A project i've been working on for the last 4 months is finally ready to go live. The Poetry Archive will launch on the 30th of November (hopefully to much fanfare and applause), allowing access to recordings of poets reading their own work. This includes a historic archive of many hard to find recordings from the past.

Update: It's now live! We had a great launch party at the British Library and recieved coverage on the BBC, the NYTimes and many more local language news papers around the world. Well done all!

1980 has all the games you played as a kid. Space invaders, Pac Man, Kungfu...

In the 9th grade the Pizza place around the corner from my school (Avalon Junior High) used to have a table top version of 1942 (a fighter plane game). My friend Jesse and I would eat peach gummies and play until well after class had started after lunch. Takes me back.

I'm not sure that I need help planning for the holidays, but i'm sure some people will. Giftbox is a service that helps you organise your gift giving.

Keep track of the gifts you've received, Keep track of the gifts you've given to others, Keep track of gift ideas you have for future holidays, Keep track of where/when gifts need to be returned, Compile a wishlist of gifts and email it to your friends and family, Send thank you eCards, Receive reminders of upcoming holidays

It's not a bad idea for a service, I would imagine that they'll be adding gift giving and gift ideas soon. Perhaps a mash up with froogle? or Shopping? or riffs?

I'm not a car person, prefering most of the time to spend my money in other areas. However, if I had the cash the Vanwall GPR V12 might be the Christmas present I would buy for myself. 1950's formula 1 heritage with a modern Jaguar engine and road legal. The craftsmanship is amazing and by all accounts (Topgear) it's a great machine to drive. Yummy.

Shit website though, they should spend a little money on the photography. Although if you've got enough cash to get one, you're likely on the track driving it rather than surfing the webernet.

It's as if everything 1999 is being reinvented with tags and a more integrated social structure. Riffs a new service to vote with your keyboard on millions of products, is similar in many ways to epinions and dooyoo. They do a better job of explaining it.

For the casual riffr:

You'll find ratings of the millions of items in our database, and you can search Riffs by categories or by user-generated tags that match your interests.

For the passionate riffr:

Express your opinions on anything by writing a short riff, or a long review, or just look for things that other riffrs have contributed, and rate and/or comment on what they've written. You can also get personalized music recommendations just by rating a few albums!

Riff on... Music, Books, Movies, Cars, People, Places, Events, TV, Sports, Restaurants, Games, Software, Websites... and anything else.

I've always been a heavy user of opinion sites, perhaps this will be the site to get me to contribute.

Best sandwiches in London. Hands down. Lots of meat, a full ball of fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, rocket and olive oil. HT Harris. If you're interested, i'll let you find it.

Looks like Google is entering the same game as Mint and Measuremap by allowing smaller sites, sub 5 million page views/month access to statistics. However they’re offering it for free…like only Google can.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You'll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliverROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.

I'll be trying it out on folkmann.ca and i'll let you know how it goes.

Update: I've been waiting over two days to see my stats, and this morning Analytics kept kicking me out and back to the google homepage. I've very disapointed and i've just recieved an invite to Measuremap, so I think i'll try that.

Looks like the ecom giant has finally started letting people tag the products in their catalogue. At the moment it's only available to 50% of the Amazon.com audience and isn't available to other countries yet. Kokogiak has a good write up and links to Flickr photos for those that can't see it.

I would imagine that the tags will prove to be an interesting way to find other books, improve Amazon's search and eventually replace any hierarchy in their navigation. However, I can see spammers having a good time with this, Amazon will have to create some tools to deal with this...that or the community will have to self police a la wikipedia.

It also lends itself to serving some dodgy results. For example, I tagged Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell with "fantasy", other items tagged with fantasy included the latest Britney Spears album.

It will be interesting to see how the experiment turns out.

Nice little site by Snickers. A quick game each day that gives quick satisfaction. The games are fun, but the send to a friend method of data collection is a tired. Can't anyone come up with a more clever way to get my details?

Most people have never heard of Web 2.0, let alone many of the companies that call themselves such or use the associated technologies. I'm reminded everyday how few people know (or even care) about the changes that are happening online at the moment. Just this morning, I was talking to my other half about Podcasting, expecting that she'd know what it was. After listening to me ramble for 5 mins on the subject she asks "What's Podcasting?". It's was a good reminder that the vast majority of the web viewing public are still new to these concepts and that knowing who your audience is and what they understand is still as important as it ever was.

If you're unsure if a website falls into the Web 2.0 category, or if you're curious you might want to try this validator. So far folkmann.ca is only a 2/13...so i'm clearly not 2.0 enough.

Simple chrome covered goodness and the must have geek accessory for the holidays.

The "Monstor Drive" by US Modular (2GB) costs about the same as a 512MB flash drive and weighs about half an ounce. It fits in the palm of your hand, but packs enough memory to store more than 600 MP3 songs, over 350 photos or about 30 minutes of MP4 video!

Apparently the drives come in sizes up to 6GB at the moment. Check out the rest of the US Modular products, some great gifts for the geeks in your lives.

Sometimes people are smarter than computers. At least Amazon seems to think so. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is the most interesting thing i've seen in a long time.

Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it.

Truly great products allow industries to grow up around them. The Ipod is obviously one of those products. For example, Pod Star sells covers for your nano, and very nicely designed ones at that. I think it's great that a big company like Apple lets the little guys skirt around the edges of their business, making money and increasing the value of their brand.

Facinating article by ATKearney about department stores and their collective pain in a specialists market.

Traditional department stores are caught in the middle. Once thriving and profitable, many are struggling to compete with hard discounters and high-end specialty shops. So far, these new competitors seem to be winning, with industry analysts ready to sing department stores swan song. After years of teetering on the brink, are department stores doomed to obscurity? Or are they poised for a surprisecomeback?

Some very insightful comments on the future of retail. Is the same thing happening online? I'm not sure. Amazon and Ebay are both similar to department stores and they seem to be the runaway successes. Although, there is still plenty of room for the smaller stores to make large profit in niche markets, and perhaps erode the base of customers that the "online department stores" have created.

Early days, we'll just have to wait and see.

Suprglu, holding all of your web applications together. Do you use, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Blogger or 43things? Now you can get all of your feeds from any of these applications all in one place, and you'll eventuallybe able to publish the list as one big RSS feed.

SuprGlu is about bringing the pieces of your web content together into one central place for you, your friends, and maybe even your friends to-be.

With the advent of so many fun to use applications, it is a shame for us to not use them. So keeping that in mind, what would be even better is to blog them.

I've registered and i'm not yet sure how this will fit into my consumption of media. At the moment I use my.yahoo.com to manage my RSS feeds (although i'm probably going to switch as it's starting to burst), and I use each other service individually.

It's an interesting concept, however i'm not sure the model has been completely worked through. Would I add all my feeds to this? or just my own content? Is having content all jumbled together better than other navigational methods, or the viewing habits i've developed? How is this different from including all of my other content as links from my blog, or importing the RSS directly into folkmann.ca?

Suprglu, I need reasons to believe. If you're listening, i'd love to hear some...i want to be convinced. [tip:Francois]

Update: jfolkmann.suprglu.com

If you're a podcaster, you may want to take a look at Fruitcast. They've created a service that puts ads into your podcasts so that you can make money, much like what Adsense does for websites. They say:

Want to earn income from your labor of love? Putting ads on your podcast is now as easy as signing up for an account and changing the URL of your podcast's RSS feed.

If you don't know what podcasting is, wikipedia has a good entry.

My family has been bugging me to watch Rome for some time now and tonight was the first episode on BBC 2. (If you want spoilers visit the HBO site, as they're 11 episodes ahead of the BBC.)

A co-production between HBO and the BBC, Rome brings together the Emmy award-winning producers of series Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, with the BBC's worldwide reputation for period dramas. Launched earlier in the year on HBO in the US, Rome now comes to BBC TWO.

I have to say, i'm quite impressed. However, between this and Lost my Wednesdays are going to be completely shot.

Update: Techcrunch has a full write up.

Looks like the sleeping giant has finally woken up. Microsoft has just launched Windows Live, taking a first step into the feed arena among other things. They've also said that they're also going to add a bunch of other online services, to faciliate project management, expense reports and billing. Michale Arrington at CrunchNotes has live blogged the launch event for your enjoyment.

This looks like the beginning of Microsofts foray into software as services, it'll be interesting to see the battle between Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft over the coming months. For the customer this can only be a good thing, more competition brings interesting services (at least for now).

Communicate early and often. (And when you’ve got to tell people they have to keep waiting, make them feel good about it.)

An excellent example is the following message I received this morning from Measure Map (blog metrics).

Hey, remember when you signed up for an invitation at Measure Map? We wanted to let you know that we haven't forgotten about that. We've got a nice healthy list of folks waiting to get in, and we've just started sending out our first few invites - we hope to get everyone into the service in the next few weeks.

Just wanted you to know that we're still holding a spot for you.

I’m glad the Adaptive Path team (the company behind the service) has taken their own user experience advice when it comes to customer service. Let’s hope that the end product is as good as their communication skills. I’m sure there will be plenty of reviews soon enough.