I’ve added yet another goofy widget to my media diet page. This one displays the books I’m working on at the moment.
It’s created by Shelfari, a social networking site built around users cataloging their personal libraries. I’ve decided to use it to track my reading habits, just as I’m using last.fm to record the music I listen to.
Capriciousness has always been my guide. I’ve never followed how many, or what type, of books I read over time. So, this will be something new for me. I feel a bit guilty about all the conspicious consumption lately. But I am curious to see how things stack up at the end of the year.
So far I’ve added all of the books I’ve read this year, including two I’m still working on, Philip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal and Brian Greene’s primer on modern physics, The Fabric of the Cosmos.
This plugin requires Adobe Flash 9.
You can scroll back and forth through the titles, or click on a book to learn more. As I add more books throughout the year, the shelf here should fill itself.
Like many of my fellow pale, white Americans, I have a job that requires I spend most of the work day seated in front of a computer.
It comes with a few negatives. I have minor neck pain. I’ve gained a little weight. And I’ve developed a highly refined, and easily inflamed, sensitivity toward the shortcomings of different varieties of database development software. None of which is probably doing much for my sex appeal. Especially that last one.
But it has its advantages, too. I enjoy the work. I’m blessed with great coworkers. And it’s possible to complete most of my job while also engaging in one of my favorite hobbies: listening to pop music.
To make the most of the opportunity, I decided several months ago to purchase a good pair of headphones, the Grado SR-80. While I won’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, they’ve certainly been great for me.
And, more recently, I’m signed up for an account at the social networking site last.fm. Now every time I listen to a song it’s cataloged by a little bug on my computer that sends the track back to their site. You can watch what I’m up to here. You should go join yourself, too. It’ll be fun. (And if you do, add me as a friend!)
Since I’ve written about last.fm and the RSS feed of recent tracks over there in the sidebar before, I won’t ramble too far. But I do have something new. Below is a quilt of album covers that displays artwork from the music I’ve been listening to lately.
It’s dynamically generated and updated by last.fm. You can check it out anytime right here or over on my media diet page. Pointless indeed, but at least marginally entertaining. Sort of like this blog, I suppose. When we’re clicking, at least.
About two months ago I started using the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to save and tag my favorite news stories. A couple hundreds links later, I’ve built a nice collection. Below you can find the tags I’ve selected displayed visually.
If you’ve never seen one, this is what is known as a tag cloud. The crowd over at Wikipedia defines it this way:
A Tag Cloud is a text-based depiction of tags across a body of content to show frequency of tag usage and enable topic browsing. In general, the more commonly used tags are displayed with a larger font or stronger emphasis. Each term in the tag cloud is a link to the collection of items that have that tag.
While it makes for a fun little toy, the whole effort is certainly hampered by capricious and inconsistent coding on my part. At its core, this project is founded on mapping complex news stories to simple nominal categories for quantitative analysis. Because the creation and execution of my coding routines have been, to be kind, pretty loose, you shouldn’t expect more than a foggy view on the perculiarities of how I consume and categorize news. For insight into the news itself, it’s best you trust the professionals.
Should anyone be interested, you can track a feed of my latest links in the left side bar under the heading Ben’s News Bag — also available via RSS — and keep up with the news cloud here or on my media diet page, where I’ve installed an identical module just above my blogroll.
I’ve added another feature to the sidebar. This one, called Ben’s Live Playlist, is a feed of my latest listens served up automagically via last.fm and a couple Web toys.
Here’s how it works. Every time I play a song it’s recorded by a little bug on my computer trained to ship the titles to my last.fm profile page. The data is harvested there by a widget created by a guy named Jonathan and then published here using another widget by a guy named Otto.
Since the code was done in AJAX the listing should be updated every few minutes, which means that you can find out what I’m listening to literally as I listen to it. How about that?
If you’re not already a member at last.fm, I encourage you to sign up. It’s a neat way to track your listening behavior and the social networking features are a good deal of fun. If you join, be sure to add me as a friend!
I have added a new feature to the sidebar called Ben’s News Bag. It’s a live feed from an online cubbyhole hosted by del.icio.us. Every time I come across an article I like, I’ll ship the link and it will pop up over there on the left.
Stupid? Maybe. But, hey, you never know. You might see something you’re interested in. And, if anyone really wants to keep an eye over my shoulder, you can snatch the box’s RSS feed and plug it into your aggregator of choice.