Like staring at a painting for too long, I’m not sure where this post is going, so I’ll just throw it out there as an index, and see if it leads to anything.

Intro
10 years ago we hailed the arrival of the Information Super Highway. Now, new technologies built on that infrastructure have increased information accessibility by an order of magnitude. The idea that in our lifetimes we had to search out information in physical libraries seems atavistic. Below I highlight some of the major trends in information consumption in the Geekdom.

Blogs > RSS
RSS has allowed push dissemination of content on the web. You can follow as many blogs as you like through a feed reader. I typically have over 1,000 unread posts in my Google Reader, due to the high quantity of blogs I follow.

For those who still are having trouble with the concept I suggest Common Crafts excellent video tutorial, RSS in Plain English.

The state of the art of RSS is advancing with innovations to help you deal with information overload such as Feed Scrub, with which you train your account to filter out posts you don’t want to read. I signed up for the beta, but until they create more advanced import and export options I won’t be trying it out (currently you have to import and export each feed individually).

Post Rank is another potentially interesting service which sieves your feeds for the most popular posts. It achieves this by looking at comment counts, tweets, clicks, bookmarks etc. And AideRSS integrates it effortlessly into online feed readers as a Firefox Extension or a Greasemonkey script. The interface is fugly, so I disabled it. Hopefully they’ll improve UI in future iterations.

Feeds of course, aren’t made by the magic feed fairy, one has to setup an RSS feed on their blog. Some blogs don’t have any feeds, or feed the wrong thing. Recently I’ve been ranting on Twitter about my new pet peeve, photo sites that don’t include the photos in their feeds. Enter Feed43 a web service that can create a feed from a webpage using regular expressions. Although it’s a bit daunting at first, anyone with mild geek-cred can get the hang of it after a couple shots. Check out the feeds I’ve created there.

Twitter
This is the blogging short form that is hot right now. You are limited to 140 characters per “tweet”, which is what makes this service unique: brevity. A lot of people are supplementing their blog posts with numerous daily tweets. Like RSS, this is a push service, so all the twitterers whom you follow’s tweets show up on your Twitter page.

Twitter is a service that is extending what the language of the internet. Consider the innovations in semantics: @replies and #hashtags are meta-language characters that have grown organically in Twitter to facilitate tweet tracking.

An interesting thing about Twitter is the myriad ways it’s used. Some use it as communication channel to hold conversations with their friends. Others to give status updates (it can update Facebook status). Some to share cool things they’ve found. Others promote their services. Others use it as the ultimate knowledge base, and others as a newswire. Most use it for a bit of all of the above. I grab tons of information from my daily Twitter browsing on a range of topics such as politics, tech, finance and the lives and opinions of people I know and/or admire.

The number of technologies growing up around this platform are too numerous to go into, but a few of the interesting ones I’ve seen are Follow Cost, which allows you to evaluate the posting frequency and @ replies of someone before you follow them; Yammer, which is billed as twitter for project management; and Twinkle for iPhone, which grabs tweets from your current immediate surroundings (useful to have at an event).

A lot of people still don’t get Twitter, despite it’s  popularity. If you want to learn more, again, I suggest again, Common Craft’s video Twitter in Plain English.

Instapaper
Possibly my most used iPhone app, Instapaper let’s you separate the long form articles you want to read later from the constant flow of byte size bits that you may consume fast and loose in your feed reader during breaks. In the past I would just skip things I didn’t have the time to invest in. Now I can just mark them to be downloaded to my iPhone, and read them on my commute.

Safari Web Clips, OSX Dashboard, iPhone apps, etc
And on and on and on… APIs mean you get the data any way someone can think up to serve it. Webclips and Dashboard widgets in OSX bring sites’ onto your mac effortlessly. The iPhone app store is creating a huge new marketplace for content providers. Even just checking your mail puts you in contact with data with (mandatory) RSS snippets at the top of the inbox.

Government
Notorious for its opacity, government is starting to open up it’s doors. With “Open Obama” taking office, his commitment to transparency, apparently, is much more than lip service.

1. Obama’s change.gov (now whitehouse.gov) & Citizens’ Briefing Book with it’s Digg model for voting up & down citizen commentary.
   
2. The House, and the Senate on YouTube, where you can see videos by your Representatives, and their debates on the floor.
3. OpenCongress.org, which allows you to vote up or down the popularity of bills, and features profiles of Representatives.
4. USAspending.gov, that has an open API (arguably the true measure of transparency) to let people develop apps that have direct access to the data, as well as tons of downoads.
   

Also, check out John Edwards on Twitter. Unlike Al and Barack, he updates frequently!

Life Feeds
The paradigm is not only changing on a website level. With the explosion of social media sites like Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for careers, Delicious for bookmarks and Flickr for photos, the Internet is increasingly a place inhabited by people. You can learn frightening amounts of information about a person involved in social media. Indeed, most people are so tickled by the fact that we are writing our autobiographies in the cloud, they are ok with the security risk.

On my FriendFeed page you can see an aggregate of my social media profiles. My About page has more in this vein.

Conclusion
Information accessibility is a good thing no-doubt, but there are a couple of perils involved with this explosion of means. People putting out life feeds are ever more at risk of reputation damage, and even identity theft. You are only as safe as your least secure social media site. The recent twitter hackings during Mac World, where Steve Jobs was pronounced dead (classy), is just one example.

Consuming myriads of info through a single source also means credibility diminishes in importance. It’s tougher to distinguish which is the reputable news source with the branding gone. This contributes to info-tainment. People can’t trust their sources, and they don’t care.I think we’re at a strange point in the internet where it is simultaneously maturing into a platform, while simultaneously deteriorating the credibility/quality of information.

[starrating]

Is this thing on?

This was originally envisioned as an iPhone app, but it seems that interfacing an app with iCal might be more difficult than I had hoped (at least according to the infamous Marzagao).

The idea is simple: We love our girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses and mistresses, but let’s face it, we don’t show it nearly enough. You can subscribe to an iCal calendar that reminds you every month to do something nice for that special someone at Just Thinking of You (.net). The events have alarms and suggestions. Check the site for some examples.

I’m thinking about changing the design, but I wanted to get something up so I coded my first draft. Check it out and let me know what you think!

If the question of Argentina belonging to the 3rd world is unresolved, it’s at least firmly planted in the 2nd.  Here are my notes from my recent ten days in the capital:

1. Financially things are still tough.
   • The peso is in flux, which creates multiple layers of complexity to doing financial transactions.
   • Inflation is on the rise: prices have risen almost everywhere (except transport) to match NY prices. According to my cousin, wages have gone up proportionally.
   • Coin crisis: You need change to ride the bus, only about 30 US cents, but coins are scarce. So much so that they can be sold for profit. No one has change.
   • It’s very expensive to buy electronics or clothing.
2. Police have improved, but can be potentially useless.
   • People aren’t so afraid of being kidnapped or harassed by police.
   • They have patrols now, if infrequent, and a 911 number like NY.
   • On the other hand, they answer directly to the Federal Government, causing problems. For example, a friend’s home intrusion alarm went off. When he got home a rep from the alarm company met him at the door, but refused to go in. There was a police man on the corner whom they approached, who also refused to go in. Aparently, he was being paid to watch that corner.
3. Security is still a problem.
   • Stickups remain common. A friend of ours was robbed at knife point while we were there.
   • People are still afraid to open store front businesses due to the high rate of stickups.
   • You have to LOCK all doors. Whether you’re inside or out.
   • When out in public, you must keep a close eye on your bag and personal effects. “Choros” (pick pockets) remain abundant.
   • On the other hand, kidnappings are now uncommon.
   • People decide not to live afraid.
4. The middle class is firmly right leaning.
5. Culturally, Bs As remains vital, mostly.
   • Cafe and night life remain vibrant.
   • The state of the art of Graffitti is maturing.
   • The art of drawing is well respected. You see many interesting sketches in the daily papers and in advertising.
   • Dogshit remains a problem.
   • While building remains strong, often, unfortunately to the detriment of beautiful historic architecture, most of the city is still very charming. The southern climate helps a lush abundance of old life trees thrive.
   • The “Asado” (barbeque) remains an essential stamp of hospitality. This time I tried “chinchulines” (lungs), kind gross, and “molleja” (a fatty, bacon-like throat gland), delicious! I passed on the raviolis de “seso” (brain).

Conclusion: Despite all it’s charm, it’s still dysfunctional on many levels. Under the right conditions however, it is still livable.

Here is a link to my Amazon wishlist called ‘Erotica‘.

1. Les Fleurs Du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
2. Flesh Unlimited by Guillaume Apollinaire
3. The Dominant Wives and Other Stories by Eric Stanton
   
4. The Mammoth Book of Erotica by Maxim Jakubowsk
5. Men in Love by Nancy Friday
6. The Pure and the Impure by Colette
7. My Secret Life by Anonymous
8. Under the Roofs of Paris by Henry Miller
9. Cockpit by Jerzy Kosinski
10. Passion Play by Jerzy Kosniski
11. Story of O by Pauline Reage
12. A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel by James Salter
13. Little Birds by Anais Nin
14. Candida Royalle’s Under the Covers DVD
15. Emmanuelle DVD

It isn’t the fruit of my own research,

rather pilfered directly from She Comes First, by Ian Kerner. A good, informative read.