<p>I've been working at The Dreaming for a few weeks now. Its a comic shop on the Ave. in the U. District of Seattle. Its owned and run by just one dude, Aron. Let me tell you, working at a comic shop is <em>awesome!</em> My last shot at working at a comic shop was ...sub optimal. I attribute that to the management not being very friendly or not 'in the trenches', but mainly to the fact that i was one of 15 or 20 employees at two locations of the store. Here, its just me and Aron (someone also helps him with the wednesday order breakdown).</p>

<p>Also different is that I'm just working on projects not running the register and stuff. I like that. First up I'm alphabetizing 20,000 or so back issues. Then doing some sort of clearance sale to trim a lot of the fat. Later,  I'll be building some software that helps reduce some of the mundane work of subscriptions, re-/ordering and maybe P.O.S. stuff.</p>

<p>Lately, I've started reading more single issues again to cover some of the areas that Aron doesn't like/have time for/know about. I bring home a pile of some title read as many as there are to get caught up on it, then write up a little review, design up a little card (4 x 6) and tack them up at the shop on the shelf. Its a lot of freaking fun.</p>

<p>This is quickly becoming a dream job. Given nothing totally wonky happens in the forseeable future, I could see myself staying with this for quite some time. Knock on wood. [ Knock. Knock.]</p>

<p>I'll post reviews as I write them.</p>

<p>its been awhile.</p>

<p>awhile since my last post. and awhile since <a href="http://veganstraightedge.com/articles/2005/8/30/2/i-got-a-job/" rel="bookmark me">my last job</a>. today i talked to a proprietor of <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;q=the+dreaming,+seattle,+wa&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;z=11&amp;ll=47.70052,-122.330704&amp;spn=0.216732,0.468292&amp;om=1&amp;iwloc=A" rel="bookmark met">a comic shop</a> here in seattle near my house about doing some work for him. it sounds promising. or at least hopeful. i'll be talking to him again in a few days. so fingers crossed...</p>

<p>For a long time, I've been using tags on this blog to show a kind of keywords or categories to describe a post. I've been using an AppleScript for MarsEdit called Tag Maker written by <a href="http://garrickvanburen.com/tagmaker/">Garrick Van Buren</a>. The way his script works is that when you have a word selected in MarsEdit and select his script it adds a few links in parentheses after the word. Running the script on "MarsEdit" would give you:</p>

<code>MarsEdit &lt;em&gt; (&lt;!--// Technorati START //--&gt; &lt;a href="http://www.Technorati.com/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt; t&lt;/a&gt; &lt;!--// Technorati END //--&gt;  &lt;!--// DELICIOUS START //--&gt; &lt;a href="http://del.icio.us/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt; d&lt;/a&gt; &lt;!--// DELICIOUS END //--&gt;  &lt;!--// Flickr START //--&gt; &lt;a href="http://Flickr.com/photos/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt; f&lt;/a&gt; &lt;!--// Flickr END //--&gt; )&lt;/em&gt; </code>

<p>which would look like this MarsEdit <em>(<!--// Technorati START //--><a href="http://www.Technorati.com/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag">t</a><!--// Technorati END //--> <!--// DELICIOUS START //--><a href="http://del.icio.us/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag">d</a><!--// DELICIOUS END //--> <!--// Flickr START //--><a href="http://Flickr.com/photos/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag">f</a><!--// Flickr END //-->)</em>. The Flickr code I added to his script then submitted that and keyboard shortcut instructions back to him. He released an updated version that included both changes. Very cool, that was my first patch submitted to anything.</p>

<p>After some time using it I started to notice three things. 1: I was getting lots of questions about what the <em>(t, d, f)</em> was all about. 2: No one was clicking on any of those single letter links. 3: My blog wasn't coming up in the Technorati index as posting anything about anything. After a while I realized that the word that I'm linking is as important to where I'm linking it to. So by that logic any post that I used this script on was telling Technorati that i was writing about the letter 'T'. Ugh. Not good.</p>

<p>I've been meaning to change the script again so that the word that I have selected gets the link around it linking only to Technorati. Since del.icio.us and Flickr don't really do anything with incoming links. I finally made those changes today on a 737 flying from Seattle to Baltimore stopping in Kansas City. I sit on the floor in front of gate 38 waiting to sit on another 737 to take me to see my girlfriend.</p>

<p>The changes / simplification I made to Garrick's script could just as easily be made for Flickr, del.icio.us or any other tag name space. I just don't really care about those. The modified version of the script outputs this markup now:</p>

<code>
  <pre>
    &lt;a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt;MarsEdit&lt;/a&gt;
  </pre>
</code>

<p>I'll clean up my code and comments and post the Apple Script here, too.</p>

  

        
  [...] If you’re using my TagMaker script with MarsEdit, shaners 0 matic 8000 posted a patch for better Technorati placement: Reworked tagmaker script. [...]

<p>A year or so ago, I heard someone mention <a href="http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/">the million dollar homepage</a> in a blog or something. I thought it was hilarious. And Genius. The premise was as a part 'Internet History' you could buy any number of contiguous pixels in a rectangle for one dollar per pixel. The site was selling ads for a total of 1 million pixels. 1 million pixels, 1 dollar each... wait for it... 1 million dollars. Fucking crazy right? Well, it seems to have worked the site is totally covered in ads, so presumably they made a million freaking dollars on a gimmick.</p>

<p>Then later on I saw a site called <a href="http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/" rel="bookmark">Websites as Graphs</a> which turned a web page into a tree diagram illustrating different type of html tags with different colors and showing the nested structure of a page. Its pretty neat.</p>

<p>At the bottom of the results page, the page where you diagram would be shown, there was a little blue box with a 1 number in the middle of it. Curious. I followed it up and it was <a href="http://www.onethousandpaintings.com/">1000 Number Paintings</a>. The guy who made the diagram site also did a <em>little</em> painting project.</p>

<p>The schtick was 1000 paintings; all 12 inches square, all the same blue background with a white number in the middle. Every one had a different number from 1 to 1000. They're all for sale and different amounts based on a couple variables. First is its number. 1000 minus the number on the painting is the base price. So let's take 37. 1000 - 37 = $963. 724 would be $276. So the lower the number, the higher the price. Also a factor was how many paintings had sold thus far. Initially, there was a 90%. For every 100 paintings sold discount would go down 10%. So after 500 paintings sold (which is about what its currently at) the price is 40% off. All paintings were a minimum of $40.</p>

<p>So even at the minimum he would make 40 grand if he sold them all. Of course, these kinds of things don't always sell all of them, but the earlier lower number would balance that out, because they would be so much more. You can see which ones are still available and which have sold. It doesn't show you the order, which means you can't figure out the discounts on each, but needless to say, he did good.</p>

<p>That idea later got eli and I thinking about this kind of thing. After talking about we decided that people care more about the <em>story behind the art</em> more than the actual art. For example, if you saw a 8 inch square canvas painted all blue with a 2 inch tall white Helvetica 1 right in the center at a garage sale, knowing nothing about it, would you pay $999 for it? Neither would I. But if its a limited edition, hand numbered, color vinyl, tour release, blah, blah, blah, would you? I still wouldn't, but clearly some people would.</p>

<p>Quite a while back <a href="http://elisfanclub.wordpress.com" rel="met friend neighbor coworker">eli</a> and I were talking about <a href="http://www.myspace.com">myspace</a> some how. I was surely ranting about how much I hate it; all shitty markup, bad error messages, tons of downtime, not to mention to way people use myspace. Its just shit. Across the board complete and utter shit. The only thing, <em><strong>the only thing</strong></em>, myspace has done right is gaining critical mass or the network effect.</p>

<p>We talked about it from lots of angles (social, technical, aesthetic), then he asked me a really good question. <em>What will good social networks look like when they come around?</em> I told him, they already are around. Look at <a href="http://upcoming.org">upcoming.org</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com">flickr</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us">del.icio.us</a>. (yes, I know that all three of these are owned by yahoo now. yes, its just a coincidence. yes, we had this talk ages ago before they bought them. though, it does say something about yahoo's barometer for what's good and important these days.)</p>

<p>All three of them (amoungst others out there on the InterWebs) facilitate social activity based around an activity or an object. Upcoming's activity is scheduling and coordinating events happening in the real world (meetups, parties, etc). You could also say that Upcoming's object is a calendar or event listing. Flickr's activity is sharing photos, their object is photos, obviously. Del.icio.us's activity is storing and sharing bookmarks. Their objects is URLs.</p>

<p>Its interesting to note that at least flickr and del.icio.us are both useful without any of the social aspects. They're an order of magnitude more useful with the social stuff, but if you just wanted to store you bookmarks in a place that wasn't your computer, del.icio.us is still good for that.</p>

<p>Real life relationships are based around the same idea, an object or an activity. You don't find many groups of people getting together or seeking out other people just to 'be friends'. Almost all of everyone's friends were met doing something. Relationships are mitigated by activity. Profile commenting 'hey, wassup?' is not activity. At least, I don't think it is.</p>

<p>So what does all this mean? I'll make a bold and wild prediction here. Even though we see a surge of new social networks right now, I think we'll notice a trend away from generic social networks where all you have is friends and a trend towards a multiple specialized network arrangement. You have a network of networks that you belong to. You'll be a flickr member and have certain flickr relationships based on your flickr activity (photo sharing), some music network for music sharing with music friends, work networks for job stuff, local networks for physical meetups with local friends, and so on.</p>

<p>There will also be a trend toward more kinds of relationships than just friend or not. My lawyer and my hooker are not the same kind of relationship, they both fuck me, but in very very different ways*. I need to be able to separate that online like I do in the real world.</p>

<p>Throw into the mix a more portable ID system with free data import/export and you've got yourself the makings of social network worth a damn.</p>

<p>*Let me be clear. I do not have a lawyer or a hooker. Its just a figure of speech, an expression that, I think, illustrates my point well.</p>