It's Web 2.0 week, and that means lots of announcements of companies changing names, startups launching, and new products being introduced.
Jeff Barr caught the early buzz on KnowNow's new product, eLerts, which gives KnowNow itself a rebirth. (Full disclosure: I'm on the Board.)
I do believe eLerts represents a fascinating new direction for the company: a consumer Internet service that plays well with other Web 2.0 services such as PubSub and Syndic8, offering real-time delivery of notifications of things people want to know about, as they happen on the Web, straight to peoples' desktops.
eLerts let you be alert. From Ron Rasmussen, KnowNow's CTO, I got this description:
With the new KnowNow eLerts service, users can now instantly receive relevant news and content as soon as it is available, without the need to be anchored to a particular site, RSS reader, or aggregator. This translates into a cleaner and more efficient experience: no pop-blockers, search, IM, voice, email, or portal interference. Subscriptions are created by simply dragging-and-dropping any RSS or Atom feed onto the eLert Toobar or Deskbar.
I have played with the alpha version of the service, and I believe there are a lot of potential uses for it. We're only at the starting gate of innovative possibilities for RSS (now that the RSS aggregators are consolidating) -- and KnowNow is exploring that frontier, blazing new trails.
Further buzz: Tom Foremski, Matt Marshall, J.D. Lasica, Dan Farber, Stowe Boyd, "bete-noire"
Sugar, We're Going Down
Fall Out Boy: From Under the Cork Tree
"We're going down, down in an earlier round
And Sugar, we're going down swinging
I'll be your number one with a bullet
A loaded god complex, cock it and pull it"
Thank you Myspace for helping me discover this band. I love this album. (*****)
Hollaback Girl
Gwen Stefani: Love, Angel, Music, Baby
The first three songs are about time, money, and winning, and the album just gets better from there. What's not to love? (*****)
Gone Going
Black Eyed Peas: Monkey Business
"You see yourself in the mirror
And you feel safe coz it looks familiar
But you afraid to open up your soul
Coz you don't really know, don't really know
Who is, the person that's deep within" (*****)
Holiday
Green Day: American Idiot
"Zieg heil to the president gas man,
Bombs away is your (pun-ish-ment),
Pulvarize the Eiffel Towers, who criticize your (gov-ern-ment)..."
(*****)
Dreamgirl
Dave Matthews Band: Stand Up
"I would dig a hole all the way to China, unless of course I was there, and I'd dig my way home. If by digging I could steal the wind from the sails of the greedy men who ruled the world..." (*****)
B.Y.O.B.
System of a Down: Mezmerize
"Why don't presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?" (*****)
Bleed Like Me
Garbage: Bleed Like Me
"You should see my scars..." (*****)
Beverly Hills
Weezer: Make Believe
"Where I come from isn't all that great;
My automobile is a piece of crap;
My fashion sense is a little whack,
And my friends are just as screwy as me...
Beverly Hills - That's where I want to be!
(Gimme Gimme)
Living in Beverly Hills..." (*****)
I'm Supposed To Die Tonight
50 Cent: The Massacre
"Sometimes, I sit and look at life from a different angle. Don't know if I'm God's child or I'm Satan's angel." Sing it, Fitty! (*****)
E-Pro
Beck: Guero
I love how Beck samples the Beastie Boys' "So What'cha Want" (which itself is a sample of Sly Stone's "Time for Livin'") while singing, "I won't give up that ghost. If you take away, these tongues are twisted... There's too much left to taste that's bitter..." And then Beck goes into this chorus of "Na na na na na na na" that is reminiscent of the Meow Mix jingle... (*****)
Rain Man
Eminem: Encore
"When am I gonna come to my good senses? Probably the day Bush comes to my defenses..." (*****)
Sleeping In
The Postal Service: Give Up
"The people thought they were just being rewarded for treating others as they like to be treated, for obeying stop signs and curing diseases, for mailing letters with the address of the sender... Don't wake me, I plan on sleeping in..." Thank you, Chris Wetherell... "Nothing Better" is a great track on this album, too... (*****)
Verse Chorus Verse
Nirvana: With the Lights Out
"And if you save yourself
You will make him happy
He'll keep you in a jar
And you'll think you're happy
He'll give you breathing holes
And you'll think you're happy
He'll cover you with dust
And you'll think you're happy now..." (*****)
Tilt Ya Head Back
Nelly: Sweat
"I see you lookin', uh
like what you see?
Boy, now don't be shy
and look at her face in opportunity..." (*****)
Jesus Walks
Kanye West: The College Dropout
"We at war with terrorism, racism but most of all we at war with ourselves... I want to talk to God but I'm afraid because we ain't spoke in so long..." (*****)
America, FUCK YEAH!
Team America: World Police: Soundtrack
"America, FUCK YEAH! Comin' again to save the motherfucking day, yeah! / America, FUCK YEAH! Freedom is the only way, yeah! / Terrorists, your game is through, 'cause now you have to answer to / America, FUCK YEAH!" (*****)
Canned Heat, by Jamiroquai
Napoleon Dynamite: Soundtrack
Kid on Bus: "What are you gonna do today, Napoleon?"
Napoleon Dynamite: "Whatever I feel like I wanna do. Gosh!!" (*****)
Almost
Bowling for Soup: A Hangover You Don't Deserve
"Here I go thinking about all the things I could've done.
I'm gonna need a forklift, cuz all the baggage weighs a ton..." (*****)
John Battelle: The Search
My favorite book of 2005. Period.
(*****)
Steven D. Levitt: Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
"Just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors -- let's call them X and Y -- but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It's possible that X causes Y; it's also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being caused by some other factor, Z.
Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes. Experts use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so." (*****)
Malcolm Gladwell: Blink
A book of anecdotes about the power of thinking without thinking; this book is a more interesting read than Gladwell's previous, The Tipping Point.
New York Times: "Gottman believes that each relationship has a DNA, or an essential nature. It's possible to take a very thin slice of that relationship, grasp its fundamental pattern and make a decent prediction of its destiny. Gladwell says we are thin-slicing all the time -- when we go on a date, meet a prospective employee, judge any situation. We take a small portion of a person or problem and extrapolate amazingly well about the whole."
David Brooks, who wrote that review, adds: "Isn't it as possible that the backstage part of the brain might be more like a personality, some unique and nontechnological essence that cannot be adequately generalized about by scientists in white coats with clipboards?" (*****)
Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters
I don't agree with some parts of this book, but I truly loved reading it, and it really made me think. I referenced it in my weblications and superhacker and phoneboy posts. Favorite chapter is How to Make Wealth. (Thanks, Ev.) (*****)
Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software
Joel is really good at wielding "diverse and occasionally related matters of interest to software developers, designers, and managers, and those who, whether by good fotune or ill luck, work with them in some capacity."
Joel on Software embodies the principle of "Welcome to management! Guess what? Managing software projects has nothing at all to do with programming." This book, a compendium of the website's wisdom, is useful for everyone from team leads estimating schedules to software CEOs developing competitive strategy. (*****)
Bruce Sterling: Tomorrow Now: Envisioning The Next Fifty Years
Bruce wrote this book to come to terms with seven novel aspects of the twenty-first century, situations that are novel to that epoch and no other. It's about future possibilities.
"This is the future as it is felt and understood: via human experience...
The years to come are not merely imaginary. They are history that hasn't happened yet. People will be born into these coming years, grow to maturity in them, struggle with their issues, personify those years, and bear them in their flesh. The future will be lived." Here here, well-spoken, Bruce. (*****)
The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems: John Vacca
"Science has extended life, conquered disease, and offered new sexual and commercial freedoms through its rituals of discovery, but many unsolved problems remain...
If support for science falters and if the American public loses interest in it, such apathy may foster an age in which scientific elites ignore the public will and global imperatives." (*****)
Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins : Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
I had the pleasure recently of meeting Amory Lovins and hearing him talk about Twenty Hydrogen Myths and the design of hypercar. (He also talked about Bonobos... wow.) I'm a convert to the way of thinking espoused in Natural Capitalism. I used to be cynical about the future, but Amory's work has made me a believer that many great things are about to come. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. (*****)
Merrill R. Chapman: In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
In hilarious prose, this book catalogs lots of stoopid high-tech marketing decisions. It offers clear, detailed analysis of many a marketing mishap, with what happened, why, and how to avoid such stupidity. Might just be the best. book. ever... (*****)
Paul Krugman: The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century
A book exposing the pitfalls of crony capitalism, from corrupt corporations straight up to the executive branch of our government. Krugman is nonpartisan -- what he exposes is foolish short-term thinking on the part of recent United States policies. The patriotic thing to do, he advises, is to fix these economic problems now before they become much harder to solve.
Henry Petroski: Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design
"Design can be easy and difficult at the same time, but in the end, it is mostly difficult." (*****)
Alexander Blakely: Siberia Bound
One of my favorite books of the past few years. Xander is a master storyteller. (*****)
Susan Scott: Fierce Conversations
How to make every conversation count. One of my favorite books of the last decade. (*****)
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