I’ve seen several people writing about Tom Vanderbilt’s thought-provoking, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) . Every few pages there is a good idea that leads you down some mental rabbit hole. I have highlighted passages and dog-eared pages on the Kindle every time I sit down to read it. The universal experience of driving has turned us all into amateur psychoanalysts navigating complex social interactions, so the book’s popularity is understandable and says a lot about how much is going on while we’re just driving.
General
Daily reads with feeds
Last Friday I was reading through the monthly archives at Matt Webb’s excellent and erudite Interconnected blog. I especially enjoy his brief book reviews and reading recommendations, which I follow religiously as he reads 100+ books a year, most of which I have never heard of before.
Anyway, he created an RSS feed to read Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebooks (1,565 pages) on a daily basis in easy to digest chunks. This is a great way to read lengthy material that is not presented as a linear narrative or in chapter form. The Notebooks are perfect for this as would be any sort of diary or journal. For other daily content, I recommend subscribing to the Pepys Diary, which provides several different types of feed content based on what you would like to glean from the material.
There is also a service, DailyLit, which specializes in delivering daily book content via email or RSS. There are many public domain and copyrighted works available and you can customize delivery with options like receiving updates only during the work week or at certain times of the day, etc.
Make money for someone special as you surf
As an Amazon Prime member, I buy a fair amount of stuff on Amazon, especially Kindle books and MP3’s. With free 2 day shipping and $3.99 next day shipping, it’s too easy to buy things on impulse.
One cool program Amazon created is their affiliate program called Amazon Associates , where people can create links with their associate ID that when clicked will pay a percentage (around 6%) if the click results in a sale. The associate program is very popular among bloggers as it gives you one more way to make money off something you do anyway, like recommend books.
I see a lot of popular bloggers like VC blogger, Paul Kedrosky, who use this and it occurred to me that while I appreciate the book or product recommendations, wouldn’t it be better to award this benefit to someone in my immediate circle? In other words, shouldn’t a nice Amazon commission on MY purchases go to someone I actually know and care about? Someone who might really benefit from it rather than some Venture Capitalist out West who I’ve never met? It’s really just a matter of substituting the Amazon associate ID’s at the end of the URL. After a quick search, I found a Greasemonkey Script that does this.
Now, whenever I load any Amazon link anywhere in my browser the Greasemonkey script rewrites the link and inserts my friend’s associate ID. If I click the link and buy something my friend gets a 6-10% commission.
I would not recommend using your own associate ID as you cannot make commissions on your own purchases. Of course, if you got your friend to use your Amazon ID and you used his ID, then you might both be able to make reciprocal purchases.
It’s very easy. Here’s all you need to do:
- Make your friend get an Amazon Associate ID.
- Install and use Firefox as your web browser, if you haven’t already.
- Install the Greasemonkey Firefox Extension
- Install the Amazon URL rewriting Greasemonkey script
- Edit the script and add your friend’s associate ID.
That’s all there is to it. Now any time you buy anything from Amazon, your friend or loved one will get a nice percentage, which can add up over time.
In the future, it might be nice to add a feature to the script to rotate through a group of Amazon associate ID’s from friends and assign one to each link at random to make it more interesting. Or, you could see about finding Amazon associate ID’s for any charities that participate in the program.
Weird Blogger content flagging
One of my friends and favorite writers, Hollis Baker, blogs over at Blogger’s Blogspot. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way his site content was flagged as offensive, which makes no sense at all as his writing is strictly apple pie. In fact, he publishes many of the same stories in his hometown newspaper. I’m sure this mistake is fixable, however we decided to move his blog to his own domain, www.hollisbaker.com to avoid any future issues. So, we set it up in WordPress, imported the entries from Blogger, and now he’s good to go. I look forward to more enjoyable reading. Check it out for yourself by reading one of his best entries.
Shallow versus deep
Despite my desire at times to be otherwise, I am a shallow thinker – in the sense that my normal thought pattern is more lateral and connective than deep and focused. There are few things that I know deeply, but many things I understand superficially.
I hate not knowing something and yet feel satisfied once I have understood something sufficiently well to connect it to everything else I have stored away. Like most things, it is probably best to have a foot in both camps: the ability to process large amounts of information while capable of ‘going deep’ to focus when necessary.
In my experience, most people are in one camp or another. Yet, which mode is the most ideal?
A few things I have noticed:
- Shallow thinkers tend to be more social relative to their deep thinking peers. Many deep thinkers are even frustratingly asocial.
- Deep thinkers are rare whereas the world seems to abound in shallow thinkers.
- Both shallow thinkers and deep thinkers get something from the presence of the other. There is a certain excitable state that emerges when capable shallow and deep thinkers get together.
- Shallow thinkers seem more practical and action-oriented, while deep thinkers seem drawn more to the theoretical, or at the very least, they seem more content with the thinking versus the doing.
Which type of thinking are you most comfortable with?
I started thinking about this after viewing my Google Reader Trends:
From your 203 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 8,077 items, starred 491 items, shared 1 items, and emailed 45 items.
I am also reminded of the (humbling) description of the socionics type, the ENTP at Psychological Types uncovered from the Socionics people:
ENTps are very curious and process a lot of information, similar to a gold digger washing out the soil looking for gold. And ENTps know where the “gold” is. They are often well aware of some new and unusual discoveries. Such information is usually available to everyone who is interested enough to look for it, but not many people are that bothered. ENTps ideas are often based on these discoveries and for someone who didn’t know that these findings are already in existence, ENTps ideas may look very radical and original.
How to royally screw up your Google PageRank
A week or two ago, I fiddled around a bit with the inner workings of this blog, as I do from time to time. In trying to improve the search-engine-friendliness of the site, I made a few changes to the permalink structure in WordPress, but after a couple minutes I changed it back and forgot all about it.
Turns out Google had a big PageRank refresh over the weekend and I went from PageRank 4 down to PageRank 3. In trying to find an explanation for the drop, I realized that a large part of the site content was unreachable and generating 404 Not Found errors. Between upgrading WordPress and messing with the permalinks, the URL rewriting got hosed, which made nearly every post unreachable.
After much lamentation and gnashing of teeth, I did some research and found a nice solution in the form of the WordPress Permalink Redirect Plugin, which would resolve the issue and also help redirect some even older broken permalinks.
Now, all I need to do is keep blogging every day until I get back into Google’s good graces.
No vision: A missed opportunity with Flickr
As someone who occasionally needs to find stock photography for various design projects (stock photography is like design shake and bake), I’ve used several services ranging from free to painfully expensive (Getty Images). For some Getty Images photos, you might pay a few hundred bucks to borrow a high resolution print-ready image. Considering they might pay the photographer a couple bills and then get to resell the images as many times as they can at no additional cost, I imagine it’s a pretty high-margin business at the top end.
Unsurprisingly, as low-cost microstock photo providers like iStockPhotos.com and Stock.XCHNG have emerged onto the scene, in true reflection of the actual costs involved, they’ve been quickly snapped up by larger companies like Getty Images and Jupiter Media. As soon as iStockPhotos.com was acquired, the prices went up dramatically. With most of these microstock sites, the initial service is attractively priced and contributors are compensated adequately, then as they scale, prices increase and payouts decrease, as one would expect.
Free Wall Street Journal: Part Deux
In the previous entry, I explained how you could read full articles at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by tricking wsj.com into thinking you originated from Google News. Basically, any WSJ traffic from Google News is allowed to view the full article.
My previous solution was awkward kludge, but it got the job done. Of course, I should have known there was an easier way to do it. The problem is two-fold: the Journal site checks the referer and the URL parameter. So, if you can change the referer and rewrite the URL’s to include the URL parameter, the entire site will be in subscription mode.
Step 1: Change the referer to appear as if traffic is originating from Google News. This is easy with the RefControl extension for Firefox. Just install the extension and set the referer for any traffic to “http://online.wsj.com” as coming from “http://www.google.com/news”. See screenshot below.
Step 2: Rewrite all URL’s on the WSJ site so that they include the Google News parameter. In other words, take all links on the site and add “?mod=googlenews_wsj” to the end. With the referer set manually and the modification in place, you should be able to view the full articles. So, how do you rewrite the URL’s on the WSJ site? I recommend creating a Greasemonkey script to do this, which should be pretty simple. When I get some more time I might do it and upload to my defunct userscripts library.
How to view full WSJ articles for free
The Wall Street Journal is a pretty good resource for business news. I say “pretty good” because it has an annoying pay wall and it’s now owned by Rupert Murdoch, who I find tacky (Fox News, regardless of its politics, is lowest common denominator viewing). I do have to wonder about the profit margins on newspaper advertising if a business like the WSJ can’t reliably make enough money selling advertising on its own site that is relies on a subscription model. Maybe this is just a testament to the success of its subscription model?
Radical minimalism is modern asceticism
Apropos of my last post, I came across two very relevant pieces. One on the success of paper as an interface (we forget that paper is a successful technical achievement) and one in Time on radical minimalism.
This flight from materialism seems to be part of the national zeitgeist. Many of us are overwhelmed by modern life in all its complexity and ambiguity. At a certain level, has modern life become opposed to our basic nature? Partly due to temperament, I look back and wonder if we lived better lives a few generations ago when the tendency was to stay near family and to live simply with more humble expectations for what life had to offer. Aside from advances in prosperity and medicine, have we improved the quality of our lives?