clock … watching time, the only true currency

These aren’t new, but it is Saturday, and I’m sick of staring at them in my inbox.

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I thought all The Economist content was invisible on the web, but not this September 7, 2006 opinion piece, “Welcome aboard,” which asks “In-flight announcements are not entirely truthful. What might an honest one sound like?” An honest one would be scary; this, therefore, is funny.

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When will the web have a better tool for comparing traffic than Alexa? Boy Wyman’s musings are one among a dozen examples I might dig up where people jump to conclusions based on these numbers only because there is no viable public alternatives.

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Via the Map Room blog, I noted with dismay that Amazon discontinued its Block View feature. I was convinced in early February 2005, right after its introduction, that this was big news.

I think Amazon is trying to kickstart Dan Bricklin’s cornucopia of the commons for a web view of a locale that is better than anything previously offered or envisioned.

Well, I’ve been right before and I’ve been wrong before. Oh well. I hope the data gathered doesn’t disappear: will be a historical curiousity, if nothing more.

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A friend pointed out LibraryThing, and I’ve been meaning to invest a bit of time to see just how addictive it might. Not yet.

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CNET News.com article “Make sense of medical bills with MedBillManager” caught my eye. Several weeks ago, I found the bill from a Saturday night visit to the emergency room for the boy’s earache to be maddening, both in its amount and its complexity (why do the doctor and the hospital bill separately?). I’m more likely to input my books into LibraryThing than medical information into MedBillManager at this point, but I do hope someone finds a profitable niche in making the medical maze less troublesome for real people.