listening to words/blog

(alternative title: New feature! RSS feeds for tag pages!) Now it’s easy to find out when lectures on particular topics of interest have been added to the listening to words database.  Simply go to a particular tag page, say, agriculture, and click on the orange RSS icon next to the tag title.  Add that URL to your favorite news reader, and voila, you’ll be automatically updated as soon as a new lecture with that tag appears on our site.

Long overdue: There is now a categories page which lists the five (or so) most recently added lectures for each category.

You can now easily del.icio.us, digg, or stumbleupon (yes, it appears any web site name can be turned into a verb now-a-days) directly from lecture pages.

I switched hosting providers (old: powweb.com, new: pair.com) and the site should be running much faster now.  There may be a few glitches in the next few days as I complete the transition to the new server.  If you noticed anything broken, let me know. Thanks.

Although this blog has been quiet for awhile, rest assured that plenty has been happening back on the main site.  Even though I’ve been steadily adding new lectures and features, I kept thinking “Oh, let me add one more feature and then I’ll do a big ‘Check out the new features’ post.”  But that one more feature always led to another one more feature etc. etc.  So from now on I’ll try to do a better job of keeping folks informed as soon as new content appears.  Here’s a brief list of new and newish features:

• In the recent lectures page you can now add lectures to your playlist(s) and favorites.  The feature is all AJAX’d out so there’s no need to refresh the page or anything.
• There’s a spot on the homepage now that lists how many lectures have been added since you last visited the site (you must be registered for this feature to work.)
• Lectures originating from YouTube can now be viewed right in the lecture page (example.)
• There’s now an archive of past featured lectures.
• A ton of other minor stuff I’m forgetting.

I’ve still got a list of about 50 features I’d like to add, so keep your eye on this blog for more frequent updates. And don’t hesitate to let me know if there are any features or lectures you’d like to see on the site.

That’s from Kurt Vonnegut. He will be missed. Thanks to the Celebrity Lecture Series at Michigan State University we can still hear both Vonnegut and another great American voice we recently lost, David Halberstam.

New feature: related tags. You’ll find them on individual tag pages (like religion) as well as people pages (like Will Wright.) What it shows is a list of tags that are also found in lectures containing the chosen tag or person. It’s just another way of exploring the database that will hopefully lead towards finding interesting stuff you didn’t even know you were looking for (like say, a lecture tagged with both “religion” and “humor”.)

Pop!Tech is a “one-of-a-kind conference, a community of remarkable people, and an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas.” Last year they streamed all of the lectures live for free, which was just fantastic (I didn’t get much work done those two days.) Now they’ve done one better and made most of the sessions available online in mp3, flash video, and quicktime. I’ve added them to the site here.

Recommended: Thomas Barnett is a human leaf-blower when it comes to topics like geopolitics, security, terrorism, and globalism. Erin McKean talks about words, language, and dictionaries (we’ve also got her talk at Google.)

With the addition of the Faraday archive, the database stands at 826 lectures. Seems as good a time as any to announce the thing to the world. Thanks to all my beta testers.

Thanks to beta tester feedback, I realized that the people list needed to be sorted by last name. So now it is. Unless the name ends in something like “Jr.” Those all end up in the J’s. If there are any MySQL pros out there who know how to handle sorting by last name when the name strings are all in a single field, I’m all ears.