On August 3, 2008, I drove from Spokane, WA to Lewiston, ID, and chronicled the transformation of the Inland Northwest skyline by the harbingers of modern communication: the cell phone tower. These sentinels have joined grain elevators and power line towers in watching over, or rather listening over, this farmland.
Check out the full "Sentinels of the Palouse" Flickr set.
Now even The Google is involved!
Ok, only 921 comments so far. Genius.
I recently read a review of Moleskine City Notebooks by The City Record, a new notebook from the famous maker dubbed as "a way of organizing your trip and to preserve it for your memory and your records." Moleskine City Notebooks are specialized journals for cataloging one's journey to and through a city. The restaurant reviews, sight-seeing suggestions, areas to avoid, tips-and-tricks, and unforgettable experiences are all recored by the owner; only maps and topic suggestions are provided within the notebook. It's not Lonely Planet's guide to San Francisco, it's Joe's guide to San Francisco.
In the review the author pondered, "one wonders if a cottage industry will develop to create content for City Notebooks." Inspired, I myself pondered: can we create a shared guidebook, editable by anyone, owned by everyone, that will survive out there in the cold, harsh, cynical world?
With social authorship in mind I bought a San Francisco City Notebook and created the Shared Guidebook, SF. I seeded it with a few of my own favorite nuggets of information, mostly set in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco: restaurants I've enjoyed, overlooked vista points, tips on where to park that I shouldn't tell anyone, etc., plus an annotated map of the area. The vast majority of the guidebook is blank, ready to be filled by everyone else. But how?
This is the risky part: I am going to leave Shared Guidebook SF to be found by someone else. I've tried to make it as inviting and interesting as possible. On the inside-cover I have described this project, asking the finder to please contribute to and enjoy the guidebook, and when they feel the time is right, pass it on to someone else or leave it to be found yet again. Also, I've asked the finder to email me or Twitter me (the username and password are listed!) regarding Shared Guidebook SF's fate.
So, I'm off to send this little guidebook off. Wish it luck!
... because I keep forgetting how.
There is no guarantee that your Extensions will work, but they will try. For example, Gmail Manager has some display issues, but it's good enough.
Thanks, Lifehacker!
In my article The User-Generated Content Game I talked about how facinated I am by SFGate.com's ability to inspire users of the site to comment on their new article, generating massive amounts of valuable user generated content (UGC.) I regularly read the site and check out the number of comments. Today, I was floored once again.
The Olympic Torch made it's only North America stop today in San Francisco, and with a clever switcheroo the city announced one official route, but took the Torch on another route to avoid protesters. When I found the SFGate article about this, "Torch leaves S.F. after surprise route shift", the article had 1668 comments at 8:33pm.
Here is the progression of comments between 8:33pm and 10:05pm.
9:00PM: 1759 Comments.
9:22PM: 1801 Comments.
9:33PM: 1818 Comments.
10:05PM: 1885 Comments.
187 Pages of Comments. Whoa.
My point is, the comments just keep flowing in. People are reading and replying and taking a deep interest in the conversation. I wish every application that I've worked on had as involved a user base as this. While this is an oversimplification, SFGate just put newspaper articles on the site and let people talk about them. The killer app.
04/11/2007 - Update
2 days later: 2172 comments.
Update: you will need to install Growl if you do not already have it installed.
Even though iTunes is slightly better about loving NAS drives than it used to be (see my post Mac Attack: Vantec loves America, OS X 10.5 Leopard) life is not perfect. For me, once my Mac loses it's connection to the NAS, such as after waking from sleep mode, iTunes cannot find the original files, even though they are there. The error reads "The song xxx could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?"
After quite a bit of investigation and trial and error, I'm not sure who's fault it is: it might be the NAS's fault, based on my "solution:" if I list all of the files in the My Music folder on the NAS, iTunes can find them again -- that is, all I need to do is acknowledge their existence and things start working.
My NAS is named "VAULT." Using the Terminal, I executed the following:
ls -R /Volumes/VAULT/My\ Music/
File and folder names streamed by for about 30 seconds, and when it was done, iTunes was able to find the original files again. Great!
But, I wasn't satisfied -- I wanted something I could run from within iTunes to fix this when it happens. I decided to fire up Automator and create a little app that would do this for me. Jump to here to download "Find Original Files.app", but to use them you will need to edit the two files within and change some stuff (more on that later). If you'd rather make your own instead of editing my version, here's how:
/Users/(your user here)/Library/iTunes/Scripts. Create that directory if it does not exist. 
Unfortunately, iTunes will not let you run Automator apps or workflows from within it, but thanks to Jason Kacmarski's Apple Discussion response to "How do I get automator scripts into iTunes? Very frustrated" I was able to figure it out: create an AppleScript script to launch the Automator app.
tell application "Finder"
activate
open application file "Find Original Files.app" of folder "Scripts" of folder "iTunes" of folder "Library" of folder "(your user here)" of folder "Users" of startup disk
end tell
3 . Save this to /Users/(your user here)/Library/iTunes/Scripts
Now when you launch iTunes, you should see a little "Script" icon on the menu bar with your application it.
Good luck, and I hope it works for you. Here is a zip file with my version if this little helper app. Unzip the following to /Users/(your user here)/Library/iTunes/Scripts.
Remember: you will need to edit "Find Original Files.app" in Automator and "Find Original Files.scpt" in Script Editor to fix the appropriate directory paths for your particular setup! Also, if you get a Growl error, you will need to install And you might need to install will need to install Growl, too.
Question for you: as of 10:30pm on March 3, 2008, which of the following blog or news posts from today have the most user-sumitted comments?
Maybe you can spot the dark-horse winner here, and maybe you can't. I'll make it a bit more clear: boingboing.net, techcrunch.com, huffingtonpost.com, and icanhascheezburger.com are all in the Technorati Popular top 10 blogs. sfgate.com, on the other hand, is not ranked in the top 10, nor even the 100. Readership-wise, it stands to reason that the vague, 4-sentence article about a horrible road-rage incident in Oakland, CA should not be as commented upon as today's most popular articles from top-10 blogs. So, how did this little local article stand up?
But wait! Here comes the M. Night Shyamalan surprise twist of an ending -- how did today's SFGate's article "State Supreme Court takes up same-sex marriage" do?
635 comments in one day. That's 64 pages of juicy user-submitted content to be ad-targeted, sold, and/or data mined. Internet gold.
SFGate, really? I read SFGate on a regular basis and have gotten into the habit of looking at the article's comment-counts. I'm continually surprised at the amount of user-contributed comments for what is basically the digital version of the printed newspaper. Plus, these are local stories, not reprints of national or international AP articles. Personally I think this is really big. Somehow, someway, "S.F. braces for major health care cuts" (86 comments) got over twice the comments today than celebrity gossip "Lindsay [Lohan] Invites You Into Her Mystical World of Tattoos" (40 comments.) in our celebrity-obsessed world. The same-sex marriage article was written by Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer, not celebri-blogger Michael Arrington or professional pundit and one time California gubernatorial candidate Huffington. Nope: Bob wrote it, and his article probably generated more direct user feedback than any of the other "regular" blog out there today.
(I'm intentionally punting on the Digg issue: sites like digg.com generate massive amounts of user contributed content.)
So what's going on here? What's different? Is it the newspaper? People love the paper. Is it that people are invested local issues? Today's story about local computer programmer Hans Reiser's murder trail has generated 91 comments, up from 86 from 10 minutes ago, and 83 about 10 minutes before that: it's 11:30pm PST time and people are reading the newspaper, then the comments, and adding to the conversation.
And now midnight: 94 comments.
This really fascinates me. People are very invested in this local news site in a way that seems to keep up, if not beat (in the user-generated content game), many niche sites out there that appeal to people's specific passions (read: Long Tail): gadget sites, computer programming humor, hockey, knitting. Maybe that's the answer: it's not different at all -- the San Francisco Bay Area is niche, too. But I suspect that people care more about it than other niches, since those of us that live here can walk outside and see our fellow SFBA-niche enthusiasts walking down the street, eating in restaurants, trying to park, and bitching about MUNI. How many Lindsay Lohan lovers have you spied today?
