dogear: in-page bookmarking

One of my very early posts was about creating bookmarks within a web document. Most, if not all, of the current bookmarking web applications allow you to bookmark a page, but not a sentence.

As I was bookmarking articles to my del.icio.us account, I became frustrated by the fact that I would probably never get to them, as I was being forced to read them in a linear way. Read one article, then move to the next. I don't work like that, so I decided to something about it.

Ta da! dogear.

After dogear parses through a web page, the reader can click on almost any sentence to bookmark it. The sentence is highlighted and its location is sent to the dogear database.

Now you can take breaks while you read, read out of sequence, survive browser or computer crashes, and bring your readings with you wherever you go.

dogear is in its alpha stages at the moment, but I'm trying to get everything to work properly (some sites just won't go through the dogear engine; others don't display properly), and to add some "social" features: Who else is reading this? What else are people reading who are reading this? I want to review this. Et cetera.

dogear is looking for some alpha users to test the concept and provide feedback.

Contact me at www.eigology.com.

unblokt: 2nd George W. Bush speech begins

An unblokt user has requested another go at a collaborative George W. Bush speech. The first Bush speech was completed a few weeks ago and can be read here. Some quotes:

"We should put our faith in God and in whatever our leaders say."

"Anyone who disagrees with us is a terrorist."

"The terrorists hate babies. They hate apple pie. They want to destroy the American dream. Not only do they want to destroy it, they want to squash it and mash it up like a bug."

I think Bush's speechwriters must be getting in on the unblokt action too.

unblokt Volume 2 complete!

Well, another classic has been written. Thanks to all of the authors who contributed on this second full-length novel at unblokt. Volume 2 can be read at the bookshelf. A third book has just been started, and this coincides nicely with National Novel Writing Month. Let's see if we can pump out another 200-pager by the end November, shall we?

Mash-ematics

Driving back to my apartment tonight, I had an exciting thought. (As a math guy, this is exciting to me; probably won't be very exciting to you.)

Google Maps + Mandelbrot Set

You remember the Mandelbrot Set right? Mandelbrot was an IBM researcher working on visualizing iterative functions in the complex plane (I think) and he discovered this incredibly beautiful mathematical world which is now named after him.

Anyhow, it would be so cool (and useless) to see Google implement this. What better interface to roam around this infinitely-detailed bug-shaped world than the zoom and drag interface of Google Maps?