a new site focused on the Washington DC neighborhood where I live. Earlier this year it was named one of America’s “bloggiest” areas, thanks to a vibrant crew of writers who have turned online journalism into a significant new force in district politics.
Shawington is an effort to join the fun. There you can find a frequently updated feed of the latest posts from all the Shaw blogs, plus a mashup map I cooked up on one of our hottest local issues, the vacant buildings littered around the neighborhood.
I handled the programming and most of the design, but the inspiration and driving force behind the site came from my housemate and landlord, Martin Moulton. Bekah Raleigh provided vital guidance with the design. And not much of anything would have been possible without the great tools developed by Wordpress, the Planet Planet project, Sam Ruby at Planet Venus, Morten Frederiksen and, while we’re at it, the Google Maps people and whatever long line of saints made sure Python and Apache play so well together.
In the future we plan to expand our research on vacant properties and build out a couple more features. But this is what we’re going with at the moment. Let me know what you think.
There’s another new link over there on the sidebar, this one called DC Music Stores. It leads to a map of what is billed as the definitive list of music stores in the DC area. All I did was pull down the list and throw it up on the map. I tossed in a couple other shops off the Post’s site too.
If something is wrong or missing or out of date, let me know and I’ll work to work it out. Enjoy. And allow me to recommend the CD Warehouse on M Street. They have an excellent selection of new and used CDs from Continental electronic musicians. Like Ellen Allien.
12.21.06 UPDATE: Yesterday this map was featured by the local blog DCist and subsequently linked by Wonkette, who summarized my creation as “kind of the most depressing Google Maps mashup yet.” For the benefit for my self-esteem, let’s just assume they were referring to the quality of DC’s music shops and not my craftsmanship.
But, either way, check out what all the attention did for my hit count.
Ben’s Bookshelf
Here are the books I’m working on right now, courtesy of the social networking site Shelfari. To check out all the books I’ve read the last couple years, click here.
Ben’s News Cloud
As part of my daily reading routine, whenever I come across an article I like I earmark the page using the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. Below you can see a tag cloud depicting the content tags I’ve attached to those stories. The more frequently a tag occurs, the larger it appears. Click on any of the words to see a list of the stories filed with that tag.
This project began in the first week of December 2006, so the cloud represents my news reading habits since then.
Ben’s Music Quilt
Since the end of January 2007, all the music I’ve listened to on my computer has been recorded in a database at last.fm. Here is a quilt displaying covers from the albums I’ve played most frequently.
Blogs by people I know
Hello. Welcome to my new blog. It’s still under construction and should be filling up with actual content over the next few days. For the moment, please pretend it does not exist.