booktwo.org

Back in January, I was approached by Art Public and asked to build an application and website as part of their Bus-Tops project. This has just gone live over at http://bus-tops.com/shelters/, so it seems like a good time to talk about the project.

Bus-Tops is part of the Cultural Olympiad, and benefited from a grant from Artists Taking The Lead, a nationwide series of arts projects sponsored by the Arts Council and London 2012. In short, we’re putting screens on the top of bus stops across London, and we’re going to let people play with them….

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This post is going to talk about sex quite a lot. I’m going to assume you’re all OK with that.

For me, technology, literature and sex are all bound up together, and this entanglement can be traced back to a single book: JC Herz’s Surfing on the Internet (Little, Brown; 1994). An exploration of the early net, a travelogue, an explicator of MUDs and MOOs, of chatrooms and founding memes; what was still, then, the Information Superhighway. I read the book in, I think, 1995. Within a month, I had a 28.8 modem and a Compuserve account. It’s probably impossible…

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I should have mentioned this earlier, but I am joining the shadowy forces behind CoverSpyLondon for one week only.

If you have any tube book sightings, please follow @coverspylondon and send us a direct message.

I thank you.

Back in March, I launched a little site called Quietube, which is basically a little bookmarklet allowing you to watch YouTube videos without all the comments, ads and so on (original booktwo post is here).

Well, it turned out to be very popular, currently edging towards two million views, with a daily average of 10 to 20 thousand visits. These are not small numbers.

However, looking at the logs, it became clear that these visits were coming from unexpected sources. The vast majority of visits are from the Gulf region. A few weeks ago (a fairly typical…

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In case you don’t read Times Emit (which you obviously should), Apt just released a fun little literary app onto the web that I designed and built: The Book Seer. I wrote about it over at TE (and had a bit of a rant about book data):

It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from Amazon and LibraryThing – at the moment. I’d like to pull stuff from more places, but it’s not easy.

…

Book data is hard, but it shouldn’t be. It’s also valuable, and that’s why Amazon ranks higher than most publishers for

…

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A quick heads-up on a little Apt project I haven’t talked about properly before. We got bored with all the comments and crud on YouTube, so we built Quietube – think of it as Readability for your favourite videos.

A little bookmarklet lets you easily and quickly generate a nice, clean page – and a short URL from any YouTube page. Check it out. If it all seems a bit confusing, here’s a quick tutorial:

[Original post at Times Emit]

It’s rare that I out-and-out praise a service, particularly here, but if you’re running any kind of customer-facing service on the web I can’t recommend Get Satisfaction highly enough. In fact, if you’re not using it, you’re doing it wrong: it’s up there in a select set of absolutely essential tools like Google Analytics, Feedburner and Campaign Monitor (or equivalents, but they’re my picks) that should be set up and running for your project / website / shop before they launch.

Get Satisfaction is “people-powered customer service” that provides a trackable single point of contact,…

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I’m very pleased to announce that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a collaboration between my employer Apt and The Institute for the Future of the Book, is now live.

Several months ago we heard that the Institute was setting up in the UK, and we approached Chris Meade with a view to working with if:book London on a joint project. The result of this was the realisation of a long-cherished idea from Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute. Bob had recently reread Doris Lessing’s classic novel The Golden Notebook, and wanted to bring it…

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I’m pleased to tell you that bkkeepr, my project to create a Last.fm-alike for reading (and more besides) now has an API.

An Application Programming Interface (API) is essentially a machine-readable version of an application, and more specifically, the data in contains. bkkeepr is first and foremost an application that does stuff with data, and bkkeepr.com is the human-readable version of that application. What an API does is allow third parties to build small applications, widgets and so on that utilise that data in new and different ways. (This is another post, but I pretty much…

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Just a quick note to say that, after a long hiatus, one of my favourite pieces of data visualisation is back*: LibraryThing’s Tag Mirror.

The Tag Mirror shows what everyone on LT thinks about your books. And what lovely runs of expression! “drama drugs dystopia economics elephants”. “postmodern programming prostitution psychiatry”. Oh my!

The data crunching involved makes my head hurt, but as someone who doesn’t bother to tag my own books, it’s a wonderful sight to behold, and a great start for reading explorations. Cheers Tim!

* Actually, it looks like it’s been back for a couple…

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