A few years ago I made it a goal to read a book a month for a year. I did OK. I didn’t reach my goal but I found time to read a fair number of books and had a great time doing it.

But now I’m finding it hard to get through a single book, or even a few chapters of a book. I find it especially hard to read long form on the iPad. With a flick of my fingers I can check Twitter, Facebook, my email, CNN.

Most books have rough parts. Parts that drag, lull, or seem to slow way down. You expect it. And when I came to these parts in past I would simply power through them. But now, if I find even a few sentences in a row that do not keep my attention I feel like I should move on, close the book, and read something else.

OK. We get it. We are probably all suffering from this trend. So how am I going to conquer it? Simple; practice. I’m going to retrain my attention span. I’m going to sit down with something – a book, a project, maybe even some time for meditation – and spend 30 minutes with it. Then, I’ll progress from there.

For whatever reason this hasn’t really affected my work or my personal research projects. I’m guessing that deadlines have something to do with that.

I’ll report back on my progress.

Random 60: Can not find writing paper in stores! | Favorite on Viddler.

I know that writing letters is at an all time low – but is it so ‘unpopular’ to write that writing paper should be absent from the store shelves? I went to a few stores and not only didn’t they carry paper, they looked at me weird when I asked if they carried it!

What would John Adams and Thomas Jefferson do? I know, I know, probably Twitter each other.

Thoughts?

Google, and more specifically Google.org, has setup an equally neat and useful system for tracking search trends regarding influenza. Apparently search trends are enough of an indicator to track actual flu activity. In other words, Google’s Flu Trends tool can now tell you how active these influenza viruses are in your area “up to two weeks faster than traditional systems”.

That seems an incredibly tall order but I believe them.

This tool sort of reminds me of two other systems that, while they too are incredibly ambitious, have made a large impact on the general human population. The National Weather Service’s storm warning systems and The Amber Alert. Both of these government-backed systems are very different but both have had incredible successes to help save lives and return missing or abducted children to their parents.

If Google is able to raise flu awareness in the US population by even a small percentile, it’d be a huge win for this tool. I wonder what other “search trend tools” could be built to help protect and serve the community.  And, even more importantly, how they can effect those that live inside and outside of the United States.

Source: Google Flu Trends.

Thanks Peter.
If you’d like to suggest a topic, please do! 

As of: May 1, 2008

Somewhat recently, according to this graph (pictured), the Apple iPhone has taken over the top spot as Flickr user’s use it more than any other camera phone to publish photos to Flickr.  The Nokia N95 had a demanding lead over every other camera phone, while the iPhone took the lead with an amazing upswing.

This is not suprising to me, giving the ease of uploading from the iPhone to Flickr through email.  For those that have “jail broken” their iPhones there is also an application they can use to upload photos directly to Flickr.  I shutter [sic] to think what this graph will look like once version 2 of the iPhone software comes out, and there is an official application, or many applications, for uploading photos to Flickr.

Source: Flickr: Camera Finder.

I’d be remiss not to mention my goal of Bringing it all together and how I’m getting pretty close to my personal online publishing Utopia.

Jeremy Keith wrote about his personal efforts, and the efforts of a few others, and how the strategies all differ. It seems that there are few different ways to go about “bringing it all together”, you just have to choose which one you like the best.  Here is a short list:

• Publish only on your own site.
• Publish everywhere but aggregate back to your site.
• Publish everywhere but link from your site.

Source: Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site