Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Vancouver Sun.  This is a follow up to the hydrogen eating bacteria story.  Apparently, the earth's crust contains huge stores of hydrogen that leaks out naturally.  There is 1,000 liters of hydrogen in every cubic meter of rock in the crust.  >>>"The most promising source of the hydrogen may be geological "traps" similar to those now drilled for natural gas. Professor Freund said: "One of these natural hydrogen fields is already known to exist in North America, and extends from Canada to Kansas."<<<  Can you say hello to home power generation and home-based hydrogen fuel stations for cars?  GM already has a home power generator that will cost only $2 k and extract hydrogen from natural gas.  This will make it mandatory equipment.  Massive decentralization.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 8:27:13 PM    comment []

John Sands: "In my mail archiving, I've given up browsing completely...for my mail, I don't put things in folders anymore. Everything I want to keep is forwarded to a POP address I use only for archiving. I have a program that grabs everything from that address, saves it, converts each message to an HTML file, pulls out the attachments and links to them, and stores everything where Index Server will find it. So now I only search." Nice idea - the email equivalent of using Google instead of bookmarks. Index Server is actually pretty cool, and very easy to use. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 3:17:34 PM    comment []

Weblog Bookwatch. "I thought it would be interesting to see which books are being mentioned most frequently on weblogs. Weblog BookWatch keeps track of weblogs that flow through the recently changed list at weblogs.com and searches for links to Amazon.com. Then it looks at the ISBN in the link's URL, and counts the link as a mention of that book. The most fequently mentioned books show up on the Top 10 list, with references to the weblogs that mentioned them. It's only looking for books right now (not CDs or other products), and only looking for links to Amazon.com." [Paul Bausch] Too cool! Now if we only had a librarians.weblogs.com against which we could run this type of query! Imagine it for different genres, too. It sounds like Paul is tracking other interesting Amazon services, as well: "Amazon is offering an XML Platform for developers so they can integrate Amazon's best-sellers into their websites. If you're an associate, log into the associate site for more info. This is an interesting step toward Amazon becoming a Web Service. They're ahead of the curve, and really understand how the Web works. I can't wait to see how they expand this. An independent developer has already written a Perl module called Business::Associates that works with the new platform." as well as: "DayPop is tracking Amazon Wish Lists. (I have one of those.) The next step is to be able to filter a list like that by my friends—or by groups of domain experts in various subjects. (imagine: this is what the top 50 web designers [as voted by their peers] are wanting to read. or doctors. or indy musicians. or anthropology students. etc.)" Too much to think about at the moment, but I'd like to spend some time on it someday. [The Shifted Librarian] 6:57:46 AM    comment []