Category: Consuming

Topshop is a trendy UK retailer, and they’re pretty tech-savvy, what with a fashion SMS service and such. But their website is so flash-heavy it’s almost impossible to navigate.

It’s still not as bad as the official Icon motorsports page, which is not only difficult to navigate but almost impossible to find if you can’t remember the URL– which is not the name of the company, but rideicon.com. The site is all Flash, so search engines can’t index it. Search for “Icon Motorsports” or “Icon Motorcycle Gear” and you might find some resellers, but not the official page. I guess their sales are all through local motorcycle shops or online resellers anyway, so maybe they don’t care that the site is hard to find and hard to use.

I’d care, though.

Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe has reviewed my employer. You can vote for the story on Digg.

CNN blogs about the Friendster Patent. No wonder the Friendster investors just put more cash in.

We now have a MySpace group for StyleFeeder. You know you want to join it.

So Warren Buffett is giving away money, huh? Well, humorist Adam Green is doing the same. From his “nearly a decade of gainful employment” he donates 85% of his personal fortune of just over six thousand dollars, including the value of his iTunes music library.

Then he details his meagre and likely useless donations, including at the end “You know how when some group or other looking for a handout sends you a sheet of those personalized return-address labels you sort of feel guilted into contributing, as if you owned them something? In any case, I sent $25 to Islamic Jihad.”

NeoOffice is the OpenOffice port for MacOS X — no X11 required. Sweet.

I don’t know why, but I find both of these articles hilarious.

NYT on Marijuana in SF: “What both sides can agree on — in classic San Francisco fashion — is that the problem is really Oakland’s fault…. The rising neighborhood opposition to the clubs also stands in striking juxtaposition to the personal political beliefs of many in San Francisco, a city that prides itself on a progressive attitude.”

And on prostitutes in Germany: “To the list of pernicious things that have not happened at this World Cup, add one more: a spike in the sex trade. While clubs like Artemis have been busier than usual after games, the tournament has generated nowhere near the surge in demand for prostitution — or the influx of temporary prostitutes from Eastern Europe and Asia — that many experts predicted.”

New Feature: Put your StyleFeed on your site. Note my updated StyleFeed, now Flash-based, on the left. I’m particularly interested in seeing what Terence thinks of this site and this feature.

I went to see Calexico last night at the Roxy. It was excellent. They do a sort of borderlands rock that I think is both beautiful and intelligent. But maybe it’s just cause I’m a sucker for a steel guitar.

Anyway, they closed with a cover of Manu Chao‘s song El Desaparecido, which I had almost forgotten about: Cuando me buscan nunca estoy, cuando me encuentran yo no soy…

Sometimes I like shopping– I like nice things and it can be fun to look at them, browse through them, occasionally buy one. There are other kinds of shopping I don’t like, though: I hate it when I need, say, a pair of pants to wear to a particular event, and they have to be in a particular style, and nothing is quite right, and I have to walk all the hell over town to find them, and if I do find them at all, they’re fifty bucks more than I want to spend.

Stylefeeder makes both kinds of shopping easier. If I’m browsing, it lets me keep track of what I’ve browsed through, and where, so if I go back and decide I do want it, it’s right there for me. If I’m looking for a particular item, it gives me a shortcut to all the similar items that other people thought were interesting. For example, if I wanted to buy some jeans, I could visit the stylefeeder jeans page, or even subscribe to its RSS feed, to see all the interesting jeans. And of course you can get more whimsical. If I wanted to buy some kind of cute thing for my girlfriend, there’s a whole page of cute.

The third thing it lets you do is find new stuff by recommendation from people you agree with. If I see interesting things that the user Phil has added, I can check Phil’s Stylefeed and follow his taste.

(Note: Yes, my company runs Stylefeeder).