Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

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E-Commerce Shopping Sites

November 27, 2006 / / 4 Comments

Not that I’m encouraging anyone to spend more money this season, but if you’re interested, Larry Chase sent out a list of interesting of shopping sites that you might want to check out. I think I’ve written about some of this before, but here are the highlights:

FruCall –  One quick call tells you if an online price beats the store price. “Frucall not only reads back the best online prices to you, but it also allows you to buy items directly from online merchants while you’re on the phone!”

CyberMonday – Shop.org set up this site to show all the various deals online today.

Dealcatcher – Comprehensive list of online and offline deals.

Like.com – A shopping search engine.  This is an interesting concept that captures photos of celebrities and allows you to search fashion items they are wearing and find similar items for sale.

Shop Local – Find all the deals in your neck o’ the woods.

Pronto – Named “”Best Online Price Comparison Site” in 2006 by Kiplinger’s, this site searches product reviews to create an overall product rating and then it connects you to various online merchants.

ThisNext – This a social shopping site that lets you connect with like-minded to find their recommendations on specific products.

Kaboodle – Another social shopping site that lets you organize your wish lists from various sites on the web.

Bidnearby – Find the closest ebay auctions to your zip code area and save or avoid shipping.

Google Checkout – It’s growing.

AARP Rocks the House

November 27, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Move over Bill Graham, looks like latest greatest concert promoter could be the AARP! Apparantly the teen set are not the biggest market of music consumers. Instead, the RIAA suggests that the 45 and older group in the biggest, most reliable music consumer sgement. According to the NYT, “Last year fans 45 and older accounted for 25.5 percent of sales, while older teenagers (a group more prone to music piracy) represented less than 12 percent.”

Watching the growing graying trend in music appreciation, AARP promoted a Tony Bennet tour and may begin a whole series of promotions and other iniatives to target this group for potential AARP members.

This may have some interesting implications for other developments online including the future of online social networks. I still expect a hybrid to develop of online/offline networking groups that relate to the older groups. We’ll see.

What do your E-mail Sign-offs say?

November 27, 2006 / / 0 Comments

NYT runs an interesting article today about the challenge of Netiquette in regards to e-mail sign-offs. It may be a bigger deal than you think:

What’s in an e-mail sign-off? A lot, apparently. Those final few words above your name are where relationships and hierarchies are established, and where what is written in the body of the message can be clarified or undermined.

Without the typical non-verbal contextualizers like tone of voice and facial/body gestures, e-mails for us to look for other signs that help contextualize and interpret the message.

“So many people are not clear communicators,” said Judith Kallos, creator of NetManners.com, a site dedicated to online etiquette, and author of “Because Netiquette Matters.” To be clear about what an e-mail message is trying to say, and about what is implied as well as what is stated, “the reader is left looking at everything from the greeting to the closing for clues,” she said.

Makes me think of I.A. Richards ideas on word meaning and word placement. According to NYT, ending an e-mail with “Best” is a clear indicator your cooling down the relationship (bordering on brush off) while “Warmest regards” is a positive move toward relationship.

Maybe we could simply stick with the cold and hot words:

Icely yours,
Frozen,
Windy but hopeful for sun,

vs.

Blazing,
Volcanicly yours,
Hunk a hunk a hunk o burning love,

I guess I better go take a look at the way I am signing off on my emails.

Your smoldering inferno,

Doug

American Popular Culture

November 16, 2006 / / 0 Comments

While trying to find out some words related to treasure chest, I stumbled across an old Catholic comic book series and eventually ended up at the Authentic American History Center. This site provides a fascinating collection of American pop culture artifacts that reach all the way back to the revolution.

There are pamphlets, comics, images and audio files from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, early 1900s, WWI, WWII, and each decade up to the present. The topic range from religion to politics to other elements that captured the national  consciousness.

Way cool! Plus the Catholic comic book Treasure Chest was pretty interesting as well.

Limits of Time and Space

November 15, 2006 / / 1 Comment

I put up a new reflection on Floydville. Here’s an excerpt if anyone is interested:

Despite my best efforts, nothing happened. I ran. I jumped. I even flapped
my arms. Nothing. No matter how hard I tried, I failed. After dreaming again
and again and again that I could fly, I almost convinced myself it was
possible. Sitting in church, I’d visualize myself hovering above the room,
encircling the congregation and soaring up into the sky. Then the sermon
would end, and I would realize that I was the one preaching!

A couple weeks ago while sitting in a large hall at a business conference in
Chicago, I gazed up at the ornate ceiling. The old sense of flying returned.
Ah, this looked like the perfect room to let my imagination soar. Suddenly
my mind flashed with light and I discovered this profound insight: I cannot
fly.

No matter how hard I wish, no matter how hard I flap my arms, this body is
not going to start floating. Catching my breath from this overwhelming
illumination, I wondered where does this desire to fly come from? While
there are many reasons why other people and myself dream of flying, one
reason stands out in the moment: the desire to fly can sometimes be a desire
to escape the limits of the material world.

The gift of this physical world comes with a variety of limitations. We
cannot stare at the sun. We cannot breathe underwater. We cannot walk
through walls. We cannot fly. By virtue of affirming the realness of the
world around me, I must accept the limits of this same wondrous world.
Limitations play an essential part in the game of life.

Read more.

Bobi Jones

November 15, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Here is a little poem from one of my favorite Welsh poets, Bobi Jones. Hopefully this will suffice in lieu of a good quote for the day. And I must also offer tribute to Joseph Clancy for the translation (as translation is an integral part of the poetic art).

The Middle Aged Poet

The child has dried up; his play and his sweat have died
His dance has shrivelled, besieged by bloated limbs,
And his leg’s sprightliness has grown bitter. I wonder whether
The muse can restore it in her swaddlings? Yes. Though finger
And thumb and ankle rot, praise will surely escape from their pit
By night, and make metre of the corruption: angels of mirth
Will still chat in the joints of the Poem. I bear within me
The innocents’ cheerful graveyard; an occasional night
Invites the remains of me to creep secretly out
To the early-patterned white leaves, and I dance a cradle’s questions
Through them, rhymes’ curiosity, till the dawn;
Then heavily, stooped, sad, in a magic procession,
Like lamentations that ventured out freely
For a time, they muster back to my silent daily ageing.

Is the term Social Networking accurate?

November 15, 2006 / / 2 Comments

Phil Balderson recently suggested that social networking may not be the best term for the various functions that connect media, people, or ideas in different ways. When I asked what term might replace it, Phil suggested the idea of “meshing.” Playing off the idea of “mashups,” Phil suggests three reasons for meshing:

1. Individuals without prior relationships can mesh.

2. Society is meshing with technology (via Web 2.0).

3. Something new emerges as technologies, people, and sites mesh together.

I am my own social network

November 14, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Skimming through the backlog of emails and feeds, I discovered this earth-shattering news: my brain is a social network: no wonder I hear voices all day long. Roland Piquepaille ran a piece about this last month on ZDNet. Looks pretty interesting. Our brains seem to have something like gates that can open and close, allowing information to pass through or not. For a range of articles along these lines, see this issue of Science and be sure to check out all the PDFs at the bottom of the article.

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