Great statistics for those who are interested in the usage trends of Social Networking websites.

The only social networks studied that didn’t have more women than men in the 18-24 year old group were venerable old LinkedIn (where incidentally the 25-34 age group was tops) and a site called Perfspot.

Other highlights:

• Women ages 14-24 dominate activity on social networks and have more friends than men of the same ages.
• Men ages 35+ are more active and have more friends than women of the same ages.
• The average social network user has 2-25 friends.
• There are a disproportionately high number of 69 year olds across various social networks. (my guess is that it’s the most popular ‘fake age’)

Link: Study: Women Outnumber Men on Most Social Networks

Cuil.com was a hot topic yesterday.

Follow up to my earlier post on search engines, I am not sure if I can describe this as “diversity of the Web” … well, it is surely entertaining.

Eric Schmidt

Larry Page

Ghandi

Paul Graham

Link: The World According to Cuil

Related Article: Try Yuil

“The Dancing Girl of Izu (伊豆の踊子)”, originally published in 1926 by Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成 - The first Japanese to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature), was repackaged in the style of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (ジョジョの奇妙な冒険) and sold at 7-Eleven outlets to attract young readers in Japan.

I was fascinated by this cover art (right). The interpretation is almost “an exact opposite image of the book’s content (from 2-channel)”!

Link: Novels under manga cover: Convenience stores go literary

This post has made my day … with a bit of bitterness.

At its charming new stock price of $12, the New York Times Company (NYT) has an enterprise value of about $2.85 billion. As BusinessWeek’s Jay Yarow notes, after you back out all the non-core stuff, that means that the New York Times itself–the paper and the digital assets–are valued at about $750 million. That’s less than half of what CBS just paid for CNET…

Link: Announcing Our Offer For The New York Times Company

A short animation for BBC Sport’s Olympics marketing campaign. By Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, the duo who brought you the Gorillaz.

Link: YouTube BBC’s Channel

Want to make a point but couldn’t do it alone? Start a campaign on ThePoint.com.

I first saw this site about 4 or 5 months ago and really like the concept. The Beta tag was recently dropped with a redesign and some new features. Had to say that I personally like the old NewYorker-ish page style a little better.

Link: ThePoint.com

Related Article: How to Avoid the Curse of Vision Overload
by Andrew Mason (ThePoint.com Founder)

I attended a WebGuild event few months ago on the topic of Social Search and saw some interesting demos from sites like Mahalo (human power search engine) and Eurekster (search meets wiki). My instant reaction was mixed: how would the result-refining task ever work on a large scale? how to measure the quality of a search query? Is collaborative filtering a good or bad thing for the users?

I am not an SEO expert, so purely speaking from a user’s perspective, I would choose variety over accuracy since I believe “diversified definitions” is exactly what makes the Web so attractive compared to other media. That being said, I am pretty happy with the way search works today, and I think tagging as opposed to ranking, is where improvement is needed.

I goggled “better search algorithm”and this article ranks second on the first page. Here is a direct quote:

What if we had an “open source” search engine that everyone working in and around the area of search could plug into? The companies working in tagging, shared searching, audio and video search could offer their results/indexes to the open source search engine so that their meta data could be considered in preparing the best results?

With the above being said, this post was a result of what came into my mind after seeing the video demonstrating Google’s Digg-like search interface on TechCrunch this morning.

Link: Is This The Future Of Search?

Rocksteady sound is melodic, romantic and psychedelic at its best. With Alton Ellis’s magical voice, the classy ska swing at a lower speed is simply irresistible.

-Image(I’m Still in Love with You) from Amazon.com

==Playlist 2008.07.16: Alton Ellis and Rocksteady ==

01 It Hurts Me So - Reggae Chronicles
02 Harder & Harder - The Legendary Alton Ellis
03 I’ll Be Waiting - ELLIS, Alton feat Hortense Ellis
04 You Are Mine - The Hudson Affair
05 Rock Steady - Alton Ellis & The Flames - Trojan Selecta Vol 6
06 This Feeling Of Love - The Best of Alton Ellis
07 La La Means I Love You - Reggae Chronicles
08 Black On Black - Hail Jimaica
09 I’m Still In Love With You - ELLIS, Alton feat Hortense Ellis
10 Sun Of Man - Sun of Man
11 Since I Fell For You - The Legendary Alton Ellis
12 Why Birds Follow Spring - The Birth Of Trojan
13 Blackman’s Pride - The Legendary Alton Ellis

Download XSPF Playlist

Link: Alton Ellis on Wikipedia

Evernote provides the tool to capture and save your browser’s clipboard data and post it online in one click. This is one of the best online services I have seen this year.

Link: EverNote.com

Building a personal site in the blog format has many obvious advantages. It’s fast to build, easy to manage, flexible and expandible. If you are using open source content management systems (CMS) such as Wordpress (Blog) or PhpBB (Forum), there are big communities out there that generate enormous amount of resources that allow site owners to choose specific feature sets and implement them quick.

The build-from-scratch approach simply seems a lot less attractive now. If I have enough control over customization, there is almost no reason not to go with this time-saving route, even it means I have to live with a fixed content / presentation structure.

There was a time I thought building a Flash wrapper is more interesting than the actual content. This site could have looked like this:

As a music lover, I’ve always wanted to see an online music service that provides users a functionality to create personal playlists that can be easily shared on the Internet. Like a mixtape concept for example. Users can send emails to friends with an RSS-like attachment that launches the music player with instant streaming samples, or post it to any social networking sites and then let the friends to make purchase decisions in a per song basis.

Here it is, my long-time favorite music store juno.co.uk just launched a new feature that allows anyone to create a playlist and distribute it online using the Juno Player via XSPF (XML Shareable Playlist Format). The interface isn’t perfect yet, but they have such a great music selection that I could start a weekly DJ podcast just by playing off samples with no need to host the actual mp3, and, well, not breaking the law, too.

==Playlist 2008.07.05: Nu Jazz, R&B, Funk and Broken Beat Session==

Download M3U Playlist | Download XSPF Playlist

DJ MITSU THE BEATS - One More Roses (Sho Chiku Bai Japan)
COBBLESTONE JAZZ - 23 Seconds (K7)
REPLIFE - The Unclosed Mind (Futuristica Music)
ROY AYERS - Stoned Soul Picnic (Warner Jazz)
MARCO DI MARCO TRIO feat JACKY SAMSON - Un Auntunno A Parigi (Arision)
STATELESS - Art Of No State (Freerange)
BLAZE - Lovelee Dae: The Final Chapter (Playhouse)
SKEG & ROB LIFE - Dirtybeatbreakinfunkandhiphop (Breakin’ Bread)
LITTLE DRAGON - Little Dragon (Peacefrog)

An interesting online bookstore that has a Google Maps-like interface.

Link to Zoomii.com