Evolving Web

HowTo: Using HitTail

"We are a suggestions engine!" - Everyone at HitTail.

HitTail is working hard to differentiate between being a suggestions engine and an analytical tool.  Yesterday I wrote about 103 Bees and how I have used them to write some successful blog posts.

As I mentioned in that article, blogs have little value if people hit the post a lot during its first three days of life and then never come back again.  HitTail is specifically designed to help you write blog posts with long term search staying power.

In their very clever, concise and easy to grok demo, HitTail shows that long term value in a web site comes from natural search hits - ones that come without you having to buy ads.

I would go one step further to say that natural search is successful because it retains its relevance to the searcher.  However, in addition to this, it also has to be findable. 

This is where HitTail comes in.  They scour your existing search strings and suggest a load of ones you may wish to write posts about.

Note that these posts aren't designed to get huge number of hits a day, like my torrent post - but rather to get a consistent stream of hits every day forever and ever, like my review of Nancy Pelozi's book Sneaking Into the Flying Circus, which is often used in college courses and every fall I get a flurry of natural search results.  

So here's the meat of the HitTail experience, the Suggestions Page:

First off, the seedy underbelly of the Internet and the nature of natural search is obvious here.  My blog is generally about community, conversation, and technology.   Sharing my wife and real incest likely isn't going to make my top list of things to write about.   However, good suggestions here are:

1. Wayfinding in the subway
2. Find torrents
3. Hong Kong Nan Lian Garden
4. Theory Cities Hong Kong
5. Octopus Children Hong Kong

Also, I've been systematically reading all of Philip K. Dick's books so that also makes for a good potential title.

So I've clicked to move the grayed ones to my "To Do List" and I've clicked to Delete the remaining ones.

This gives me a To Do list.

Now, let's say I want to learn more about my natural searches just from Hong Kong.  I like the suggestions from HitTail, but I'd like to see the whole range of natural searches and see if I can get more insight into their context.

So I go to the Keywords tab, which lets me see a little:

This still isn't quite enough to tell me what I need to know.  But the HitTail people are wonderful!  And they've given you the 'Excel" button.  You hit it and you get all your search terms during your association with HitTail.

So you get a good long list of search phrases, which are a mishmash as diverse as the needs of all humanity:

As you can see, there are posts searching for things that are obviously me like "J. LeRoy Music" and "Jim Benson Vivian Blog", and things that have nothing to do with anything like Hester Blumenthal Recipe (likely found by a mix of some recipe and a review of Syd Blumenthal's book.)

But I'm here to find specific information about Hong Kong. To make this simple, I'll just look at ones with Hong Kong or wayfinding in them. 

 

So here we get a bit of depth.  We see that food is rather deep and that, in general, people are interested in getting around and eating in Hong Kong.  This is great information.  I already have a wayfinding in Hong Kong (with emphasis on signage) post. 

"Octopus Children Hong Kong" as a post title could result in a number of posts.  From all of this, I would go for a post of what it's like to be a kid in Hong Kong today.  How you navigate the subway, get around, eat with family and use your Octopus card.  This is really interesting because I did have a few conversations with kids in HK about these things.

The Suggestions from HitTail are basically statistical extensions of my existing posts.  They assume that the search strings that people use to get to your site are both indicative of your content and the desires of those who are arriving at your site.  HitTail's tools show various combinations of words in some type of relevant context. 

They also understand that the HitTail engine is not always successful.  So it lets you pick the best, discard the rest.  It also lets you investigate the context of the recommendations to give them more depth.

After that, it's up to you to actually write something useful.

Technorati tags: HitTail, HowTo, analytics, suggestions, blogging

Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington

Moving From Fiji to Vienna

Microsoft's upcoming releases for improvements to Vista are called Fiji and Vienna.   The feature sets for the releases highlight my issues with Microsoft's OS group's development.  They are huge feature sets that must be applied (and completed) all at the same time. 

James Kyton says:

And that is why Microsoft is planning a “Vista R2″, codename ‘Fiji’. From what little information is available we know that this will be a minor release sometime in 2008.

Windows Fiji
-The UI will be updated with things that were originally promised for Vista, along with a more powerful sidebar, which will be more than just a dock for widgets (a.k.a. gadgets)

-.Net Framework will be updated to 3.5 (or maybe even 4)

-WinFS will be applied over NTFS to give us Virtual Folders (or maybe just Saved Searches)

-All bundled application will be updated to newer versions

-Tighter integration with Windows Live. Probably through ‘Codename Nemo’, a media center application thats integrated with Messenger, Spaces, and probably lots of other Windows Live Services.

- We might see Monaco, a music authoring tool, similar to Apple’s Garageband.

- Default playback of HD-DVD (maybe even Blu-ray), Vista currently identifies these disks but cannot play them without an external decoder.

-A more advanced Speech Recognition

-NGSCB will be implemented to make the system more secure.

-New themes, icons, wallpapers, games, and minor tweaks to almost everything.

Why is it necessary to wait until "2008" for this?  Why do these need to come as one release?

Kyton says:

Although Fiji doesn’t sound too exciting yet, new features are bound to be added. Still, it might just be a way to keep us quiet while they work on Vienna.

If you want to "keep us quiet" then make these available when they are complete individually.  Don't make me wait for Monaco (which will likely be the MS Publisher of music software), before you give me NGSCB.

Also, don't force me to eat your Monaco in order to get other updates.

I pray every day that with Vienna, Microsoft takes more of a Linux approach and gives me options for what I do and do not choose to update my machine with.

Lastly, I want to briefly discuss this quote from James Kyton:

Windows Vista is a huge improvement over previous versions, and has many great features that makes it a must have (despite what many might say).

When Windows XP came out, both Windows 98 and Windows ME were utterly unusable.  XP has some minor annoyances and is certainly no OSX, but it is stable for a MS desktop OS.

Vista certainly has impressive features - but I'm not convinced that it's vital to my survival to take the risk of upgrading.  I run a lot of software and upgrading is scary.  I am reasonably sure that I will upgrade at some point - but I'll wait until I get a new laptop.

Technorati tags: Vista, Fiji, vienna, microsoft, modular, component architecture

Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington

HowTo: Use 103 Bees

(if you are looking for Torrents go here)

I've mentioned in a few posts that I've been using 103Bees to better understand my blog visitor traffic.  The tool's home page asserts you can mine traffic for more relevant content and better advertising results.  These things are very important for e-commerce sites, but I'm not sure they are important to me.

What is important is this specific benefit:

Generate ideas: spend some of your time doing customer intelligence and get ideas for new content

For me, 103Bees gives me deep insight into how people are arriving at this blog by happy accident.  From those happy accidents I see what people most search for (and somehow find my pages) and a bizarre splatter gun effect of my previous posts.  What emerges is almost a Bill Burroughsesque cut-up of keywords from my blog and a swarm-vote of ones that resonate with the public.

Sound weird, we'll I've got screenshots to prove it.

Now, from the 103Bees Traffic Summary, we can see that I currently get just a small percentage of overall traffic from search engines.  (Search engine traffic is in yellow).

Part of the reason for this is that recently I wrote an article on searching for Torrents which was picked up by a few torrent sites and bloggers and that made direct referral traffic very high.    I wrote that article based on my research here on 103Bees.

In the tagcloud below we see that Torrent is very very popular, lots of people are searching for "Torrent" as part of their search string and finding Evolving Web.

Now, if I were to just follow the tag cloud, I'd write a long post about a Hong Kong MySpace Torrent that kills people.

This expresses the dominance of torrents in search, but doesn't establish any relevance or context.  In order to use these words effectively, we have to understand their value to those doing the searches.

To do this, we switch 103Bees from cloud view to the default list view and we get some extra functions.  We can see other keywords related to the keywords, search phrases from which they came, remind ourselves that we want to do something with that keyword or stop that keyword from showing up in the analysis.  (I have long since stopped words like that, the & and.)

So for Torrent we see related keywords:

and search phrases:

This last one is the most telling.  While "Torrent" as a keyword is highly popular, actual specific searches for "torrent" cover a very wide field with the top only having 4 hits in the last month.

And if we compare this using 103Bee's Top Search terms feature, we see torrent as part of a specific search phrase shows up as low as sixth place, edged out by myself and flying cars:

So we understand that "Torrent", while it brings people to my site more than any other keyword, has a diffuse membership.  So if I had a post that said "torrent torrent torrent", that wouldn't have much effect.

What was clear though was that people were coming to my site searching for specific torrents.  Even Jared Diamond ones!  So I wrote a post telling people that there were other tools for them to use and I did a quick review of those sites. 

Previous torrent traffic came and went quickly because the post that Google was directing them too just discussed the legal and political issues surrounding torrents.  Now, they come, get useful information, and leave. 

"Kill MySpace" ends up being the most relevant and thankfully most popular search term for the content found on my site.  Hong Kong coming in second when you look at the search strings.  (Those included things like Hong Kong Food, Hong Kong Signage and Hong Kong Guide).

Lastly we go and analyze the shape of our long tail.  Here's mine:

When you look, you see I have a very very long tail.  95% of the search terms used to find my site were only used once.  (Note that I've only been using 103Bees for a month, when I've been in the system for a few more, I'll revisit the tail and the site.  Bees is a tool that will get better with age.)

Without something like 103Bees which helps me organize and analyze my search terms, I would never know why - exactly people were coming.

This is all very important to me because tools like Digg or news sites like Techmeme provide great immediate traffic - but rather dismal continuing traffic.  I've been increasingly concerned about the disposable nature of blog writing.  People read it and forget it.

Tools like 103Bees not only allow you to increase traffic for the sake of increasing traffic - but more importantly go guide you toward writing that will have permanent value and long lasting appeal. 

Technorati tags: 103bees, analytics, permanence, relevance, context

Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington

No Bugeye Request

Dave Fisher objected to my silly picture of myself in the Demonstrative post.  Although, I thought it was a picture of me being demonstrative. 

So I provide a picture of me not being silly.  This was a picture of me negotiating with the house painter.

I am not being silly here.

This is not as silly, but strangely almost the exact same pose at the ocean, later that same day.

 

 

 

Lastly, here I am, not being silly at the office.

I believe this is critical non-silly mass. 

Free Services Are Unaccountable Stewards

Is your information important to you?   Your email?  Your contacts?  Your conversation histories?

GMail, Yahoo!Mail, Hotmail, and other free web-based email services are free.  They also are contentious.  Being so, they don't save secret copies of your email.

This week, Google had a glitch and it nuked the email of about 60 Gmail account holders. 

Here's Google's note to Techcrunch, explaining the issue:

We saw your post today about Gmail and wanted to let you know what was going on.

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have.

We know how important Gmail is to our users – we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

In the Web 2.0 world, we put a lot of our important information in the hands of benevolent strangers.  They operate according to the whims of funding, bugs, advertisers, worms, security holes, and the Department of Homeland Security (or local equivalent).

At any time, your personal information is at risk when using these systems.  It's up to you to measure that level of risk.

I use typepad because I can download an OPML file of my blog at any time and save it.  I try to do this quarterly.

Typepad and SixApart are bang-up people, I truly trust them.  But Fate ... well, she's a different girl altogether.  And even with backups, Typepad has been known to lose a day or two there.  Not because they are negligent or stupid - but because that's how computers work.

Some things I have to just trust.  My del.icio.us information or my network in LinkedIn are entirely unprotected from loss.  And I rely on them.

When Ed Vielmetti's laptop broke in October, he arrived at my doorstep heavy in a state of withdrawal.  I loaned him one of my laptops and watched the life seep back into him.  The color returned to his face, he stopped hyperventilating ... but that was just net access.  (Slight exaggerations, mine.)

One of the things Ed told me he was most reliant on was his del.icio.us links.  What if someone developed a del.icio.us worm that ate the whole database?  Or even just Ed's account?  For Ed, Ed's account is really important.

In the terms of service, no one promises to save your data from harm - ever.  So, don't blame Gmail if you lose your vital information.  You choose your level of risk.

Technorati tags: gmail, google, yahoo, risk, data loss, backing up, responsibility, ed Vielmetti

Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington

Image borrowed from DnDAdventure.

Eating Through the Holidays

So I went to Hong Kong over Thanksgiving and ate myself into oblivion.  Then I flew back and, to make up for all the eating I did in HK, I ... ate a lot more.

I will note that there are many more photos and different descriptive text on a nice slideshow on my Picassa web album.

From Christmas Eat...

For Christmas eve dinner we went out and got a lobster about the size of my wife.  Here she is happy to show you all about it.   We steamed it and then split it, finishing it off by baking it with shallot butter.

From Christmas Eat...

Here it is ready to be split.  And below, here it is complete and ready to eat (not plated particularly well, I'll admit).

From Christmas Eat...

How we did it.  This one is pretty simple, you take a massive live lobster and you take a bunch of pictures of you clowning around with it.  Then you get a really big wok and bring water to a boil.  Then you quickly put the lobster in and hold a lid down to stop him from beating the crap out of you.

Then you take him out and split him down the middle with a cleaver or really sharp knife.  You then put him in a baking pan of some type and coat him with shallot butter.  You make this by mincing one shallot and sauteing it - then mixing it in with about 4 ounces of butter.  Spread the butter all over the lobster and bake at 400 degrees (F) for about 20 minutes.

Then eat it.

From Christmas Eat...

Christmas Morning Breakfast:  Potato Latke with Sour Cream, Caviar and Lox.

The only thing to make here is the Latkes.  But I'll briefly talk about Caviar selection.  Caviar is an annoying thing to buy because often you can't actually taste the stuff you are buying.  Caviar varies madly from year to year.  Last year, we preferred the Idaho Sturgeon but this year the Californian was a lot better.  (And we didn't feel like shelling out for the Iranian Osetra).  We rarely buy it, so I don't want to sound like we're downing the stuff daily.  It's a once in six months trip.  You can order direct from Seattle Caviar as well.

To make the Latkes, get some potatoes, onion, eggs, flour, salt and pepper.  One of the many good tricks to making good latkes is to use your shredder to the max.  Vivian shredded coarse, medium and ultra fine potato to make the latkes.

We started with this recipe and then varied it by using white potatoes instead of yukon gold (because we wanted less starch) then did the grater trick above.

 

From Christmas Eat...

We then had Vivian's killer Dark and Light Chocolate Mousse Cake with Creme Anglaise.  It is always amazing and wonderful.  Vivian hadn't made this since our friends Adrian and Isabelle came for dinner about 2 years ago.  So it was most welcome.  Last time Adrian ate about half of it in one sitting.

You will never see the recipe for it from me.  I would say it would mean immediate divorce, but it would actually likely mean my death.

From Christmas Eat...

This picture does not do this justice.  Christmas night's meal was simple, but perfect.  We made Duck Breast with a Cherry and mixed wine sauce.  On the side are baby bok choy blanched in chicken sauce.

We started with this recipe and then greatly veered off course.  We didn't want the oil and the texture of the scaloppine.  So we seared three duck breasts.

First we trimmed the fat off the duck breasts.  They usually come with about an inch of fat off all edged.  With a pair of poultry shears, trim that fat off - believe me, it has enough left over.

Then put them in a pan and sear them in a little olive oil.  They are going to give you one hell of a lot of duck grease.   When they are nicely browned, set them on a baking sheet and put them in the oven on low.

The recipe calls for Grappa.  So I went up to buy some and ... everyone was out.  So I went instead for a dry white wine and used a little more than 1/4 cup.  We deglazed the pan with some of the white wine and then poured everything else in to reduce, as the recipe calls for.   

It was really ... very .... good.

From Christmas Eat...

On Boxing Day, Vivian went to the office for "a little work" and didn't come home until nearly 9 PM.  I had already marinated a set of flanken cut ribs two days before according to the demands of this recipe.  I diverted from it by using Lime zest, instead of lemon and added a bit of lime juice to the recipe.  Also, we could only find Kikoman Ponzu sauce.   Kikoman products seem to be very thin, so I added a bit of Amoy Light Soy (not light like less sodium, but light in that it's lighter in color and consistency compared to Chinese dark soy) to give it more body.

I made about 3 pounds of meat, so I doubled the recipe which was a perfect amount.

The meat was then Barbequed in the bloody pouring rain at 9 at night by a selfless husband.

The glaze is called a Barbeque sauce, but it's actually a glaze.  Make it according to the recipe at the link.  Then, when the ribs look 99% done on the grill, spread on the glaze and cook for just a teeeny bit longer.  They were marinating for two days, so they had plenty of internal flavor. 

The mango glaze has so much sugar in it that it will burn like mad if you leave in on for very long.

When you get them on the table, dab on a bit more of the glaze and then use the remainder as a salsa around the rim of the plate.

From Christmas Eat...

We then went out to Ocean Shores to relax for the rest of the New Year's break with some very nice sunsets.

Please do check out the slideshow.  And let me know if you want to see more things about food.  I know it was cumbersome to click on the recipe links and compare to the text here.  I also fully recognize that this is about as pretentious a bunch of food posts as one could make.  But they were ... soooo good.

 

Technorati tags: Duck, recipes, christmas, flanken cut ribs, cooking, food, mousse, lobster

Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington

O Cowardly New World that hath Such PR People In It

Microsoft, as many of you know, sent out a buncha laptops to a buncha bloggers (mine must have been lost in the mail).  And the bloggers who didn't get one were outraged! 

They sent them to people like Marshall Kirkpatrick who is a die-hard Mac user.  And these were spiffy Acers too.  One of our software designers in Toronto has one and it's very nice.

Originally, Microsoft said the bloggers could keep the laptops.  And the un-laptop-provided bloggers went crazy.  "They are trying to buy friends!"  "They are trying to bribe people!"  "They are without honor!"

To Microsoft, the expenditure amounted to a gnats eyelash and was the equivalent of a nice meal out.  Would some people sleep with the software giant after such wooing?  Sure.  But others wouldn't.

That's life.  And Microsoft is a software company that wanted people to review its software on machines where they knew everything had been installed correctly.  It all makes sense to me.

So now the cowardly PR people, sensing PR disaster(!) are scrambling to get the laptops back.  Marshall reprints the letter he received from MSFT:

Marshall,

No good deed goes unpunished, right? You may have seen that other bloggers got review machines as well. Some of that coverage was not factual. As you write your review I just wanted to emphasize that this is a review pc. I strongly recommend you disclose that we sent you this machine for review, and I hope you give your honest opinions. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I’m going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews.

Thanks for your understanding, and happy reviewing,

Aaron ***

The PR people should see that there are two sides to this story and not cave immediately in.  The reviewers never had to keep the computers - they could have always donated them or something.  That's up to them.  Any PR campaign stirs some controversy, no matter how slight.  Be patient and watch for things to settle.

However, all this makes excellent Technosoap!

Technorati tags: technosoap, microsoft, vista, playground politics

Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington

The Curse of Being Demonstrative

I lived in fear of being bitten by the Five Things tag, not because I'm overly-private, but because I'm overly demonstrative.  I think everyone knows just about everything about me.  I'm an open book. 

Today I was bitten.  So here are Five Things You May Not Have Known About Me:

1. I had an accidental Afro. When I was living in Omaha in 1985, I wanted to have something other than my thin, straight hair.  My friend Jim Jeffers had great hair and could do all the rad 80s hair-band styling of it.  He had a new hair style every week.  So one day I let him talk me into getting something done to my hair.  I asked for a body wave, I got a bizarre looking afro.  It looked horrific.

Shortly after getting it, I went to see "Starship" during their "Built this City" tour (where they had lost Kanter and temporarily forgot how to make music).  At any rate, I was in front and Grace Slick stared at me throughout the entire show.

My friend Simon was convinced it was because of my hair and I reminded her of the 70s.

2. I dislike fish. I write a lot about food, but the careful reader will note that I don't ever write about fish.  No salmon, trout, red snapper, etc.  (The only exception is likely halibut or sea bass).  This is because I never liked catfish, but my dad LOVES catfish.  While we were growing up, he'd go fishing all the time.  Sometimes I feel like fully 25% of my youth was spent saying, "But, really, I don't like catfish!"

3. I like carefully purchased expensive (but not ludicrously so) cars. I have a 99 Saab Wagon which I bought new.  It's working its way up to 100k miles now.  In general, I believe in buying the nicest things you can afford and then taking care of them and making them last forever.

4.  For the love a woman I nearly plummeted to my death. Well, I don't think she would have stopped liking me but ... One time I went hiking with my girlfriend Heidi.  She was pretty fearless all the way around.  It was spring on the Oregon coast and it had been pretty rainy.  We hiked through deep, plush forestland and came to a ledge.  On the left side was cliff straight up for about 100', on the right was a cliff straight down for 100'.  The ledge trail was about 4 feet wide.  It was all loose mud.

Heidi goes on and I stop and say .. um ... maybe this loose mud isn't the best to walk on.  "Naw," she replied, "it's fine, it's just on top, it's rock underneath."  Sure enough it was about an inch of very slippery, viscous mud of over rock.  So she moves on ahead and I follow behind, at one point slipping in the muck and sliding with one let dangling over the ledge and the other foot stopping about an inch from certain death.

She never noticed.

5. I once went shopping door to door for friends.  When I was five or six, so like 1970 or 1971, I went to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, to spend the summer with my Grandparents.  I would do this a lot in my youth.  This was one of the first times.  My parents put me on a little plane which stopped over and over and over and over again until I got to Scottbluff.  I usually flew except one year, for some reason, my parents put me on a Greyhound bus which I found insufferable.

So I was a little kid exiled in Scottsbluff.  What to do?   I don't know if this was at the suggestion of my Grandmother, but I ended up going door to door down 2nd Avenue in Scottsbluff saying to whomever answered, "Hi, I'm here visiting my grandparents.  Is there a little boy here I could play with?"

I remember one woman saying, "Well, I don't, but those people in that house over there do."  So I went over there and said basically the same thing.  That's how I ended up meeting my summer (and occasional Christmas) childhood friend Darek Ravert.

---

Funny, but that last one has been riding around in my head for some time now.  I actual have a package of maybe 8 to 12 vignettes from Scottsbluff that I should make a whole post of.  One that always sticks with me was during the 1976 summer Olympics everyone on the street (or so it seemed) left their doors open and people went from house to house watching events and eating.

The rules of this tagging event mean that I have to inflict the tagging meme on five other souls.  These five people must do what I have just done.  Must.

I will now torture:

1.  Robert W. Anderson - Because he's a loveable but very private guy and I like to watch him squirm

 2. Dan Ciruli - Because misery love company and I don't know him well enough yet to call him loveable. And, he's trying to kill me with pushups.

3. Jason Kaneshiro - Who has hit blogging full force this year.

4. Ed Vielmetti - Who may have already been tagged long ago, but I looked back into early November and couldn't find anything so I'm tagging him anyway but fully expect him to say something like 'I was tagged ages ago' and then I'll feel bad.

5. Karen Anderson - ex-iTunes propagandist and fellow Seattlite.

I wish I still had a scanner.  The Afro Jim picture would be good for this post.

Technorati tags: Chain letters, scottsbluff, starship, grace slick, Oregon

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

Full Immersion

I love cities.

Every city in the world is different.  It has its own culture, its own quirks, and arrays of subcultures and undercurrents.  They are vital and alive and that life interests me, energizes me ... awakens me.

It's hard to explain to people - especially when I am visiting - that what I really want to experience is the city itself.  Specific tourist attractions are fun and enjoyable, but they aren't what really draws me to a place.

Most residents of a city go to tourist attractions when tourists come to town or for an event that is hosted there.  Rarely otherwise.  Seattle residents don't hang out at the Space Needle.

So I'm most happy when I feel integrated with a subculture in a given city and get a chance to experience life in that city.  For example, my favorite times in Los Angeles were when I went A-gay nightclub hopping with my friend Akio and when I went with my friend John to a grimy Pho noodle house to a Pho gathering.

I feel most at home in Hong Kong when I wake up and wander down the street to back-alley Jok place for breakfast or when I have an appointment and I jump on the subway to get there.

And, truly, I most loved Tokyo when I went to the grocery store and bought groceries.  I loved New York the morning where we woke up early, walked around Tompkins Square because it was fenced off due to a recent mini-riot, and over to a restaurant for coffee where we sat out on the street next to an empty lot filled with rubble.

I loved Washington DC when I could direct a van full of quilt through the busy city streets without a map.  I loved Chicago when, during the Printer's Row book fare, I guided a bunch of people to the "real" Chicago pizza. 

Apparently, I like food a lot too.  But what I really like is the feeling of comfort I get from a City.  When I learn its layout, how the residents use it, where pockets of interest might be.  When I need something and I know several places to get it and several ways to get there.

Because when you know that, then you really start to see the cultures that swim in the city.  You start to notice things like "this city has a lot of used bookstores here" or "this city has subtle racial segregation here" or "this area is clean because people have lived here for generations and care about it"  or "this area is cleaned because of recent gentrification."

You start to find threads of interest like "The Jewish community in this city is really active and into music"  or "The Green party is really active here"  or "There sure are a lot of people here into progressive rock."

Those threads are where my real interest lies.  The communities that form in cities that make up its character.  When a subculture is truly active it has massive energy.  It's a wonder to bask in that.

And every subculture exists in space and time.  You generally need to meet, need to have activities, need to exchange ideas in real-time.  Suburbia and rural areas cannot generally support this because they don't have the density.  We tried to kill this off in our cities from the 30s to the 80s by over-planning our cities (trying to make them dense suburbs).

But cities have a way of self-regulating.  They push toward a more socially active population.  People thwart planning all the time.  Look across America and you will see previously strictly zoned warehouse space repurposed for housing, work space, art coops, light manufacturing, schools, and entertainment.

The force of culture was stronger than zoning regulations. 

Cities inspire me.  Their design, the use of the cities, the actions and style of the subcultures, the soul of the population moves me.  They keep me outward reaching, anxious to grow and resistant to stagnation.

I love cities.

Technorati tags: travel, culture, urban planning, musings

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

A Little Perk

 It's christmas eve and nearly midnight.  I was using the computer for a recipie book.  We're making this Ginger Mango Flank Steak (except I'm using flanken cut ribs instead of flank steak) tomorrow.

Anyway, I quickly checked my blog and noticed some funny activity so I popped over to Google Analytics to check on something and I found something I didn't know was there.

So I noticed that there was eight main sources it said I got blog info from  But I couldn't tell where they were coming from precisely.  The color chosen for techmeme and something else were very simlar and I couldn't see their difference in the graphic.  So I clicked around, like I always do, to get the percentages.

But then, quite by accident, I found that if you click the name before the graphic, that pie slice extends out from the graph.  Here it was able to help me differentiate between my techmeme percentage of .91% and the thing next to is (103bees.com) which was 1.18%.  That's pretty keen!

Technorati tags: google analytics

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer