Being Mark Cohen

I bet my mate that silver-coloured coins were magnetic.  When I was a kid I remember they were.  Only in Australia it turns out they’re not.  It’s worth the cost just to see the lengths he went to

Seth Godin talks about how to lose.  Beyond what he says, who’s to say if you refer someone you cant help to a competitor that the competitor will not reciprocate one day.  Karma.

Google launched Google Earth on the iPhone today, and it’s a swish implementation.  A nice feature is the tilt-sensitivity.  If you tilt the phone its as if you tilt the camera you’re seeing the earth through See picture to the right)

My first thought was "how different to Maps is this – does it warrant a download?".  It’s not something I’d use daily but it’s got some entertainment value.  I’d be keen to know how much data it uses up, and I don’t think I’d play with it too much if not on a wifi.

The speed of the app seems way better than Maps, and it has some nice UI features like momentum – when you spin the earth it "remembers" how fast you moved it and keeps moving for a while.

Here’s a nice yahoo pipes / google charts mashup that charts your tweets like this:

Fun, a little interesting but mostly just abstract cool.  I think this is really just plugging an rss feed into Google Charts and producing is smart looking scatter plot. Nice.

One of the most irritating things about the media industry from a consumer perspective is this:

I was on Facebook, and was dutifully looking at a Flixster movie quizz when an ad for Warner Bros 85th Anniversary and all their promoted movies on itunes came up. I thought “wow, these are cool movies” and clicked the Ad that THEY showed to ME. At this point I get shown this:

So what have they done?  They’ve attracted my attention at their own expense, then told me “you can’t have what you want”.  These guys (and Apple) need to understand that locking a person’s account out of the USA store based on where they live – especially combined with the above – is probably the dumbest thing you could do.

I’ve been looking around at sites that offer fitness / mapping functionality, and stumbled upon EveryTrail. They have an iphone app which uses the built-in GPS to record your trip. My cycle in to work is recorded here. They have the neat ability to upload directly from the phone, in GPX – and they offer the ability to get your data back out in GPX or KML for Google Earth. Data portability – check.

This got me thinking about what I’d look for in a route-tracking / route-planning site like this. I think the key feature is ease of use. If you have to manually manipulate data or files, you’re already losing me. Beyond that I look for the social element. I want to be able to email links to people, embed the map in my own pages, and I want to be able to get comments from other people – like suggestions of alternatives to try. To do this, they’d need to be able to manually build a map (like in Bikely) and I also want the ability to use the maps to plan trips. Motorcycle trips, cycling trips, hiking trips, or even just road trips by car.

This is where both Bikely and EveryTrail lose me. They are a little cumbersome to draw trips manually. Bikely is in my opinion way better than Everytrail for manual drawing but neither is what I would call great. Bikely keeps trying to default to road trips – try draw a trip around Darling Harbour and it keeps trying to send you via the city.Everytrail keeps creating new pins every time I click on the delete pin button, and adding the pins / waypoints is a bit tedious.

The GPS device / iphone solution is clearly the best way to go, but I’m still looking around for a good site, where I can do the same track a few times a week and track my performance over time. And preferably keep using my phone to track my performance and upload straight to the site.