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BookLamp is a 'Pandora for books'

BookLamp is a project that the people at Amazon.com would be idiots to pass up buying.

It's a machine learning tool that's been designed to go through books and analyze not only how they're written, but also help group together novels that share similar structures and styles. The hope is to help people discover books they may like based on previously read novels, or what kind of reading experience they're going for. Internet radio recommendation service Pandora does something similar, employing a thumbs up and down system combined with listening history.

Because BookLamp's system uses machine learning, it skips the three major aspects of each book that humans usually tally: story line and plot, the characters, and writing style. Instead, it figures out bits of these three items by using written cues and quantifiers like word density, pacing, action, character dialogue (as noted by quotations), and level of description. The system also blends in one to five star ratings from Amazon.com.

So far, the database has 179 books, but is tracking more than 700,000 data points over 30,000 scenes from those titles. If it were to scale to track more works, in theory the results for related items would be even more precise. In its current state, users can go in and pick from one of the titles and get recommendations for similar titles, or view the graphs of what the system has recorded for its pacing, density, and other characteristics.

One of the coolest features, and the one I think is the killer app is the pacing analysis. It will go through and figure out when the pace of a book speeds up or slows down.

In the video demo (embedded after the break), creator Aaron Stanton picks Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park as an example, and demonstrates that BookLamp was smart enough to detect when the pace ramps up, including on what page that change occurs. I could see this being a great way to check and see if you're wasting your time on a read that's off to an incredibly slow start and potentially going nowhere. Instead of giving up, you could simply give the chart a quick look.

The project has been around since 2003 and continues to build up its database. There's a sign-up form to request a work to be added. You can also play around with the browsing and stats tool by registering. Be sure to hit the read more button to check out the video walk-through.

[via Digg]

More on Microsoft's database-in-the-cloud service

LAS VEGAS--While Internet Explorer 8 demos, Silverlight progress and a Monkey Boy reprise from Steve Ballmer captured much of the attention at Mix 08--it was a database announcement that could be the sleeper announcement of the show.

What Microsoft announced was a database-in-the-cloud service where Web developers can store their data. Those attending the Mix show here were able to sign up for a beta test that is set to begin in three or four weeks, with a final version aimed to be launched by the end of the year, according to Dave Campbell, a technical fellow in Microsoft's … Read more

SXSWi party scene: Go here. No, go here

AUSTIN, Texas--Despite having plenty of blogging work still to do on Friday night, I decided to check out some of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival's notorious after-hours scene. Man, it's enough to give anyone a headache long before the aftereffects of the free drinks set in the next morning.

Friday night promised to be the least party-heavy night of the week, with only one "official" party on the books: PR firm Porter Novelli's happy hour at the massive bar called Six Lounge. Probably because of the lack of other SXSWi parties, the line outside … Read more

SmugMug smiles for Amazon S3

When photo site SmugMug initially contacted me, it was in the context of some of the pieces that I had written about competitor Flickr and some of the issues associated with protecting photographers' works online.

In a nutshell, relative to Flickr, SmugMug has opted for less of a open-community orientation than for ways to store and display photos with a rather granular set of access controls. (See some discussion by CEO and "Chief Geek" Don MacAskill.)

These are important topics that I'll be discussing further in due course, but today, I'm going to focus on SmugMug'… Read more

Mux does quick, simple Web video ripping

I'm always on the lookout for simple ways to manage video on the Web. One of them, called Mux has been getting some buzz lately for taking advantage of both Amazon's EC2 and S3 Web services to store data and do the crunching at the same time. Mux uses the two services together to serves as a video ripper and converter, letting you grab videos off a small handful of popular sites and save them locally or send them to your mobile phone. It'll also take any file on your computer and convert it without the need … Read more

Blippr takes Twitter model, applies it to product reviews

In case you can't read from the screenshot above, Blippr lets users browse and rate commercial products including books, video games, movies, and music. The twist is that these reviews are incredibly short at just 160 characters, or the limit on an SMS message on your mobile phone. Twitter, the popular micropublishing tool pioneered this idea, and the folks at Blippr think it might work on product reviews.

The fact that I need to write more about it is also one of the reasons that Blippr doesn't fit he bill for what it was created for. Sometimes reviews just need to be longer to give a product or service justice.

Coming back to the review system, the written reviews are coupled with a 1-4 rating system that uses emoticons (aww how cute) to establish a metascore for how good an item is. In addition to the rest of the Blippr users scores, you can get see a quick friends score as long as your Blippr friends have rated said item. These scores are shown at the top of each review and help sort through content.

Blippr doubles as a social bookmarking tool, letting you create custom lists and subscribe to the day's hot list of products that are getting buzz. There are no ads on the site, so to supplement an income for the creators, the entire thing runs off affiliate links to various online retailers.

Here's the thing, I like this service at a very visceral level. It rips off a lot of GUI from Flickr, but I'm OK with that because writing 160 word reviews is simple and brings that same publishing happiness that Twitter does. What I don't like is that same limitation ends up amounting to something more like one-line comments on a blog post than something constructive or substantial like you'll find on the native user review systems on popular Web retailers such as Amazon and Netflix. Sometimes the details really do amount to something.

The service is in private beta, although the folks at Blippr were kind enough to offer Webware readers some invites. To get yours, click here. More shots after the jump.

Next up: Amazon sides with Blu-ray

For those who came in late, Blu-ray has won the format war.

On Wednesday, online retailer Amazon.com became the latest to declare its support for the victorious high-definition technology, announcing that it "will more prominently promote Blu-ray hardware and software products on its Web site." The company will not, however, discontinue its sales of HD DVD products.

"The high-definition landscape is rapidly changing, and consumers are looking for guidance on how to make the best high-definition buying decisions," Peter Faricy, Amazon's vice president of movies and music, said in a statement from the company. &… Read more

Amazon storage 'cloud' service goes dark, ruffles Web 2.0 feathers

Amazon.com Web Service's hosted storage service went down Friday morning, frustrating many Web site customers and refreshing concerns with the ballyhooed approach of cloud computing.

An online forum spiked with customer complaints Friday morning as some people found that content stored on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) was unavailable or performed slowly.

The service was restored a few hours later, according to an Amazon technician. The first forum posting was timed at 5 a.m. PT, and the service was back up at just past 9 a.m.

The glitch sent a ripple through the blogosphere as … Read more

The future of the 'cloud,' open source, and the OS

When my posting frequency drops a bit, the usual reason is that I'm flying here and yon and otherwise occupied with goings-on at some conference, meeting, or client engagement. The situation in January was a bit different. For the first time in a while, I had some decent blocks of uncommitted time. And I put those to use fleshing out and writing some longer research notes that had been sitting on the to-do list for way too long.

Two of these deal with so-called "cloud computing"--the idea that software will increasingly run in the network. These … Read more