Think & Play
Thoughtplay is the creative team behind various popular websites and other projects. At this blog we give away bright ideas regularly, and comment on interesting trends both online and off. The thought channel is for more business-related trends, play looks at entertainment and leisure, and thoughtplay introduces our own creative ideas, as well as news about our projects.
A business pick-me-up | 281106
Celebrated marketing guru Seth Godin is offering his guide for start-up business, The Bootstrapper's Bible for free via ChangeThis for a limited period, until the end of '06.
Categories: thought
RSS: read all about it | 271106
We're keen on RSS feeds at Thoughtplay - and we have our own feed of course (if you're an existing reader, please note the link has changed to enable us to track usage with FeedBurner - the old one still works, but it would be great if you can spare a moment to update it!).
Mainstream awareness of RSS though is disappointingly low (though significant numbers of people get newsfeeds through services such as a Google Personalised without knowing RSS lurks behind it). Interesting services that can help mediate it to people used to older media include Zookoda's RSS to email service, the new FeedCycle which provides preset serialised information feeds (get travel stories, for example, or old Sherlock Holmes tales in regular episodes, regardless of when you subscribe) and the worthy but not-quite-right 'glossy RSS' of Idiomag. We've got some cool RSS ideas of our own - but for another time!
Modern manifestos | 211106
We'd like to recommend ChangeThis - a collection of modern manifestos largely in PDF form. In the collection you'll find Chris Anderson's original article about the long tail of product sales, and a sequel, Hugh MacLeod's encouraging essay on 'how to be creative', and much more. Manifestos are disseminated with Creative Commons licences to encourage the free spread of ideas. Inspiring for business and life alike.
Millionaires again (in a sense) | 141106
We're delighted to announce that our book recommendation site What Should I Read Next?, with its sister film/music recommendation service at ThisOneNext has just had its millionth visit!
Categories: thoughtplay
Medium-tech batteries | 131106
Fresh from a small survey in Wired, in which 67% of respondents suggested batteries are the main technology most in need of an upgrade come two new (or at least improved) developments - water-based and paper-based batteries.
Categories: play
Another image search development | 081106
Further to previous discussion on image searches, there's a new twist in this field from Live.com - as well as offering text-based searching for images, it allows you to upload an image and then looks for common elements in other images (via TechCrunch).
Categories: play
Alternatives ways of analysing web traffic | 071106
One of the perennial problems with web-based businesses is assessing traffic in context. Everyone has their own server logs, but understandably no-one wants to share them. At the moment, most people turn to Alexa or perhaps Ranking.com. But they're limited, and Alexa relies on its Toolbar - downloaded by a self-selecting group, who are all PC users.
These aren't perfect either, but here are two interesting alternatives:
- Socialmeter - this polls popular social bookmarking sites, plus Google and Yahoo, to get a raw number of the number of times people have linked to your site
- Urlfan is a neat idea, too: it analyses thousands of RSS feeds looking for links inside them. Clearly a bit uneven, but a good and growing source.
Categories: thought
Automated job candidate analysis | 061106
Here's a clever if slightly alarming idea: automated CV/resume sorting using Bayesian filtering (try it out here for IT-based jobs).
Categories: thought
Alternative ways of analysing image content | 051106
Image searches on the web are a tricky area: filenames don't always relate to content, and it's hard for computers to identify what they depict. Until now: new research at Penn State University has come up with a software method for recognizing image content. This could be a major breakthrough (if it works).
If you prefer to trust people, there's always Google's crowdsourcing Image Labeler.
Categories: play
The tragicomedy of the commons | 041106
The UK's Institute for Public Policy Research has published a report on copyright policy (see Ars Technica for a good summary).
In brief, it says there are four legislative models for intellectual property available, and encouragingly advocates the third:
- all knowledge is private property (US)
- knowledge is primarily private property, but some has public ownership (UK at present)
- knowledge is public property first, and secondarily a private asset (eg academic research papers)
- knowledge should be entirely a public resource (eg open source software)
Whether the mapping community would agree with this analysis is moot: the US offers its mapping data to the public domain, whereas the Ordnance Survey in the UK is notoriously litigious, and the Royal Mail overprotective of its postcode data.
Projects such as OpenStreetMap and the New Popular Edition Maps are thankfully trying to liberate cartography here too.
Bringing the long tail to retail | 021106
Here at Thoughtplay we've been watching the development of 'electronic ink' products such as the Sony Reader with great interest. But there's something else we've longed for, and now it's here: a book printer small enough to fit in a store. This is great, long tail stuff. It could give small independent bookshops a new lease of life - though the chains will probably beat them to it.
WSIRN/TON monthly update | 011106
Here are the 10 most popular books at What Should I Read Next? (figure in brackets is the number of registered users' lists in which the book appears):
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (2160)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) - J.K. Rowling (1598)
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams (1533)
1984 - George Orwell (1532)
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (1449)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (1431)
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien (1348)
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald (1222)
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell (1174)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) - J.K. Rowling (1054)
Categories: thoughtplay
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