Kevin Killian’s 1,525 reviews have earned him a ranking of 119th as an Amazon reviewer. He reviews books, movies, cookware, clothing…just about anything. But Killian is also a poet. Hooke Press has published a small edition—200 copies—of his Selected Amazon Reviews, edited by Brent Cunningham. The blurb for the book describes it as “Subversive and delightful modifiations to a pervasive online art form.” (Killian is prone to typos.)

The delightful meta-trail ends here, though: The book is not listed in Amazon.

(Thanks to Trebor Scholz for the link.) [Tags: kevin_killian amazon genre meta reviews everything_is_miscellaneous -berkman]

The Wall Street Journal reports on NewsAtSeven.com, a beta site from Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Lab, that automatically aggregates a news broadcast, hosted by an avatar named “Alex.” (Actually, it’s Alix from Half-Life 2. In fact, the the whole presentation seems based around Half-Life machinima.)

As it stands, it’s hard to tell how impressive the results are. The voice is clearly doing text-to-speech conversion, but I have no idea idea where the text is coming from. The editions I sampled are short and coherent, but for all I know, the system just picked a topic—e.g., Will Ferrell’s new movie—located a news report on the Web, and read it. The graphics are appropriate, but, again, I don’t know that they’re any better than what you’d get if you took the top results from a search for “Will Ferrell” at YouTube, Google Images, etc. So, I don’t know what’s supposed to impress me. I’m not saying it’s not impressive. I just don’t know how.

(Yes, the project could use a good marketer.) [Tags: newsatseven news everything_is_miscellaneous ]

BuzzMetric‘s Matthew Hurst’s excellent blog, “Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media,” has run some great examples of why sentiment analysis—figuring out the attitudes expressed about a topic—is so damn hard. Here‘s someone posting about Steve Rubel and Wal-Mart: “Certainly, if you don’t post about it, I’m personally not going to not respect you for not doing so, however others may.” Let’s see a computer make sense of that!

Of course, that’s just overly-complex writing that even humans have trouble parsing. But how about this example, drawn from a review of the Su Hong restaurant: “When we moved from the area, my wife’s most frequent complaint was that no one made orange peel beef like Su Hong.” As Matthew points out, it’s a positive review in the form of a complaint.

Sentiment analysis remains real hard. For judging overall market trends, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but I’d love to see some analysis of how good it actually is right now. [Tags: sentiment marketing matthew_hurst everything_is_miscellaneous]

DayLife looks like a very interesting new site for assembling news sliced the way you want it.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch rips into it (even though he’s an investor) because, among other things, it has no RSS feeds. (It does have an API). I suspect that that’s because it’s conceived as a contextualized destination. Arrington thinks it won’t succeed because it won’t draw “news junkies,” which seems right. But maybe it’s not aiming at news junkies. Maybe it’s aiming at people looking for an online way of reading news that makes it easier to browse clusters of what they’re interested in. I think the slick, human-friendly look is a plus, although I haven’t played with it enough to know whether it’s going to become a permanent destination for me. My main hesitation: While I like it’s presentation of multiple sources and opinions, and i love it’s focus on clustering, I would like it to learn what are my interests. I’m also suprised that it doesn’t let readers leave comments.

Jeff Jarvis, another investor, gives a more enthusiastic write-up than TechCrunch’s. Craig Newmark is another investor. I have a lot of respect for Jeff and Craig’s understanding of, and commitment to, the news revolution. [Tags: daylife news everything_is_miscellaneous media techcrunch jeff_jarvis craig_newmark]

Sean Coon has a terrific post reverse engineering the metadata at work at Musicovery, a Web radio site that has a Flashy UI that displays cuts by mood as well as genre, etc. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous sean_coon music metadata taxonomy ]

danah notes:

Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a change.

This is so fascinating. Us middle-aging bloggers who think blogs are about building selves in the new public are apparently not speaking for anyone other than us middle-aging bloggers. Maybe Web presence for the young’uns has little to do with building selves or maybe the nature of that public self is so different from the corporeal one the middle-agers have imported from the real world, or maybe something else entirely is going on. And maybe—although I think this is less likely—when the young’uns age to the middle, they’ll feel about their Web selves the way us current middle-agers do.

Damn, this is an interesting world. [Tags: danah_boyd self web everything_is_miscellaneous ]

I’ve added the FastForward blog to my blogroll because it’s got an excellent list of contributors and has been posting some very interesting stuff if you care about folksonomies, KM, “enterprise 2.0” (oy), etc. (Also, I get to use the little auto-blogroll creator I wrote over the weekend to make it easier to update Dan Bricklin’s blogrolling javascript.) But, I owe some disclosure on it: The blog is produced to support the FastForward event, a conference sponsored by Fast Search. I spoke at an executive seminar Fast put on a few months ago, and I may be doing some form of work at the FastForward conference, so I am in a basic conflict, not to mention that bunches of the contributors are friends of mine. So, now that the disclaimer has gone on longer than the recommendation… [Tags: blogs fast_search fastforward everything_is_miscellaneous km]

Lisa Williams’ PlaceBlogger launched today. It aggregates blogs that are about the places where the bloggers live. Unlike Steve Johnson’s Outside.in, it is hand-assembled and it focuses on bloggers writing about where they live; Outside.in maintains a list of placebloggers but it also aggregates posts about places no matter the location of the people who wrote them. That gives PlaceBlogger a certain intimacy and the potential to seed local communities of bloggers, while Outside.in is better site if you’re trying to find everything said about a location. It also means that, especially at the outset, Outside.in has more stuff, while PlaceBlogger feels a bit sparsely populated…so pitch in and add to PlaceBlogger the placeblogs you rely on.

I love the idea both these sites pursue, knitting the virtual with the real, words with dirt.

Quintura is copyrighted 2006 but Hanan Cohen just pointed it out to me this morning, so I’m counting it as new in my 2007. Type in a search term and it creates a cloud of related topics (using the Yahoo search engine), which you can use to refine your search by adding them or excluding them. Unfortunately, the site was timing out for me this morning, but you can see a screen video demo here. [Tags: placeblogs blogs placeblogger outside.in quintara everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy lisa_williams steve_johnson]