With the half hearted British summer in full cold/hot/wet/wet/wet/cold/a bit hotness, I love a dip in a good Flickr pool.

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Did you know that Amazon makes 20-30% of it’s sales through recommendations? This and other valuable lessons on building recommendation systems can be found here.

Choice quotes:

‘… find ways to collect as much user input as possible without being disruptive. People don’t train systems, they try to benefit themselves, but this is the best kind of training data.’

‘…when thinking about recommendations or targeted content/advertising, the most important to think about is all the different things that people do on your site anyway: tagging, buying, titling, clicking, determine how much of that you can capture, and try some basic, quick-running algorithms.’

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I think this may be research disguised as entertainment or vice versea.

A series of links of people being hit in the face recorded in slo-mo for your (not my) sweaty pleasure.

No embeds, so click on link above for more of smoking-dude-refuses-to-put-it-out-and-friends…

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‘Dropclock is an aesthetically intriguing motion clock screensaver. Every minute of real time is numerically expressed with heavy helvetica dropping into water in super slow-motion’

I love helvetica, but the thought of overweight helvetica hitting me on the head whilst I’m in the bath frightens me. I am now fearful of heavy helvetica.

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Janiak Puidokas just sent me this email:

Halloha,

Has learned to read your will through your eyes? With the
gayatri, or they that are observant of shot at jamadagni’s
car a hundred straight arrows a short time the camel was
deprived of life. The one advantage from the revolution.
another church, eol. Ho! Neptune! Nept. Eolus! Eol. The
seas go faces were as long as fiddles. Oh, worcester! And
everything that would promote trouble or quarrel sastras
according to which one performs the acts large force, and
stationed at the head of the among a waste of empty teacups,
plates, and jampots, none of the seedlings, so far as i
can learn, now we can be married, he said. I shall be able
of their defences Finally, mahomet determined gus and bill
remained and the twoas billy always.

Despite it alluding to poo hole town Worcester and Gus and Bill, neither of whom I know, it’s simply not as pretty as the forthcoming book entitled Secret Weapon: 30 Hand Painted Spam Postcards (more info here)

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Thousands of people chat online every day - but what does it actually sound like?

A new electronic art installation at the Science Museum in London endeavours to show just that.

Listening Post allows its audience to eavesdrop on the online world. Sampling text from thousands of chatrooms, message boards and forums, the artists have created a huge display that attempts to “hear the internet”.

Artists Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen have forged a giant curved stand that is built out of 231 small electronic screens.

(via Digg, via BBC, via er… The Science Museum)

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More wise words from today’s bestfriend Brian:

‘Supposedly, Cal told Matt Biddulph last summer something to the effect of: APIs are old hat; it’s all about hackable hardware now. For me, it’s increasingly about the implications of that: the Web everywhere powered by flowing data. We have much to think through, privacy, usability, identity, collaboration, quiet time, how much auto discovery we actually want in our lives, how we manage and redefine sociality in light of what is possible. I don’t even have good pointers or the semblance of an idea for you yet, but I just wanted to prod us all into thinking about more than browsers (even those on phones) and start thinking more about connective tissues and experiences enabled between people, places & things.’

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Hype Machine gives the musical and data hungry more to get their ears round with Zeitgeist.

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Mix one erudite geek with a Wii, a laptop, a suburban home, a baseball cap, shake and pour into some infrared customized safety glasses and… well, I don’t want to spoil it for you.

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Gore TV aka Current is looking for an IPO in the region of $100m. Targeted (only ad execs could think of that word!) at ‘young adults’ which I think excludes me at a sybaritic 33, it has a visually arresting and intuitive interface.

Current claims to be the first ‘fully integrated television network’. Me? I don’t want to integrate I want to poke and prod and look at videos meshing together before my eyes and pretty ever changing statistics popping up before me.

Viewpoints is a thing of wonder, it’s a video facewall, when you click on a face a 1 minute video appears and you can browse by topics such as ‘Rich Ecopreneurs’ etc… It’s true peer to peer (human to human) interaction, people can quickly influence their peers by uploading their viewpoint.

I’m so impressed with it, I’m going to give it a category all of it’s own: design porn.

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