new features: rss feed, tag cloud

There are a few cool new features on our blog today.

First, I've added my 'starred' feed from Google Reader. You can now see my most recently starred items. I'll try to only star 5 a day so you can see what I think is cool without having to subscribe the feed.

Adding an RSS feed is pretty straightforward in Blogger. Just add the RSS element and copy the RSS link from your google reader.

Second, I added a Tag Cloud that displays labels from our blog (From Phydeaux). It's pretty handy and in the future will probably be a better representation of my interests than my del.icio.us tagcloud. Del.icio.us has some cool stuff on it but most of my content is - well - lame. Lamer, at least, than LOTR jokes.


I've been reading A.J. Jacob's The Year of Living Biblically. It's quite good and very 'bloggy'. It's written in a diary-esque fashion. It's funny and-at times- moving, but I think he tried to take too much meaning from his experiences. The moral at the end of the story is something we, American consumers, derive way too much pleasure from. I think his documentary style almost requires it. In the vein of Morgan Spurlock, he undertakes some major change in habit for a period of time and document it. His previous book was about reading every article in the encyclopedia.

The religious idea, to live biblically for an entire year, following the commands of the bible with a literalism interpretation, is quite novel and fascinating. Americans are changing religions more and more frequently. We're entering a period where religious enlightenment is not attained through depth, but through breadth. Jacobs explores the depth of the religious movement in this country, but he does it in an individual way (which he acknowledges the limitations of). Unfortunately, it's the group experience which really interests social scientists. The few candid portraits he paints of group experiences - Hasidic Jews in New York having a drunken Crown Heights bash, for instance - are fascinating.

It is a good, interesting book but it definitely could have delved a little deeper and taken a step out of being a memoir. While that style definitely makes for a good read, it sometimes lacks in the subject's content and favors the individual experience.


I've been thinking about my multimedia project for class. I thought of two viable ideas and one completely non-viable idea. I'll try to describe each in a short little blurb, and maybe expand on the two viable ideas before I decide on which to do.

Viable Ideas:
1. Create a flash-based timeline of a historic cultural or political event. I would incorporate video (from youtube, slideshows, etc), audio (music, noise, speech), and static content (pictures, text). It would involve a lot of borrowing (Especially if the content was already collected at some source in another format) and a lot of creation, but it could end up being really cool. Imagine a self-scrollable timeline with shifting colors, content, etc. The form could change as you moved along it to match the event.

2. Economoic / Political Youtube videos. I would create videos describing basic or current political or economic concepts, such as Superdelegates, the subprime lending crisis, etc. The videos would be stylistically similar to the Commoncraft "Explanations in Plain English" videos. Mallory even gave me an idea for a style and a name. I could call it Candycraft or something similar; and use candy to describe basic items. For instance, I could use different colored jellybeans to represent trade goods. I might come up with another, more interesting theme / style; but we'll see.

Non-Viable Idea:
This is more my own little imagination running rampant. I would create a python script with two inputs - two Wikipedia pages. The script would then crawl the pages, collect links, and then piece them together to make a sort of visio-venn diagram/ flow chart (Here, clearly, the "Sort Of" denotes how much work this idea would require to get anywhere). It's like Kevin Bacon meets Wikipedia meets Visio.
Unfortunately, my Python skills aren't all that hot and I'm not sure this would even produce an interesting result. C'est la vie. Sometimes I regret not going into Computer Science. Then I remember how frustrating that can really be.