This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
Just how important is coffee to the functioning of the blogosphere? Very important, one would think. But that would only be idle speculation. Now it is possible not just to think, but to know, on a case-by case basis, thanks to Twitter and Twitterverse. As blogs have multiplied into the tens of millions and become more bloated and complex there is a trend in the reverse direction towards microblogging, based on the design principle of economy, less is more. Twitter, an extremely popular service created by a company named Obvious, enforces the "less" part of the principle by limiting the length of blogposts to 140 characters. That's what I was hinting at when I posted this item about Twitter in late March. In addition to the 140-character limit, the Twitter folks request that every update posted be an answer to the question "what are you doing right now?" Most Twitter members respect that request most of the time. And there is an extraordinary presence of the "movers and shakers" of the blogosphere and of the Web 2.0 world among avid Twitter updaters.
Then along came Twitterverse, within the past week as a matter of fact. Twitterverse, a mashup project by Max Kiesler and Emily Chang of Ideacodes, which creates a word cloud of the most recent posts to Twitter by its members, making it possible to search for a specific word. The Twitterverse visitor can choose the among the last hour of Twitter updates, the last five or ten hours, or the previous day.
And so your Coffeeblogger searched for the word "coffee" over the past ten hours, and found that Twitterverse created an URL which could be posted as a link in the Coffeeblog sidebar, along with the other tsatskes. And readers of this post need not even seek out the sidebar, they can merely click right here.
As I write this, I am taking a look at the coffee references for the past ten hours. There are those who are drinking coffee, needing coffee, simply mentioning coffee, having coffee with meals, meeting friends at coffee shops, reading the Bible while consuming coffee, giving instructions on the proper pronunciation of coffee (caw-fee), complaining about the side effects of too much coffee, and begging for money that might otherwise be spent on coffee. If Abd al-Qazir Al-Jaziri were alive today, he would be proud of his contribution to the Internet coffee culture.
Every page now has Seesmic/Disqus video commenting. Scroll to the bottom to see or post video comments. There are also Haloscan comments at the end of each separate blogpost article. To read a text-only version of Jonathan's Coffeeblog on your iPhone or other mobile phone, click here. Or to see the graphics with less text, click here.
