g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
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As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
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Cars without compromise.



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Thursday, February 4, 2010
06:18 - The power of meta
http://camelegg.com/

(top)
We live in a world where not only have certain websites become part of our presumptive landscape, but their internal structural semantics have become infrastructure to our experience, whether we realize it or not.

This has led to a rise in meta-web services, where whole websites pop up in order to exploit the presentation of existing sites by mining and collating their content. We've got RSS feeds for stripping away the dress-up games played by popular blogs. We've got EBay bidder agent programs that keep tabs on auctions for you. We've got Quietube for showing you YouTube videos without any of the surrounding distractions of navigation and community links, and even shutup.css (via Gruber) for putting electrical tape over the blinking 12:00 that is the comments section on any of your favorite blogs or news sites.

Another sites that I've been made aware of, and that might well prove to be of inestimable value to anyone who does a lot of buying of equipment, is camelegg. As the name perhaps suggests, it's a companion site for NewEgg.com, which works via the same product tracking IDs and URLs as NewEgg does, allowing you to watch individual product prices over time, set thresholds for alerts, and see what items are dropping in price the most lately. All with pretty graphs!



I'm not sure what the "camel" bit refers to, but it's a flexible brand: the site has companion trackers for Best Buy (camelbuy) , Amazon (camelcamelcamel), Backcountry.com (camelcamper), Overstock.com (camelstock), and Zzounds.com (camelsounds), presumably with plenty more on the way.

The tracked sites in general seem to be okay with this use of their data, though they might in some cases object to the inevitable trademark confusion; but that appears to be ancillary to the utility of the sites in general. Seems they've got a nice burgeoning community going there; I may have to put it to use in some of the buying recommendations I'm involved with.

Now, as far as the idea of "meta" goes, I've personally not been all that taken by it. I've tried using RSS readers, but find that if I'm following a particular site, I generally want to read all of each of its posts, in situ, with all the presentation intact—and I'd be loading all of it any time I wanted to read a complete article anyway, so I find it pointless to try to aggregate and skim. Similarly, even if I see a YouTube video embedded somewhere, I often click on through to the main YouTube site anyway because I want the full complement of metadata—the full title, the description, the upload date, all the context that makes it meaningful beyond the raw data itself.

But that's not to say others won't find this kind of technology entirely indispensable as time goes on. As online retailers become ever more caught up in the cacophony of incentives and discounts and recommendations and reviews and alternative outlets and the chimaera of positive availability, it may well prove worthwhile to be able to skip over all of it—as long as you know what you want in advance—and only visit the retailer when you know for sure it's time to make the purchase.

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© Brian Tiemann