Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

During 2006 I tried, but failed. Last year I succeeded in posting more videos on my blog than Jay Dedman, the creator of the videoblogging Yahoo group. I first found Jay in May 2004 when he first started videoblogging and since then he has been pushing me to put more video on my blog. While he has been posting less and less video I have been posting more and more mostly because of the lumiere project. During 2007 I posted 55 videos and Jay made it to 37. Because it's January 1st and I have nothing better to do I broke it down month-by-month:

Despite participating in both videoblogging week (April) and navlopomo (November)—I participated in neither—he couldn't keep up. Take that! As you can see neither of us really did anything in the first months of the year. I didn't get started until the lumiere project began in late May.

In the future I will be referring to the amount of videos Jay posts January to December as the dedman index. Use it to benchmark your own videoblog. Are you above or below the dedman index in 2007?

There are advantages to having an engineer as your twin brother. Say that you're sitting around watching television and you happen to switch to Speed right as Sandra Bullock makes the bus do an impressive 15 meter jump while running at 70 miles/hour. When that happens you can simply hand said brother an old magazine and a pen and he will effortlessly calculate how fast the bus really should be driving to make the gap.

To those wondering: A bus travelling 70 miles/hour (112 km/h) would drop 1.14 meters during a 15 meter gap, surely rendering the bus unusable (not to mention throwing Keanu and Sandra through the front windshield). The bus would need a speed of 136 miles/hour (or 218km/h) to only drop 30 centimeters during a 15 meter gap. We estimate that the bus could still make the jump with a 30 centimeter drop (although the tires will be mangled). Also the above only applies if the bus is travelling in a vacuum and not in… you know… reality.

For a while now I've been bookmarking some of the interesting Wikipedia entries that I've come across. I like to think of it as “random knowledge”. Now that I've reached 60 bookmarks it's time to do a status-check on the social aspects of a social bookmarking service. You can see all the bookmarks under my wikipedia tag.

• 23 of the 60 entries have not been bookmarked by others (38%)
• The top 5 entries are bookmarked by 340 ‘other people’ (72%)

Below the bookmarks are ranked by the amount of other people who also have bookmarked that entry.

1. Godwin's law (105)
2. Blog (100)
3. Milgram experiment (75)
4. Internet troll (34)
5. Stanford prison experiment (26)
6. Astroturfing (14)
7. American Civil War (10)
8. African American Vernacular English (9)
9. Leonardo da Vinci (9)
10. Newspeak (8)
11. Posse Comitatus Act (8)
12. Mary Sue (6)
13. Spear of Destiny (6)
14. John Doe (5)
15. Argyria (4)
16. D. B. Cooper (4)
17. Electric guitar (4)
18. Frankenstein (4)
19. Roma people (4)
20. Three Mile Island (4)
21. War of Currents (4)
22. Amicus curiae (2)
23. Aptronym (2)
24. Count of St Germain (2)
25. Crunk (2)
26. Leopold and Loeb (2)
27. Mata Hari (2)
28. Mockumentary (2)
29. Moonshine (2)
30. Tecumseh's curse (2)
31. Toledo War (2)
32. Bubble Bobble (1)
33. Camelcase (1)
34. Dead man's hand (1)
35. Fire balloon (1)
36. New Deal (1)
37. Troy McClure (1)

And here are the entries where I'm the only bookmarker.

• 1992 Los Angeles riots
• Big Ten Conference
• Bob Sacamano
• Bootlegging
• Bowdlerise
• Buffoon
• Cinéma vérité
• Détente
• Dixieland
• Gunpowder Plot
• Hybrid vehicle
• Hot dog
• J. D. Salinger
• Jim Crow laws
• July 20 Plot
• Lou Gehrig
• Manhole cover theft
• Miracle on Ice
• Mustang (horse)
• Potato chip
• Red Scare
• Roy Bean
• Sweater

At least for this little sample it really is a long tail of bookmarks. Of course it would be more valuable to look at del.icio.us in general, but I wanted to look at Wikipedia entries only. Traditional historic entries, something that I have almost exclusively used encyclopedias for in the past, generally aren't bookmarked by others (American Civil War and Leonardo da Vinci are the exceptions) and the few contemporary geek articles I've bookmarked are all scored high.

It's also interesting to see the social experiments Milgram experiment and Stanford prison experiment being very popular. Anyway, one shouldn't put too much into these numbers. After all, I'm probably the only one who've bookmarked Potato chip for a reason, although it does surprise me that I'm the only one who've bookmarked Manhole cover theft and Hot dog — both great articles.

Just look at the lists above and marvel at the diversity of the Wikipedia entries. Historic event, geek and regular vernacular, famous people (good and bad) and 80s computer games all mashed together. So many good stories, so little time.