Bookworm

Why I Enjoy Brijit (and response to Barbara Kay piece)

What makes Brijit worth reading?

• Brijit abstracts and reviews nonfiction content -- from newspapers, magazines, a few top tier blogs, radio, and television -- in no more than one hundred words.  It also rates the piece from zero to three "dots" (including half dots), with three dots being the best.
• Brijit reviews some content that isn't available online for free.  This is helpful if you're trying to decide whether to pick up the newest New Yorker or New York Review of Books, or can even help you target the choicest pieces in your slithery stacks of O magazine and Entertainment Weekly. 
• You can subscribe to RSS feeds for individual sources or particular subjects.
• The red, white, and black design is crisp and the interface is clean with a few Web 2.0 touches (for example, you can click to open or close the top headlines on the main page without a page refresh).

What if I want to write for Brijit -- how does it work?

1. Register as a writer.
2. Choose an open assignment (but make sure you can access the content first). Most assignments can be claimed by up to three individuals; a few sources call for only two submissions and one source (The Onion) calls for as many as five.
3. Read the article, listen to the audio, or watch the video.
4. Write the abstract, include relevant tags, and choose your dot rating.
5. Submit your work prior to the deadline.
6. The Brijit editors choose the best submission, edit it, and publish it on the website.
7. You can (obsessively) check the status of your submissions within your profile pages, haunt the main page for a familiar headline, or (for the more Zen among you) simply wait for the congratulatory email telling you of a published abstract.
8. Writers of published abstracts of print sources earn $5 for each; published abstracts of audio and video broadcasts earn $8.  Brijit pays by PayPal or check once a month.

Response to Barbara Kay's article

Yesterday I read an article on canada.com by Barbara Kay, who expressed her distaste for the competitive nature of writing abstracts for Brijit.com.  Her son, Jonathan Kay, gets a thrill from competing against a few other writers (in one particular case, a co-worker) for the prize of getting an abstract published, whereas Kay "shuddered at the very thought of exposing myself to such humiliation," and began talking about gender differences with regard to competition. 

1. First of all, presumably most people aren't making a game out of it the way Jonathan did (although it is very satisfying when your abstract is chosen).  Therefore, in most cases no one but you and the Brijit staff know when your lovingly crafted abstract was not the chosen one. So, really, how humiliating is that?
2. Also, we live in a world where, for better or for worse, we all find ourselves in competition for places on a sports team, for acceptances to the college of our choice, or for our dream job.  I can't imagine a safer environment than the Writers Area of Brijit.com to embrace a little private humility (when someone else writes a better abstract) and deserved, earned pride (when yours is selected and hits the front page). 
3. You can even benchmark yourself against the most successful writers to try to improve your skills.  Brijit is really an English major's dream -- you can get paid for reading and writing.
4. Kay calls the pay scale "nugatory".  Sure, most of us wouldn't be able to afford to work full time for this rate of pay or with this degree of uncertainty.  But perhaps there is sufficient benefit if you think of it differently.  Writing for Brijit causes someone to read, listen to, or watch high quality nonfiction, and hone his or her skills of critical thinking, synthesis, and concise writing.  And, if the skill is sufficient, some extra cash can be had (which is no small thing in the current economy).
5. Finally, Kay states: "Just as most war gamers are male, I bet this Brijit website has been inundated with male “reviewers” and very few women writers." I'm not privy to the overall statistics, but she might be surprised to know that, as of today's date, five of the top ten most prolific and successful writers on Brijit are women.

[Disclaimer: I am a Brijit writer.  But even if I wasn't, I'd be reading the content on the site.]

Who Should I Vote For?

Have you decided who you'll vote for in the primaries?  I have to say that I'm torn. 

There's an online quiz at a site called Quiz Rocket -- I'm going to try it out.  Well, heck, DO NOT take that quiz.  It wasn't a bad quiz, but before they'd give the results you had to click through all sorts of stupid "offers" -- and some screens you couldn't get through without agreeing to get information on something.  And the kicker?  My dream candidate?  Joe Biden -- WHO IS OUT OF THE RACE.

OK, let's try another one at a site called Electoral Compass.  This one is much better -- there are text ads on the site, but it doesn't make you jump through any hoops.  It's probably much more useful, too.  You answer every question on a sliding scale: Completely Agree, Agree Somewhat, Neutral, Disagree Somewhat, Disagree Completely, No Opinion.  When you finish it shows where you fall on a quadrant and you can see little head shots of the candidates whose positions are closest to yours.  I'm in the corner where all the Democrats are, am slightly to the right of all of them, but nowhere near the Republicans.  So, yeah, I'm a Democrat.  You can click to see, in percentage points, which candidate aligns closest to your answers. I was in closest agreement with John Edwards, followed by Barack Obama, and then Hillary, but all three were within ten percentage points.  Or, on the quadrant screen, you can click individual issues to see where you and the candidates match up.  And finally, you have the option of saving your data by choosing a user name and password for the site.  No other information is required.

One more -- at a site called Politicalbase.com.  All the questions for this one are on one page, with radio-style buttons to choose for each; essentially the same five option scale as in the prior one (I think that's called a Likert scale).  These questions are less specific -- I'm not sure it will be as accurate at capturing my actual stance on the issues.  Yup, I was right about that.  I think the way the questions were asked made my positions seem more extreme than they actually are.  I matched up with Dennis Kucinich (83% agreement), Bill Richardson (83% agreement), and Mike Gravel (79% agreement).  Richardson is out of the race (which the site acknowledges).  Is Kucinich still in it?  And who on earth is Mike Gravel?  This quiz takes a strong second place, though, because on the screen where they give the percentages it does a nice job of telling you why you matched with the candidates.

Animated History Of NYC Subway

This animated map shows the NYC subway system, with the lines appearing on the map in the order in which they were built. 

[Found via Q Daily News: Appealing Industries: Animated History Of NYC Subway]

Word Usage: State of the Union

This neat tool, called the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud, shows the words that were used the most often in President Bush's speech Tuesday night.  The larger the size of the word in the tag cloud, the more often it was used. 

Spell with Flickr

Type in a word and this utility/toy creates a graphic for that word.  Each letter is an individual picture from Flickr. [Spell with flickr]

del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!

"We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family." [del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!.]

I used both Flickr and del.icio.us before Yahoo bought them (yes, I'm cooler than you think ;-) ), and I have to say that acquiring these popular services does give Yahoo (who I use for web mail) a new presence.  Del.icio.us is a bookmarking service that utilizes tagging; I love it because I can access my bookmarks at home or work.  I back it up periodically and there have been times in the past when their server was slow, but I'm sure those problems will be a thing of the past now that they'll have Yahoo money behind them.   Most of the comments on the del.icio.us blog seem to be positive for its founders, with a few sour grapes.  People want to be anonymous and use great web services for free without having to sign up for a Yahoo ID.  Guess what?  You own the company, you get to make the rules.   

del.icio.us down?

I have really been enjoying del.icio.us as a web tool for storing bookmarks as I work.  I love tagging as a way of finding things again.  I'm really hoping the site isn't gone for good.  That's the problem with using something like this -- it's free, it's great, but when there are problems there's not any way to find out what is going on. All I know is that I've got it set as one of the sites to open when I start up Firefox and this morning is the second straight morning when it didn't load.  I think I have most of my bookmarks backed up -- I put the RSS feed for my del.icio.us page into Newsgator and just never empty that folder.

Update 7/8/05: I didn't have them all backed up, so I'm very glad that del.icio.us is back up today!  If the outage reminded you, too, that you hadn't backed up your bookmarks: Go to the del.icio.us site, go to Settings, click Export, and save the resulting html file.  Simple.

Backpack

"Can a high-tech list help you accomplish more?. . . as with other organizational tools, from day-planner notebooks to PDAs, what you get out of these sites depends on how much you invest in their approach.  The best example is a new service called Backpack, located at www.backpackit.com. . . For those who want to give an online organizer a try, Backpack is relatively simple to use. . . To use Backpack, you create a user name and password to sign on. That takes you to a home page. . . Clicking a button labeled "list" lets you type in a to-do task -- "Have oil changed," for instance. Then, after you hit return, the entry appears on the page in classic to-do style, with a small box next to it waiting for a triumphant checkmark. While the home page serves as a top-level to-do list, Backpack also lets users create other pages to focus in more detail on individual projects.  [WSJ; I hyperlinked the URL]

I am someone who loves to try out new digital toys and tools.  I've been using Backpack for a few weeks now and I'm really liking it. To quibble with the WSJ writer quoted above, I wouldn't really call it an "organizer," since that connotes  paper-based binders which combine calendar, planning pages, contacts, etc.  This app is more for lists and notes and simple project management.  I could see uses for students (one page per class) or writers (one page per writing project).

I love the fact that you can keep a recurring list of tasks (perfect for things like housework) or mix lists with blocks of text on one page.  I love that it's free (at least for the basic version).  It's been very reliable (a must).  You can delete a page when you no longer need it.  For example, we recently went to Cape Cod for a few days.  I created a packing list on Backpack and deleted it after it was no longer needed. You can send an email to any of your pages and the body of the email is saved there. This could be useful for someone with a web-enabled cell phone who wants to post a reminder or note to access later at his or her desktop.

Netdisaster: Go forth and play with this

A nonviolent way to wreak a little havoc: Netdisaster.  I made myself stop after having dinosaurs trample the Foxnews website and causing meteors to rain down on the whitehouse.gov site. :-)

I'd forgotten about this site

Cool site for today: Humanclock.com -- I think I like it because it's a collaborative effort and shows how creative people can be.