Recently in Trend Category

So the Times today reports that religious fluidity in America is way up, which makes me happy, but that, according to Rice University's assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life, "Religion is [still] the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors."

Anyway, here's the breakdown, so you ADHD kids can skip the article itself:

Big losers in the irrational monolithic meme wars of recent years: Catholicism, Protestantism.

Big winners: Syncretic faiths of all kinds. Agnosticism.

Other big winners, according to my extrapolations: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster-ism. Jedi-ism. Clean CSS layouts-ism.

America's biggest families raised by proponents of: Mormonism. Islam.

America's smallest families probably raised by: Infertile nuns who hate babies.

My picks for the "Whatever Happened To...?" file: Zoroastrianism. Mesmerism. Kris Kross (not a religion, but what happened to those guys?).

Craziest shit reported in connection to: Scientology. Self-mummifying monks.

I went to Japan and took some photos. This was a sewer grating thingy.

edit: in motion

getting some yellow on it. for ikea.

Well I don't know about you guys, but I think the new iTunes looks tacky. TACKY. Everything looks bubbly and colorful and stupid. And the new shuffle? Who would want that ugly peice of clip-on rubbish clipped to their shirt? It is neither sleek nor innovative. Is Apple getting crappy?

So I hear over at Second Life (yours and my favorite online universe ala Snow Crash, but less 3D, less informative, and less everything cool) they've got an American Apparel. That's right, yours and my favorite enthusists of leotard sporting, knee sock toting, short shorts donning tweens on beds in boyshort underpantaloons looking seductively out of the back of your issue of The L Magazine. From what I hear, the Apparel virtual store has already sold over 2000 digital (digital) items for real (real) money! Because what are the other avatars going to think of your avatar if not clad in the best of virtual hipster fashion?

We Feel Fine is an amazing applet that allows you to read snipets of personal blogs in countless, incredibly interesting ways. The is one of the most beautifully put together interfaces I have ever seen, go look at it now!.

Okay, so, can thatsplenty be honest with me for a minute here? If you saw an adult (and for argument's sake, let's say that "adult" was me) wearing a pair of these, not just wearing them, but skating around on them, would you think, "Cool!" "Lame!" or "I don't care". Please check one. This will have an effect on my life. Thank you.

Comments greatly appreciated. Seriously, I'm serious.
Heelys for Women

Disclaimer Sphere was shitty Michael Crichton book, not be redundant.

Going through the logs for thatsplenty, one of the top visits was from sphere.com, which is odd, since visitors usually get named like dh114.umass.edu or email.bumblebeesinmymouth.net and the like. So, a trip to Sphere shows a spartan page with a few links and notes that the beta is closed, and they went over their bandwidth allowance. I read through the links, and skimmed the goddamn podcast.

A small aside, Sphere is ranking as the 28th top visitor of over 3500 for thatsplenty at .33% of our traffic. Also, our biggest search engine draw spyspace and variations for Sam's SpySpace at about 75%, with mustache tattoo coming in 2nd at 1% for Karen's Tattoo Taunts. I'm happy to say number 3 is bagina for my stunnning masterpeice of misc. (Bagina is .67%)

Sphere is poised to be the ultimate blog search. Currently, there's technoratti and the like that do a sort of brainshare of blogs, but not a real spidercrawl. Google Lab's blogsearch gets the job done, and seems to be updated as frequently as Google News and usually almost no spillover in results between the two. You can sort by relevance and date. What sucks is the ammount of forums that get tagged as blogs, and the way that web spam defeats google works the same for the blogsearch, so lots of crap repeat entries. Still, when the Game Informer Red Steel Nintendo Revolution article got leaked, the orig. blog entry was down within minutes, with the qausi-blogs like Joystiqand Kotaku linkings and reporting, but not actually hosting the article scans. Blogsearch to the rescue (though with hindsight, going to flickr and searching for red steel yielded better results.) Hot blog entries + plagarism = great redundancy for breaking news.

Sphere is being built from the ground up. Identified spam is sent to the bottom of results. Livejournal entries with lots of personal pronouns get 2nd tier citizenship (will I be able to turn off livejournal/myspace/friendster blogs entirely? PLEASE) by using content semantic analysis. Super brief entries are penalized, while verbose, beefy entries get a small tug to the top (Slashdot gives +1 to really long posts, and I've personally never seen this abused, but I'm sure there will be some noise to the signal.) Nonsense, bad spelling, bad grammar will probably hurt your listing. Like google, it will look to see who links to you, but do to the odd way blogging fits in with journalism, I see a weird battle between the topical vs. the temporal, like google's sorting options. One of the more interesting things they seem to offer is the scope. They mention baseball, which while horrible boring, seems to have its fans. With a little more effort than an I'm Feeling Lucky button, you can define...spheres... of interest, in case you just want to follow a certain player (shift to topical) or a certain players current ongoing trade/drug abuse scandal (shift to temporal) and the hidden blog communities that share interests in your topic through click-hops.

Of course, you can always wait 4 hours and find it on BoingBoing.

Still, I find it interesting they are already routing through us, which most of are traffic being myspace whores, incestious ThatsPlenty kinfolk and the odd Bagina researcher. With the exception of the Gothamist quasi-link, we've not really been on any radar, some forum posts and my IM spamming friends notwithstanding. Something to watch and wait for perhaps. I'm trying to find someone with a beta and see what's the diggity firsthand.

Oh, search engine optimization for good results/defeating spam is kinda sad, as it seems to be a bit like building on Mexico City. It's sinking, goddamnit.