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
The ease with which Internet communication can aggregate the opinions of many millions of human individuals has brought about a renewed interest in what is being called the Hive Mind. An ancient Utopian ideal which goes back even before Plato's Republic and Sparta, the Hive Mind is a major theme in science fiction. The many websites which tally popularity lists, most notably Digg.com, have created the notion of a planetary, or at least species-specific human Hive Mind, which is now instantly accessible.
Since Jonathan's Coffeeblog was born over a cup of coffee in a cafe, I was pleased to find a new (to me) website called Delexa.org, which ranks websites according to topic. It combines data from the behemoth bookmarking site del.icio.us with the merciless blog popularity site, Alexa.com. And according to Delexa, what website does the Hive Mind prefer when it wants to find out about coffee? Duh. Starbucks.com.
Well, what did you expect? As biologist E. O. Wilson reportedly said about an ideology which glorifies the Hive Mind, "Wonderful theory, wrong species." But we are dealing with humans here, not bees or ants. And some, in fact many, of said humans have quite interesting minds of their own. For that reason, I am adding Delexa's coffee website popularity ranking to the sidebar of Jonathan's Coffeeblog, in the "tsatskes" section, because it directs the reader to many interesting coffee-related sites.
For example, there is Sweet Maria, purveyor of green coffee for roast-your-own enthusiasts, where one can learn how to roast their own with a popcorn popper. Seekers of a brief glossary of milk-based espresso beverages can visit INeedCoffee.com's Latte Lingo page. Illy, the Italian packaged espresso exporter also sells exquisite collectible artist-designed espresso cups, an example of which can be seen here. Need a top-of-the line grinder for the perfect grind of those home-roasted mail-order beans? Try this page from WholeLatteLove.com. Want to spend two hundred dollars for a machine that promises a perfect single cup of coffee from a prepackaged "K-cup"? Try this site. And for the grand finale, what is perhaps the greatest coffee website of all time: yes, it's the Coffeegeek, second only to Starbucks on the Delexa Hive Mind Coffee Search.
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.
