I’ve been listening to Raising Sand since I downloaded it. It was an impulse buy at 6 in the morning— looking for something to listen to during a day of writing html form code with jquery. Love T-Bone Burnett’s production and Marc Ribot’s guitar. You may remember Ribot’s stellar work on Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones. Robert Plant and Allison Krauss‘s voices blend beautifully. Particularly impressed with Plant’s ability to sing harmony, and the rhythm work of bass player Dennis Crouch and drummer Jay Bellerose.
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scraps of paper
Microsoft has launched “Healthvault,” a private archive for personal medical data. Google, sans Bosworth, is trying to figure out how to connect people searching for health information with quality results. Both of these are very serious approaches to a serious issue.
I’m wondering if it’s Mahalo that has the right approach. Calacanis is focusing on the top 20,000 searches— which fills the front page of Mahalo with celebrity gossip, gadgets, music, television, movies, etc. Stuff that’s obviously popular. It’s a little like the People Magazine of search. “People” started as a single page in Time Magazine, it was like dessert. Time realized some people like dessert all the time.
Mahalo does some nice “How to” pages, for instance How to speak French, or How to play the Guitar. Mahalo is mostly for searching and finding the fun part of the internet, elective studies. But what about serious things like health? Well there’s more in the Mahalo health category than I would have thought. The Cancer category has decent set of pages. Currently you can search and find information a large number of healthcare topics, from autism to West Nile Virus. The topic of healthcare is particularly suited to Calacanis’s idea of search results shaped by a smart person. When an individual searches for health information, they’re not looking for a list of links. They’re looking for answers.
Note to Jason: let’s see some more “How to” pages in your healthcare category. The concept and format of your SERPs gives you an order of magnitude advantage over Google’s method of delivering information. The key here is the emotional charge of the search. Of course there’s a charge when people search for gossip about their favorite celebrity, but there’s also a very serious emotional charge when you search for information when you, or someone you love, has an illness and you need guidance.
One CommentTravel and airports seem to show up on Twitter all the time. The in-between times that were private moments of boredom and pain become a kind of blues refrain echoing through Twitter and the other microblogging venues.
It’s Dave Winer stuck in the Lone Star State, Jeremy Keith boarding a plane to San Francisco, Hugh Macleod picking up his baggage, or Steve Gillmor interviewing someone walking through an airport terminal. We work in the off hours, and now we transcribe our private moments of boredom and wedge a conversation into walk to the security gate.
Perhaps it’s Ev Williams fault, asking us what we’re doing— when we’re doing something very boring. But because it’s boring, we need an outlet for our pain. Twitter beckons.
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Paul Graham’s essay on “How to do Philosophy” deserves a serious response. And there have been some, here, here, and here. Like many who begin studying philosophy, he’s disappointed that he didn’t find any magical, universal truths. And in reaction plays “gotcha” philosophy, trying to show why the history of philosophy is filled with wrong ideas. He ends up with a combination of early Wittgenstein and Utilitariansim. But this is clearly a geek’s eye view of philosophy. It doesn’t conform, so it must be bent and shaped into a reasonable algorithm. I’d suggest that Graham read more widely in late Wittgenstein and the work of Richard Rorty on Utilitarianism. Philosophy is more often about deepening a question, than the kind of fixed answers he seems to be searching for.
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