These gentlemen are from the future.

You may have noticed how quiet Global Spin has become, yet again. With the rise of Twitter and Reader and Tumblr and other such thing-share-ers, our little community no longer has much reason to post their thoughts to a group blog.

In response, I’m quitting!

…

checks notes Oh wait, that’s not it… shuffles papers One sec, it was right here…

Right! In response, I’m going to keep posting the same old things on Global Spin as always. (In a word: monkeys.) I won’t even promise to post more often, because we’ve all seen through that little shadow play. Or something.

For those of you looking for a little more regularity and a little less depth, I give you a cat… standing up! (Oh, and I might also share some other things over there, because it’s what all the kids are doing these days.)

That is all.

Now that’s going to be a lot easier, thanks to a little programming trickery by John Tantalo. He created a handy bookmarklet that takes standard International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions (as found on many Wikipedia pages) and runs them through a text-to-speech (TTS) system to speak them aloud.

Checking a few known pronunciations against Wikipedia’s IPA for them, I see that either the TTS server or the listed IPA needs some work. I suspect the latter, because the IPA for the Niger River entry (/?na?d??r/) sounds great, while the IPA for Nagios (/?n???i.o?s/) sounds way off (as I write this at least). Still, most entries work great, and I expect this tool to encourage more authors to include IPA as it gets used.

So when I want to remember something, do I “star” it or “like” it? If I want to let people know about it, should I “like” it or “share” it? Is my “note” shown as a “comment” or somewhere else?

I recognize the thinking here; if users are looking for a feature by a familiar name (“like”), they might not find it by your own convention (“star”). This half-baked mix of features isn’t the answer, though. Each addition should have been weighed against the existing choices, and if the benefit justified the new feature it should have replaced the old.

I realize that many people probably don’t want to be found under their old names, but I do, because there were some really cool people I knew back then and I know they’ve probably come into their own since. Even if they don’t have reason to publish on the Web, they might find themselves doing a casual search for my old name, so I’d like to help that link to my current online identity. The best way I’ve come up with is to make a simple Chris Craig at UCHS page that does nothing but link to my profile here. I’m hoping that’ll be enough to make the connection in the Googlebrain, but we’ll see.

Any other ideas? Have you run into this problem yourself?

Topics so far include Rails, Twitter, college, marketing 2.0, online storytelling, and blackjack. There’s even a Wii Bowling Tournament planned, so be sure to stop by. You won’t be disappointed.

If you’re in the San Diego area and have a bit of spare time this weekend, stop on by! You’re guaranteed to have a great time.

Eventful, Inc., the leading global events service, announced today that it would cease the operation of its popular Web site Eventful.com on May 1st in favor of next-generation interface Twitter, provided by Obvious Corporation of San Francisco. Twitter is a service which allows users to get instant update messages (“tweets”) from friends via SMS, instant messenger, Web, or by way of a number of custom desktop clients.

Once the commitment was made, it was surprisingly quick work to adapt the Eventful API to the new platform. Development of the Twitter-based service, dubbed Eventful Chicken, took just over a week to reach the public beta stage, including event search, recommendations, watchlists, reminders, and Eventful Demand (renamed “I wish they’d come here”). The service can be previewed currently at http://twitter.com/echicken.

There’s more, but you get the idea. Take a look and let me know what you think. I’m too tired to comment intelligently.