October 2011
24 posts
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WatchA physical interface for controlling real-time speech synthesis. I want to play a video game that takes advantage of this technology. (via Language Log » MAGE pHTS)
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Using A/B testing to find story ideas
Andy Boyle:
First, you set up advertisements for a certain area of coverage. […] Then you send those ads to a landing page or article you’ve already written about said topic.
You can then see how many people clicked through the ads, what the bounce rate was, how long they stayed on the article/landing page […] and whether or not they explored more of your website. Then you can...
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Reading @everyword →
So @everyword (a little Twitter bot project of mine to tweet every word in the English language) was written up on Gawker last Friday. This is an essay I wrote in response to some of the reactions the project has been getting.
WatchOpen source graffiti printer from Graffiti Research Lab France. (via CreativeApplications.Net)
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“Twitter’s appeal to researchers is its immediacy — and its immensity. Instead of...”
– Ben Zimmer in Twitterology - A New Science? Check this post at Language Log for links to relevant projects.
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“Surrounding this chain are about 70 word frequency histograms showing the...”
– Jer Thorpe on 138 Years of Popular Science (previously). I’m not generally a big fan of word frequency visualizations, but this one works. I like that Thorpe hand-picked the words to include, and that he didn’t intentionally exclude whimsical results.
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Findings
Steven Johnson on Findings:
“[B]ecause we are focused on quotations, we have built a number of smart systems that pull metadata from the sources, which allows you to seamlessly organize your quotes around authors and titles and sources (and other organizational schemes we are going to dream up in the months ahead.) And the social component means you can do the kind of “searching someone...
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“First, you’re just a short hop from one of our major transit hubs, Union...”
– Mayor Bloomberg’s review of the Yelp offices—on Yelp. Yelp New York - Union Square - Manhattan, NY
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What is big writing?
Or, what am I doing with this blog? A fine question!
Since Google Reader is cutting its social features, I need somewhere to post all of the interesting text- and language-related stuff that I come across on the Internet. Most of that stuff falls into a genre I call “big writing” (loosely analogous to “big games”)—projects, pieces, installations, poems, and websites that...
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