I was buying some music from Amazon.com today, which is quickly becoming my favorite place to buy music due to their "Daily Deals", which I'm notified of via Twitter (http://twitter.com/amazonmp3). Also, Amazon's customer reviews give me a lot of confidence about my purchases. In fact, if Amazon stocks a product I want to buy, even if I don't plan on buying it from Amazon, I will check their reviews. It's central to how I make decisions about spending my money. So I'm normally pretty sensitive to changes Amazon makes in this system. I don't know if this is new, or I somehow missed it for a while, but when I was purchasing today's Daily Deal I saw the following displayed:

It's a pretty simple change to the customer review system - basically it just takes the most useful favorable and critical reviews and pops them to the top of the review list. It's little enhancements like this that help filter social rating data that make it orders of magnitude more useful.

April and I went to the Penn State football game today against Coastal Carolina. So this one will be quick because it's been a long day (which if you've been to a PSU game you can sympathize with). The first thing both of us did when we got seated was to pull out our iPhones and fire up Twitter. Every significant moment of the game was tweeted by at least one of us. And most of the updates were accompanied by photos. April was also texting her sister, who was camping (with her Blackberry), keeping her informed of score.

A few weeks ago I was asked to contribute to the proceedings from the NMC Summer Conference 2008, which I presented at with a few of the Digital Commons team. I thought that as I write this paper, I would post some snippets here so my ideas get some air.

The first snippet is from a section describing the workshops we offer at Digital Commons. One of the overall themes of the paper, titled "Building and Support a Large Institution Digital Media Service" is that of scaling the service without compromising quality. I decided to use the metaphor of bootstrapping to explain that the purpose of these workshops isn't to teach skills deeply, but get people motivated and comfortable enough with the software or equipment that they'll go out and start creating and learning more on their own.

I've been trying to get a blog going for... many years.. since I was using Radio Userland. I won't bore you with what's made me fail in this pursuit - many of you have had the same experience I have. But I'm trying again.

I am going to take a different approach this time. I'm going to write about what's on my mind. In the past I think I was trying to prove something with what I wrote - and the anxiety of constantly coming up with great ideas to post about was paralyzing. I'm doing this for catharsis, and if you find it interesting, that's swell.

In the hopes of making this stick, I am going to take up the blog-a-day challenge, and post something every day for a month.

This is Day 1. Wish me luck.