I'm telling you right now that you just don't want to click here.

The head that was removed from Manar in the operation which ended early Saturday had developed no body, and was capable of smiling and blinking, but not independent life.

...or, for that matter, here. Yow.

Fascinating.

In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.

Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.

What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.

Particularly notable is that when Krakauer's book hit shelves, Simpson's was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson's book - and if they had, they wouldn't have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.

This is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

Read it all.

[Via FOM]

...is very, very good. Remarkable.

Here.

Get better soon, Edwyn!

...send your get-wells here.

...more here.

I don't know how the people at the "videoblog" Crooks and Liars are able to provide long, downloadable excerpts from political news shows, the Daily Show, etc., like in terms of legality, or even bandwidth, but I do know that I totally love being able to watch interesting news clips and interviews without actually being forced to turn on my TV.

Yeah, not much here lately, huh? My readership has dwindled to all but the most hardcore (and the most bored). Politics is so incredibly uninspiring. It's the same insipid lies from the right and the same whining about it from the left. Fuck me if it's not boring.

On this day readers of Salto will contact a friend they've lost touch with.

It's not all that easy to "lose touch" with people -- those email addresses are probably still good. I know that I have email addresses that date back a decade or more.

Remember that person that you should have written ages ago but you just, like, didn't? Do it. Today.

'Cuz god knows you ain't gettin' any younger.

(Yes, I did. Maybe she'll write back.)

I think Salto's gotten himself a job. A full-time serious adult-type job. Probably the first he's ever had, honestly, unless you count that stint teaching high school, which was pretty much a catclysmic mismatch, occupationally speaking. But don't count your chickens before they hatch, Salto's grandpappy used to say, and he sure as hell ain't gonna do that.