I am officially launching the first epeeps module peer based restaurant review that epeeps.net/restaurant. Anyone can add a restaurant, any can review a restaurant and tell how you feel about your local eating experience. Other users can read the data and search for enrties. There is even a mozilla toolbar plugin so you can search from the convenience of your toolbar.

[size=m]Mobility = fun[/size]
While you can easily use the site from your desktop, the site is currently certified to work on t-mobile's sidekick BW, color I and II with more conventional cell phones being added later this week. The idea is that you can review the restaurants on your mobile while eating at them.



[size=m]Whats Innovative?[/size]
There is no login or password, the way it works is that you can review a restaurant and then have five minutes to edit your review from your computer/phone before it becomes a "permanant" review of the establishment.

[size=m]Peep Perks?[/size]
If you come to the site while logged into the elmwood site it will simply say how many epeeps are present and allow you to have your name in the chat. Guests can remain completely anonymous or use your real name. You can add regular links by typing them and "e" links and inlinks to link back to your journal if you want.

[size=m]More to say?[/size]
I want to create the largest purely peer driven of consumer restaurant data in Buffalo. If it is sucessful I will expand it to other cities. This is also only one many many epeeps.net modules to be released this year. You all are the test audience so send me feedback.

Please add any restaurants you can think of, make sure to have as complete of data as possible e.g. phone number, addr, web add, etc. You do not need to review a restaurant to add one.

Hey Ajay,
I you have some free time tomorrow I would like to meet up with you to discuss my newest project. I think you will like it.

To everyone else,
Sorry that I have neglected you all this weekend. I know that I turned down everybody in order to "hang out " with my computer but I am working on a really worthwhile project and I hope you will all enjoy it in the end. Brian is in town and we are going out to eat tonight.

I have had such an evolution in ideas. I would like to see it work out.

[size=m]Creationism 2.0[/size]
Has anyone read about this new pseudo scientific creationists trying to push creationism back into the public high schools. Believe it or not they have actually had some success although, I think it is clear that they are just manipulating the system and people's ignorance.

There is an article in Wired magazine this month about them. I am so tired of hearing about this but maybe someone hear find it interesting or just wants to poke fun at them. if New York schools fall for this it would be really sad.

Dan, I read you journal everytime but I read it on rss or via email, so most of the time it doesn't count as a view. I don't know what to do about the increasing popularity of rss vs the want to have more accurate statistics. What do you think? Should I have it count each journal sent out as rss as a view? That can be innaccurate too because sometime I don't read all the journal sent to me as email or rss.

My new project is moving along. I expect a Tuesday release date then the first epeeps peer review module will be complete. It's actually almost done right now but I want to rest before I test it more. It is amazing what one can do without sleep. I actually prefer those straight through dvelopment periods followed by long nights of rest. I think to much about my projects to nap before a finish large portions. Otherwise I just dream about it. I can't tell you how many PHP dreams I have now. Sometimes, I figure out great stuff.

(e:wnymenu) , I accidentally sent you this as an email before I edited it sorry for the incovenience.

Thanks for signing up, glad to see you'l be sticking around. It's always fascinating to read about business as it develops. I think your idea is great, if you ever can combine it with a multi-restaurant delivery system, it would be great, I know I would for sure use it all the time.

By the way, I'm the programming director of the elmwood site. Thank you for your interest in the epeeps restaurant review engine. Unfortunately, as part of my non-business mission, I have decided to not work in conjunction with businesses or people promoting businesses.

You and I have a much different approach to information awareness on the web. It's my personal feeling that the top down business model is dead as sitcoms, but I am sure I can be proved wrong.

I have made this decision to protect the freedom of information written on the journals and to elimnate corporate influence on the journals. Not that businesses can't have their own journals, just that we don't depend on businesses for funding or advertising or share projects with businesses.

An example of why this is important, can be seen in the recent criticism of pano's for their plans to demolish the atwater house on many people's journal. If we had accepted advertising from pano's we would have had a conflict in interest. To prevent this type of problem we run all of our e-services from donations and the hard work of a few individuals.

As for the engine itself, it will not be based on a single persons review but on the review of many locals eating at the same place. Similar to voting. Our system would of course not be limited to only positive reviews because that would be biased, the opposite of objective.

[size=m]wnymenu.com[/size]
is an interesting idea I have seen work in many other citiies. If you are from the site and are reading this, I think if you tie it in with a multi-restaurant delivery service you would have a winning proposition. I have seen that in several other cities. this allows the people to go to the site and order calamari from casa di pizza, a salad from Jimmy macs, and a slection of drinks from the site.

I hope you keep a journal about the development of your site and didn't do the one time promotional journal thing like (e:hesperus)

I've seen that happen time and time again and it never works, because as soon as your name leaves the top twelve list and never returns, you become history and that no one will search for it. . If that's what you want you are much better off with craig's list as it is more of a list of things going on an quick anouncements.

[size=me]:peeps.net[/size]
So the epeeps.net project has been on hold for a while. As a first step I would like to offer a peer based restauarnt review engine. Is anyone interested in heading up a research team of what would decide how this should work. I have no problem doing all the programming (with some possible help from ajenius (e:ajay) ) but I don't want to have to think about it socially or from a user standpoint at this time. It would also help if I could get some volunteers to write up the first reviews for a bunch of restaurants so that we have something to work with, or some demo examples.

The idea being that because the reviews are written by people easting at the restaurant they would tend to be more fair than say if they were written by the restaurant or other reviewers who were often getting paid to eat or given a free meal.

Much like the journals, users would be able to upload pictures of their food (of course right from their mobile phone), talk about the service, the selection, proces, location, etc. Because anyone is able to review the restaurants it should begin to provide a fair description. At least more well rounded.

While a vegetarian reviewing Casa Di Pizza may have a different opinion than a meat eater or gluten intolerant person, having all three reveiew the same place would provide a fair and balanced depiction, at least in my opinion.

So who is interested? Pelase IM me at paulsidekick or email me.

Was anyone influenced by the debate. I find it hard to imagine the people who were very unsure of their choice of candidate. Basically, does anyone actually change their mind after watching the debate?

Thanks to (e:maidencateyes) and (e:ajay) I was able to squash the end of the month bug. This bug would make it so that during the last three hours of the month, journals would post to the server, but not show up until midnight. I knew it had to due with the fact that the old server code used to add 3 hours to everything to compensate for the fact that the server was in California. I had fixed most references to that but i guess I forgot a few. I would always forget about it and then the problem only occurrs during the last three hours of the month.

Well this time we got it. No more 3 hours mystery bug. Thanks.

This may be interesting to a few of you. I will be going if anyone else wants to go with me.

The Walter Klingenbeck Lecture

by Prof. Ralf Homann (Founder, Experimental Radio Program at Bauhaus University, Weimar)

where: Room 235 Department of Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo

when: OCTOBER 19, Tuesday 3:30pm - 4:50pm

The Bauhaus in Weimar is the first university in Germany that founded a Faculty of Media. A chair for Experimental Radio was established in 1999 and is the only one in Germany teaching radio in the context of the fine arts. This artistic practice is understood as an open field which supports interdisciplinary approaches, in the range from aesthetic operations, new technological developments and political activism.

Walter Klingenbeck was a 17 year old (Catholic) boy who founded an illegal radio station called 'Radio Rotterdam' in Munich during WWII. This radio station did never broadcast, but it did create a resistance group. Klingenbeck was discovered by the Gestapo and killed.

This event is the beginning of a lecture organized by the Institute of Distributed Creativity at the Department of Media Study in collaboration with Eyebeam (NYC) and The Thing (NYC).

I was looking at the incomming link from the western ny msuic board on the site and noticed this forum about Pano's demolatition plans where Dan posted a link to (e:metalpeter) 's journal. I had to post it to complete the circle. I mean that is what the web is about.

I made a little interactive environment (~5MB) using the shockwave exporter on maya. There is an avatar of me in the world. When you find it, it hides twice. After the last time, it speaks and becomes a link to my journal.