J’s Notes

The understated emphasis of the greatness of Jay.

Category: interesting

Interesting Stuff Outta Google Labs

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Google News Timeline
Google Similar Images watch da vinci code in HD

The Numbers Behind The Numbers

Mike Arauz asks if you’re counting the numbers behind the numbers:
What is the ratio of fan activity on your Facebook page compared to the total number of fans? (Is the community alive?)
What is the ratio of subscribers to your YouTube channel compared to the total number of video views or channel views? (Is you content [...]

Waldo Jaquith: A history of Three Chopt Road

Waldo has an interesting find off of VDOT’s website: a 1976 report “The Route of the Three Notch’d Road: A Preliminary Report”. From the Abstract:
Of the many colonial roads constructed during the eighteenth century as settlement moved across Piedmont and Southside Virginia, a few have remained virtually intact and in service as state roads over [...]

VCU Circa 1977

Interesting videos of the VCU area from around 1977 as shot by late art professor Glenn Hamm
VCU Part One
VCU Part Two

LoC On Crowdsourcing Images

The Library Of Congress has released its report on it’s program to release thousands of images via Flickr to see what information doing so would generate.  The results look great.

Nobody Cares About Alaska

StateStats is an interesting little toy that shows the popularity of a Google search query by state.  It’s interesting, though what value the data may have beyond that I don’t know.
Searching “Alaska” makes me sad for the state.
UPDATE: West Virginia loves your mom.
UPDATE 2: Comparing “walmart” and “god”
Walmart

Obesity    0.67 (Positive, moderate)
InfantMortality    0.64 (Positive, moderate)
VotedForBush    0.59 [...]

Who’s Sick?

Google now makes it easier for you to watch the wave of influenza spread across America this flu season!

Harper’s Olive Editions

Today I picked up a copy of Milan Kundera’s “Unbearable Lightness Of Being” after seeing it on display with a couple other books that make up Harper’s new Olive Editions.  These are sharply designed $10 novels including Kundera’s work, Michael Chabon’s “The Mysteries Of Pittsburg” and Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated”.  While I already [...]

Old Googling

In celebration of it’s 10th birthday, Google has released a way for you to search their database as it was in 2001.  The FAQ answers many questions like, “why 2001 instead of 1998?” and “who put the bop in bop shu bop she bop?”.

The Sweet Spot Of The Long Tail

Kevin Kelly: 1,000 True Fans

Is The Internet Making Us Better Informed Or More Partisan?

This was debated by “Matt Bai of The New York Times, Garrett Graff of Washingtonian Magazine (and Howard Dean’s first political webmaster), and Joe Trippi, who ran Dean’s campaign”:
But the three did not agree with one another and sometimes with themselves about whether the Net is making us more partisan (”echo chambers”) or better informed. [...]

Raising Kaine Supports War For Oil

Lowell Feld thinks that America needs to go to war against Russia for oil and regional stability:
In all seriousness, though, the sad fact is that the United States of America - bogged down in the Iraqi “double strategic mousetrap” (as Jim Webb calls it) - is completely powerless to stop Russia from invading an [...]

Price Of Gas Adjusted For Inflation

Interesting to see and probably better visualizes thing than my Oil Vs. Dollar graph.

Bloggers Win A Lot Of Lawsuits

In an article concerning insurance and blogging, Christopher Boggs tosses out an interesting bit of information concerning lawsuits against bloggers:
Nearly 77 percent of ALL civil cases were found in favor of the blogger or saw the charges dropped by the plaintiff. And 92 percent of blog-related suits making it to trial end in blogger triumph [...]

Left-Right Ideology

Red State, Blue State has some interesting graphs of the ideology of voters compared to Congressmen and Senators: