yahoo my web 2.0

checkout waxy's post on yahoo's "my web 2.0", and give it a spin if you have a chance. very interesting shit.

similarly, i just tried out yahoo 360. cool service, too bad it's kinda late to the table.

all this convergence on yahoo makes me wish that i was already using yahoo's services to handle my digital needs...unfortunately, i have everything spread out on different services (del.icio.us, friendster, gmail, etc...), and it seems too late for me to migrate everything.

(pic is of a very confusing sign on cuthbert and 18th)

Technorati Tags: yahoo, web20, web2.0, search, social, software, networks, yasn, digital, lifestyle, aggregator, dla, convergence

testing blogger images part deux

same drill as before...let me know if you can see the crap properly in you aggregator of choice.
thanks for helping a brotha out.

blockquote test...
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
laskdfjlskdfj
lskdjffffff fsdf slkdf sldkf

testing blogger images

testing blogger images...
please let me know via comments whether or not you can see the photo in bloglines/rojo/etc...

(pic is of a tagged up uhaul truck at the uhaul storage center in south philly)

sparkline generating webservice

via xml.com: joe gregorio made a sparkline generating webapp. pretty cool...

Technorati Tags: sparklines, tufte, webapps, ui, information, presentation

china more popular than the u.s.

WOW. talk about a turn of events. it's funny how things work out, isn't it? just a few years ago, china used to wear z. cavaricci's and zubaz even though they were 'so 2 decades ago', but now, china's fingering amber cooper (captain of the cheerleading squad) in his camaro every day after lunch.

America's image is still so tattered abroad after the Iraq war that China is viewed more favourably than the US in many countries, a global poll finds.
[...]
In most countries surveyed, Americans are seen as "inventive" and "hardworking", but they are also seen by many in both Western and predominately Muslim countries as "violent" and "greedy" - a judgement with which many Americans agree.

The survey was conducted among nearly 17,000 people from 20 April to 31 May with samples of about 1,000 in most countries, with more interviews in India and China and slightly fewer than 1,000 in the European countries.

(pic is of the urinals in the downstairs bathroom of the philadelphia racquet club. even the urinals there have an air of arrogance.)

Technorati Tags: survey, popularity, china, america, safety, war, iraq, global, perception

love will tear us apart

by way of hypemachine: a tuvan-throat-singing-cover of joy division's 'love will tear us apart'...originally pointed to by rummage through the crevices.

the artists' website.
amazon page for their album.

(pic is one segment of a larger chalk drawing that was outside of uniq, walnut btwn. 15th and 16th or something like that).

Technorati Tags: music, covers, tuvan, throat, singing, joy, division, love, songs

housing prices

via unicast: an interesting economist article on the housing boom (check out the rent ratio graph):

According to estimates by The Economist, the total value of residential property in developed economies rose by more than $30 trillion over the past five years, to over $70 trillion, an increase equivalent to 100% of those countries' combined GDPs. Not only does this dwarf any previous house-price boom, it is larger than the global stockmarket bubble in the late 1990s (an increase over five years of 80% of GDP) or America's stockmarket bubble in the late 1920s (55% of GDP). In other words, it looks like the biggest bubble in history. [ed: nigga whhaaaaaa?!]
[...]
The most compelling evidence that home prices are over-valued in many countries is the diverging relationship between house prices and rents. The ratio of prices to rents is a sort of price/earnings ratio for the housing market...

Calculations by The Economist show that house prices have hit record levels in relation to rents in America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland and Belgium. This suggests that homes are even more over-valued than at previous peaks, from which prices typically fell in real terms. House prices are also at record levels in relation to incomes in these nine countries.

the article also says that the market has cooled off in australia, britain, ireland, the netherlands, and new zealand...prices in japan and germany have outright dropped.

(picture is self-explanatory. locust between 15th and 16th)

Technorati Tags: econ, economics, global, economy, housing, prices, bubble

hubmed tags

alf eaton has added a bunch of cool features to hubmed's tagging service. most interestingly, eaton implements what i guess should be considered 'structured-tagging'...that is, a class of tags is imbued with semantic meaning and hubmed provides an interface to interact with these specially tagged items: by prefixing a tag with "list:", one can create a re-orderable set of categorized links (like much of hubmed, the reordering interface is nice and dhtmly).

i think it would also be cool to have a set of structured tags for project management: i'm often juggling multiple projects, each of which relies on a set of articles. having an interface for dealing with a set of information tagged with "for:[project_name]" and/or "priority:[priority_level]" might be useful.

the rdf-like treatment of annotations is also very interesting...i'll definitely be keeping on eye on that...

(pic is of a label stuck on the bridge btwn. 20th and 30th streets on jfk.)