Evan Bartlett ‘s blog

I’ve been really getting into reading the sunday ny times. Its a great way to discover new topics, and its generally pretty entertaining on a sunday afternoon, when trying to avoid a computer for the last day of the weekend.

In order to keep track of the things that caught my attention, I wanted to start keeping a list here. As always its tough to decide what format (diigo, google notebook, etc), but for now I’ll just try simple links (I know, I know, I hate that nytime.com requires a login!) Maybe I’ll even get back to reflecting on some of these topics!

Randoms

• The New Hunter S. Thompson documentary!

Local

• Laptop Guide to NYC? – what can we learn about NYC by traveling with a laptop
• Falls are everywhere – NYC art installation of water falls
• Life after tenemants – An all too familiar search for better living conditions on the east side
• Transportation enhancements! – Faster bus lines put in with pay before you board system.
• The Walls Have Big Ears - history of an NYC building
  

Green

• What bubbles leave behind? – how bubbles (tech, energy, etc) create the infrastructure needed for new industries
• The urban shift – back to the city
• The “C” word, Conservation and rewarding it – incentivizing consuming less?
• Clean(er) driving techniques -
• Fashion over cycling function – helmut head is a big concern
• Even the europeans are doing it - feeling the pressure, considering public transport?!
  
  
• Redefining who we are (as americans) -

I havn’t seen anything (not that it wasn’t there) over the past week about donating to help out the victims of the Chinese earthquake crisis, so I did some snooping.  With all the concerns of fraud, and just generally wanting to get my money to the most useful organizations, here’s what I found.

Good Magazine:
Buy a cute panda for a worthy cause

Google: 
Use google checkout to donate to these 2 nonprofits suggested by google.

Jeremiah Owyang, the blogger behind Web Strategy by Jeremiah, puts the number of homeless Chinese as a result of the quake in perspective by comparing it to cities much closer to home.  He urges people to donate to the Red Cross.

Read/write web also has somes posts on mobile giving (just for verizon), and using social networks for social good.

So I got a Kindle a couple of months ago, and I’ve finally got enough time to write about it.

The Kindle is confusing.  It has a shocking amount of functionality, and its hard to see what Amazon was trying to focus on.  Its a web browsing device, it could be a messaging device, its a blog reader, its a magazine reader, and its an online store!

My short answer is that, though this device can do many things, only one of those features is ready for primetime, and thats giving you a great alternative to reading real/paper books.  The experience of purchasing a book online through the whispernet service, and then sitting down to read for hours was really a pleasure.  Its very convenient, the screen is very easy on the eyes, and the akward form factor becomes much less of an issue as you get into a good book.

Despite that fact that the Kindle doesn’t stand out as an engineering marvel (like the iphone) or a tech swiss army knife (blackberry curve), it makes an interesting case for a new type of device.  After my few months of usage I can absolutely see how a mid-size portable device could now have a place in my daily routine, and I think I’m not alone in that thought.  Techcrunch wrote an article here about analysts predicting up to $750 million in sales from the kindle by 2010 (and even the Aussies think things are picking up, despite early skepticism)!

With a bit of imagination, I could see this becoming a great mobile blogging, feed reading, and net browsing device.  Having a big screen is really a pleasure (compared to a cell phone or the iphone) , and as more and more of us spend insane amounts of time online, we will welcome having an alternate way to get our fix.  I eventually get sick of sitting at a computer after a couple of hours, but with the Kindle I’ve definitely logged several marathon reading sessions without fatigue.  Having a comfortable device where I can read all my feeds from anywhere would definitely increase the amount of time I can read web/feed content!

Now I just wanted to highlight a few interesting observations about using the Kindle:

• You can order books from the amazon store online with your computer, and they’ll just show up on your Kindle.  As soon as I see a book I want to read, I just buy, and then its on my kindle to be read sometime in the future.  Think of all the bookshelf space being saved, the potential revenue for Amazon, and the convenience of having your entire “books I want to read list” with you at all times.  I realize you could probably just “save them” for later rather than buying them, but I like making the commitment of  a purchase, so I’ll feel obliged to read them.
   
• I wonder if there are some environmental/green benefits here.  I’d love to see the carbon footprint of paper books vs. that of the kindle (manufacturing through ongoing electricity consumption, etc)
   
• I’m also intrigued with the idea of a last.fm for books.  GoodReads.com is ok, but you manually have to update the site with your information, and in my opinion everything manual eventually fades.  If all the books you read on your kindle got automatically passed to Good Reads (including what section of the book you were reading at that moment), you could really have an interesting social reading experience.  Group could easily be created around books, and even specific chapters of the book, and eventually you could even start discussions with the community in real time as you read on the Kindle!