Last month, I dissected Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals using the list of samples lovingly collected by hundreds of Wikipedia users. But that was totally unofficial, a crowdsourced attempt to find musical needles in a giant mashup haystack.

Well, the official CDs were shipped out last week to everyone who donated more than $10. Inside, as promised, was the official sample list — a one-page insert with every single sample on the album. Steve Heil was the first to scan it and contact me.

Unfortunately, a huge block of printed small-caps text isn’t very useful for my kind of fun, so I tried throwing into several OCR engines on WeOCR to turn the image into text. Tesseract gave the best results, but it was still a mess that needed quite a bit of cleanup.

Anyway, here it is. The complete list of all 322 samples in Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals, available as a CSV, Excel, or Google Spreadsheets document.

Continue reading “Girl Talk's Feed the Animals: The Official Sample List” →

Like the rest of the world, I’ve been completely obsessed with the presidential election and nonstop news coverage. My drug of choice? Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum, the political sister site of Techmeme, which constantly surfaces the most controversial stories being discussed by political bloggers.

While most political blogs are extremely partisan, their biases aren’t immediately obvious to outsiders like me. I wanted to see, at a glance, how conservative or liberal the blogs were without clicking through to every article.

With the help of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases. Check out the screenshot below, and install the Greasemonkey script or standalone Firefox extension to try it yourself.

Note: The colors don’t necessarily represent each blogger’s personal views or biases. It’s a reflection of their linking activity. The algorithm looks at the stories that bloggers linked to before, relative to all other bloggers, and groups them accordingly. People that link to things that only conservatives find interesting will be classified as bright red, even if they are personally moderate or liberal, and vice-versa. The algorithm can’t read minds, so don’t be offended if you feel misrepresented. It’s only looking at the data.

For example, while Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight may be a Democrat, he has a tendency to link to stories conservative bloggers are discussing slightly more often than liberal bloggers, so he’s shaded very slightly red. (Geeks can read on for more details about how this works.)

Continue reading “Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey” →

Somehow, a 22-year-old University of Alaska student named Richard Millay got his hands on a videotape that’s eluded the media since John McCain asked Sarah Palin to be his running-mate — original footage of her 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant.

Of course, this is all very frivolous and has nothing to do with the current campaign. But like Barack Obama’s high school basketball footage, it’s a little glimpse into the early life of a highly-visible national figure.

In the first part added to YouTube, he posted the portion from the swimsuit competition, prefaced by a brief introduction mentioning the demand for the “88 minutes of Alaska Gold.”

Update: The original video was removed, but I managed to save a copy of the relevant footage without Richard’s original intro. YouTube’s removing every copy of this video, so I’m streaming the clip below from my own server. It won’t be removed.

Continue reading “Found Footage: Sarah Palin's 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant Video, Swimsuit Competition” →

I wanted to take a moment to announce that I’ve joined the board of directors for Kickstarter, a brand-new startup based out of Brooklyn and Chicago.

April 28, 2009: Kickstarter is live! I wrote more about the launch here.

Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds — journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers — raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. More than just a fundraising app, Kickstarter’s a publishing platform where project creators can communicate with the people that are supporting them. (Think Jill Sobule, A Swarm of Angels, or Sean Tevis.)

I was introduced to founders Charles Adler, Perry Chen, and Yancey Strickler by Caterina Fake back in June, and sealed the deal after a trip to NYC to meet the team. They’re a great group of guys with a strong vision, and I feel lucky to be involved.

Ultimately, everybody should be able to support themselves doing what they love using the web, and I think Kickstarter will be a great way to get there. Expect to hear more on Waxy.org as launch day gets closer.

To help them on their way, they’re currently looking for a CTO to join the founding team. I’ve been helping guide some of the technology decisions and building the development team, but we’re looking for a passionate and talented person to devote themselves to the project full-time.

If you’re interested, drop me an email or IM and I’ll introduce you!

After recording last week’s interview, I was left with a 36-minute MP3 and a profound feeling of dread. You see, I hate transcribing audio. I used to transcribe interviews in high school, and it’s always tedious, taking upwards of eight times the length of the clip itself.

Bracing for a good four or five hours of rewinding and writing and rewinding, I remembered that this is The Future! So, instead, I tossed the job over to the global anonymous workforce at Amazon Mechanical Turk instead.

The result: my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40.

This is a fraction of the cost/time of any other transcription service online, including the Turk-driven Casting Words, though you potentially sacrifice some quality. In my experience, though, there were virtually no errors.

Here’s how to do it yourself, with no programming knowledge required. The instructions below are verbose, but using my template, it shouldn’t take you more than five minutes of setup per job.

Continue reading “Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk” →