The River

Ok, so this is a bit off topic, but I figure if I can post about punctuation, I can post about spelling. (I’m a writer and editor, for goodness sake.)

Flipping around on TV last night, my husband and I came upon the
Scripps National Spelling Bee on ESPN2. (Yes, spelling is now a competitive sport.)

Not only was it entertaining — Michael and I played along by trying to spell along with the contestants — but it was incredibly inspiring. Here are all these whip-smart kids asking questions about word origins and parts of speech, showing such passion. We don’t yet have kids ourselves, but it’s heartening to be reminded of this whole infrastructure designed to encourage excellence. (Here’s the winner. ) It’s just so… wholesome.

Michael’s a recent transplant from Scotland, so this is all new to him, and that’s probably what got me thinking about it in more than a cursory way. After having to explain to him our screwed up health care system and our incredibly complex tax system, it was so refreshing to be proud of this part of American culture.

Oh, and today I ran across a link to a speller’s blog here. Angela Arenivar was part of the Spellbound documentary five years ago, and is apparently now a student at Texas A&M University. (Another Spellbound link.)That’s the home of the infamous bonfire, my brother’s alma mater, and the rival to my undergraduate school, UT Austin. Anyway, by the URL of her blog, “angelainspellbound.blogspot.com,” she seems to still be coasting on the memories of her spelling celebrity.

P.S. Here’s the All Things Considered Spelling Bee page.

Gary Price at ResourceShelf has posted Part 2 of his Q&A with Gary Flake of Yahoo! Research Labs.

One excerpt:

RS: At the beginning of 2009 what will Yahoo search look like?

GF: As I said earlier, where search goes is a function of how we and our users co-evolve with respect to one another. This means no one really knows where it will be.

My hunch is that personalization will be so good that most users will look back to web search circa 2004 as ridiculously outdated. I also think that Yahoo! will have nailed user intent to the point that we will be able to tailor the result set to focus on documents that satisfy the need behind the query, instead of returning results that
merely contain the same words as in the query.

We will also be indexing and blending from many more sources.

Many more interesting thoughts in the interview (both parts!) so check it out yourself.

Like any self-respecting data-obsessed individual, I’ve been poring over the site stats, feed stats, and Google AdSense stats for this blog. For the most part, I understand what I’m seeing. However, the feed stats area is so nascent that it’s left me a little confused.

FeedBurner gives me stats like “Total Hits,” “Total New Visitors,” “Total KBytes,” “Total Hits Saved,” “Total KBytes Saved, “Hits per Day” and “New Visitors per Day.” It reminds me of the days of deciphering “hits” versus “page views” versus “unique visitors.”

Anyway, after meeting Brad yesterday, I started checking out back issues of his blog, and ran across this entry which sheds at least a little light on the subject — and confirms the FeedBurner folks’ understanding of the stats’ shortcomings. (Or at least the need for more explanation.)

P.S. I wrote a piece for ClickZ Experts that focused on FeedBurner a while back.

P.P.S. RSS has got me thinking about the “broken” e-mail infrastructure. I haven’t posted much about e-mail but am watching the Caller ID for E-Mail and SPF merger, and look forward to events unfolding.

UPDATE: Dick Costolo of FeedBurner commented here about the stats issue, and also at Fred’s post on the topic. Check them out here. As a sidenote, it may seem we’re piling on FeedBurner, but the fact that Fred and Brad are both so interested in the topic (and FeedBurner is the only one doing something about it), would seem to indicate the company’s headed in the right direction.

As mentioned here and here, Amazon has launched what it calls “Plogs” — personalized blogs by which it communicates with its customers. I wrote up a fairly detailed piece for ClickZ this morning.

To quote myself:
The Plog could almost be called the reverse of a blog. While blogs are usually highly personal diaries produced by an individual and read by others, the Amazon version is produced by a company (or a company’s technology) and each version is personalized for just one individual.

Amazon’s keeping its mouth shut pretty tight about its intentions and plans, but I’d think at least a personalized RSS feed would be in order. “I can’t discuss what may or may not happen in the future,” replied Craig Berman, director of platform and technology services for Amazon Services, when I asked him about plans for RSS.

Such an RSS feed would be the equivalent of a personalized e-mail newsletter — pretty interesting stuff, given the spam problem most e-mail marketers are dealing with these days. Still, I suppose there might be security issues (note to self: look into this) with order and shipping information being transmitted through RSS. Hmm…

Steve Rubel has an interesting Q&A with Alan Meckler, the founder and CEO of the company that employs me.

Personally, I think it’s fantastic that Alan makes the time to blog. For a publishing company’s CEO, it’s essential to keep abreast of new publishing technologies — and the best way to get a handle on something is to jump right in. That’s why the last CEO I mentioned here, Matt Blumberg, is blogging. (Especially important for the CEO of an e-mail dependent company like Matt’s.)

BTW, went to an open house for Blumberg’s company, Return Path, last night, and ran into a whole lot of folks whose blogs I’ve been reading: Fred, Brad and, of course, Matt. Nice to see folks face to face.

We are getting a cable modem at home which enables the ditching of our land line (previously we had DSL). We were thinking of getting one of those docking-station products: WHP Wireless’ CellSocket, Phonelabs’ Dock-N-Talk or Xcelis’ Pantheon. Was wondering if anyone had experience with these things — an epinions search turned up no results. Please comment or e-mail at theriver (at) mcnigel.com if you have experience with any of these.

The idea is that you can place your cell phone in the location in your home where you can get the best reception, and then use your regular phone handset(s) to talk. You keep the one number, take advantage of free night and weekend minutes, and lose the cost of maintaining a landline. Of course, if the power goes out or if your reception stinks, you are screwed.