I'll have to give up my rarely-used mobile email and (real, not WAP) web access because I'm ditching my expensive cell phone service for a prepaid. It occurred to me that it would probably be easier and less annoying to do my mobile data-gathering via text message anyway. Google SMS is a great start, but I'm hoping that I'll have time to roll my own mobile concierge, probably via an AIM Bot.

Message bot features that I'd like to have:

• retrieve amazon wish list items
• look up addresses/phone numbers in my IMAP-stored address book (screw syncing)
• retrieve events from personal and family Apple iCal published calendars (again, screw syncing)
• retrieve documents from my tiddlyspot-like TiddlyWiki
• append a TODO to my todo list
• poor man's mail client: retrieve the subject lines of messages in my inbox, text back with a message number to get the contents

update: Hm.. This Textmark looks neat - among other things, you can map a keyword to a web clipping and message the service whenever you want the clipping. Also, I moved this idea to my halfbakery.

Agh. So I haven't done much else with my "Comics and the Web" experiment. I don't know when I'll have the inclination to pick it up again so I'm just going to type out my thoughts before I forget:

As a comic buyer, I'd really like a site that offers a better Diamond Previews Catalog

• Flexible searching
• More cover art
• Recommendations based on your tastes
• Social aspects: spotlighted items can be voted on by ordinary people, public viewable "want lists". You could go crazy with this.. show hot books for each month, the most "controversial" books, etc
• Comments from publishers, creators and buyers
• RSS feeds and/or email alerts for new releases by creators that you are interested in
• Shopping cart capabilities that allow you to build an order form (with nice support for recurring subscriptions) for your friendly neighborhood comic dealer
• Maybe a way to track your purchases and inventory your collection
• Links that you can follow for more information (see below)

It's basically Amazon for comics with some extra goodies mixed in. I guess I could always quit comics and switch to graphic novels :)

You can find a lot of information on an upcoming comic by googling for the previews order code. I tried fooling with automatically discovering pages using Google blogsearch, Feedster, Technorati, etc. This didn't work very well - I ended up with a lot of shit (and holes) in my index. Take Brian Wood's Supermarket #1 (item # DEC05 3067) as an example:

• First of all, we know that this is a code that we are interested in because it previously appeared on Diamond's order form
• BrianWood.com talks about it
• View Askew's Newsarama contains a summary and a whole bunch of full page previews
• Mile High Comics has a cover, creator info, and some other metadata
• There are various mentions on blogs

It seems like people like Khepri or Mile High (who already maintain a product catalog) would be interested in using a "Better Previews" site like this to attract more customers. Yeah, they would be providing a valuable service and giving away information for free, but since they are offering discounts many users would end up *not* buying elsewhere because of the price (Hello, Amazon). And of course, you could go nuts with this expand it into a web-based subscription management and/or sales application for traditional or online retailers...

Before I get into my rant, here are the comics that I am ordering this month. Slim pickins.

Ellis' Black Gas #1

Cholly and Flytrap #1

Next Wave #1 (Ellis again)

That's kind of sad. I'm going to hold off on my order for now in case I find something else to add. It's possible that I'm missing something good from one of the big publishers - I've been kind of ignoring them lately. Also, Local #3 and DMZ #3 should be out but I've already subscribed to both. That reminds me - this blog is good : http://goodcomics.blogspot.com.

I was toying with an idea and I wrote some code that downloads the latest Previews catalog and then tries to find blogs which mention each item code. The results were disappointing. For November, I only found one page which mentions a Previews item with a NOV05 code. Sheesh. I'm not exactly sure what this means. Is it...

1. People aren't using the Previews item numbers when referring to upcoming comics. (eg. SLG, Oni).
2. Google Blogsearch's index not as complete as I thought (I chose Google Blogsearch because it is easy to interface with, fast, and the results are pretty "fresh" when compared to Technorati)
3. or... Creators and publishers just aren't writing about their new releases on blogs. Maybe I should try this on regular Google.

I was also thinking that if you wanted to be able to build such an index, there isn't really a great way to do it. You have to ask people to start using the item number on their sites. Luckily these codes are pretty unique and not really used by other people for other purposes. An alternative way to gather together these sites would be something trackback style where the person talking about the comic inserts some metadata that says "This page or part of page refers to item number X" and then they ping you. The ping part would be necessary because Google only indexes content. (This opens up a whole other discussion - doesn't the vision of the New Web require search engines to do something about metadata?) Should Diamond Previews really have such a central role in this? I'm using their item numbers because most of the comics in the US flow through them. Is there another good way to uniquely identify a comic and tie it to a release date and publisher?

I'm kind of rambling here. My basic point is that 1) It would be good to have some sort of unique identifier for comics that could be tied to data about the creators, publisher, release date and looked up as easily as an ISBN. 2) It would be nice if web content creators had a way to express "this page (or paragraph) refers to about comic [ID # whatever]".

(PS - if you aren't a comic person and you have no idea what "Previews" is, maybe my comic book day post will help)

I use del.icio.us for all my bookmarking and I love it. The problem is that I have 1200+ pages tagged. Sometimes I have trouble finding things in the big categories (some have 100+ bookmarks) because I can only remember a phrase from a page that wasn't in the title.

There has got to be a piece of software out there that grabs the content of each page that you bookmark and adds it to a database for easy searching, right? nope. At least, I couldn't find one. If I had the time, I'd write one. The del.icio.us API + Apache Lucene + a Zoe-ish web interface should do the trick (I don't know how Lucene works exactly but I know that Zoe is built on Lucene).

I know that del.icio.us is all about tagging and folksonomies, but the tag thing breaks down a little if you have too many items to categorize. Either you end up with too many tags to choose from or too many items per tag.

Much of my time on the web is spent looking for new books, music, or movies. This is a slow and often fruitless process - I haven't found any recommendation services that make "good" recommendations so my usual method is a long, rambling search that results in one or two new things to try. This surprises me because recommendation algorithms are a somewhat popular (okay, well, not obscure) topic in Computer Science. There are a few systems out there but none of them seem to work really well.

For music, Audioscrobbler is the best I've found so far. I've not yet found a new artist that I like by digging in the Audioscrobbler data but at least its findings are useful. There are other things like U of Illinois' iTunes system, which includes songs by Flock of Seagulls, Hanson, and Dolly Parton in the list of 10 Most Recommended Tracks. I won't be trying that one.

Although IMDB is the definitive resource on movies, the content that is created by users (votes, reviews, message boards) is not very useful for a "try it if you like ______" type inquiries.

Amazon has a ton of useful recommendation information on books (and music and movies). I almost always make a new discovery when I devote some time to digging around Amazon. I find the "your recommendations" section pretty useless but the Listmania! lists, "customers also bought", "customers also viewed", and "similar items" screen are all very helpful in finding new books that I might like.

Before I start.. I don't know what Amazon's software looks like and I'm sure (I hope) that they've spent time working on the suggestion engine. My ideas below may already be part of the system or I may be missing something important. The problem is this - my Amazon recommendations are never good and I have to spend a lot of time searching for books to read next.

My main complaint with Amazon is this - too much "garbage" information is tossed into the mix that is used for creating suggestions and the good information is not given enough weight. My purchase history contains plenty of Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, and books that I later regretted buying. (There is a way to rate and enable/disable the items that drive your recommendations but it still doesn't seem to work properly). Wish lists, on the other hand, should be very useful and I'd like to see Amazon suggest items based on the wish lists or their users. I wonder how the current system would act if everything that drew on past purchases looked at past and current wishes instead. Bestselling items and Amazon's own financial interests also dirty things up a lot. *Nobody* needs to be recommended the next Harry Potter book or Bill Clinton's biography. Also, people with tastes that closely match mine sometime go out and buy the Da Vinci Code for themselves or for someone else. This kind of behavior should be noticed as "out of character" and treated accordingly. Listmania is great for finding things and lists that contain highly rated books, a variety of authors and a small proportion of big sellers should play a key role in the suggestion system. (Something to think about - I've seen quite a bit of Listmania spam from small authors and/or rabid fans. Does Amazon know that this is happening?) Reviews and ratings can also be very useful. The body of books that a reviewer has commented on can be just as valuable as a Listmania list and could be treated similarly.

Amazon has an excellent API and Amazon Web Services has been winning awards since it's inception. I have yet to see a useful application built on top of Amazon Web Services. I looked through the newest API docs and it looks like the services that they provide are complete enough (in a roundabout way) for someone to build a useful recommendation engine on top of Amazon. You can't see inside people's orders with the API, but I think that the purchase history is more of a problem than a useful resource. I wish that I had time to play with this...