Instapaper and reading on the iPhone

I've been finding Instapaper really useful lately for reading longer articles from the web.

Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.
We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.
Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

A one-click bookmarklet adds it to your list and there's an iPhone application for reading the articles. It works for me, giving good clean text for in-depth reading on my iPhone during my daily train commute. It's more like reading a book than a feedreader and I think that mode of reading is valuable. Anyway, some of my recent favourites...

Paul Morley on how a year studying at the Royal Academy of Music changed him
Leviathan or, The Whale | PD Smith
Pitchfork: Poptimist: Poptimist #23 on the charts
3quarksdaily on "DESIRE PATHS: READING, MEMORY AND INSCRIPTION"
The Best Bits » American Scientist - A new technology called compressive sensing slims down data at the source

If you use Instapaper you can subscribe to my starred articles using my username, tristanf.

Local searches on the BBC

We had an informal hackday in the RAD team on Friday, Suzy got the top 10,000 search terms in one day, July 9th, from the BBC search team and we extracted and plotted any UK placenames (see my previous cuckoo map). We're interested in how much local information people search for.

Interesting things at Activate 09

Martin and Roo have posted much more comprehensive write ups of the Activate 09 conference put on by The Guardian yesterday, so I'm just going to add some interesting facts and quotes which show, I think, what a remarkably diverse, interesting and sometimes inspiring conference it was.


Use tech as a way of thinking for rebuilding failed states. Clare Lockhart

"Mainstream media is ADHD, new media is OCD." Arianna Huffington

The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century left 100 million dead, about 50% of the population of Europe. Nick Bostrom

"Context = location + time + history + social" Ed Parsons

Jon Udell is building a local events site that takes inputs from Upcoming, Eventful and a curated delicious account of relevant iCal feeds, aggregates them and publishes them, including onto the local community TV channel. (me: I love the connections going on here.)

Political blogs are Henry Ford's "faster horse". The technologies that don't look like journalism will be those that change government and politics. Tom Steinberg

Amazon's Mechanical Turk made work into a game - you can choose tasks, do them when you want, you get points and you can communicate socially with other workers. Some key dynamics of games: Personal progress, competition, recognition and goals. Andy Baio

(me: I didn't note who said these and I'm paraphrasing...)

Highly usable online credit card transfers made the difference for Amazon and Obama.

"Test it, if it works scale it"

"We need a government where tolerance of failure is accepted"

"Teach people how to use the tools of participation"

"Develop tools that allow us to understand and analyse all the information that is now available on the internet"


(me again) Go and read something from all the people mentioned above, it'll do you good, and if we actually do or make some of these things that would be even better.