Salmon of Doubt Review, plus more on Douglas Adams
I've just put up a post reviewing the Salmon of Doubt, by Douglas Adams. I'm not totally happy with the method I use now, which is to create a "catalog" item which grabs all the info from Amazon, and then I (or anyone else) can post reviews as comments. But, it is easy, since all the author, title, image, etc. etc. don't need to be manually entered by me – I just have to find the right ID number, and this works for CDs as well. After reading the book, I checked out h2g2 – it was Adams' idea to create a community where people could put together ideas, reviews, etc. etc. Like many things that Adams thought of, I think this was ahead of its time. It's unfortunate that the BBC hasn't done a great job of running it. I didn't spend much time there, mainly because it was hard to navigate, the layout was confusing, and it seemed slow. Perhaps Everything2 is more what Adams had in mind? Although it's layout could do with a refresh as well.
Or maybe this mesh of blogs and comments and trackbacks would very much have appealled to Adams. This mesh (along with new search tools, profiles, trust-webs, automatic topics, etc. etc.) seem to be heading towards turning the Internet into a Hitchhiker's Guide. As long as spammers and viagra salesmen don't get there first.