OK, some of you have given me shit for having no sense of humor regarding Google's April's Fool post. Sorry. It was funny, OK? FUNNY. But…well, I guess I'm overanalyzing. I'll be on vacation week after next, and I promise, I'll come back with my priorities straight. Meantime, Yahoo's…
Meantime, Yahoo’s Slacker spoof was also funny. I liked this line, clearly a dig at Google Print:
Well, scanners are cheap these days. Really cheap. When you combine a few $60 scanners with some willing Ph.D interns, we expect the entire book scanning project to take no more than 4 weeks and $6,000.
Read MoreGoogle has a tradition of April Fool's jokes, my favorite is PigeonRank. This year it's the "Google Gulp," a tongue-in-cheek tour through Google's product development process, with jabs (or shout outs, hard to say) at Schmidt, Urs Hoelzle, Stanford PhDs, and the rave culture. In short, Google Gulp is…
Google has a tradition of April Fool’s jokes, my favorite is PigeonRank. This year it’s the “Google Gulp,” a tongue-in-cheek tour through Google’s product development process, with jabs (or shout outs, hard to say) at Schmidt, Urs Hoelzle, Stanford PhDs, and the rave culture. In short, Google Gulp is a fantasy drink which makes people smarter. (Maybe even as smart as the people at Google, one dares to dream…).
The descriptive text for this spoof reads like a exorcism-by-humor for some of Google’s most vexing PR issues – from terminal Beta to privacy. Read through it, it speaks volumes on the culture. Some of the lines read as if the founders themselves were involved in the creative process. To wit:
…any piece of information’s usefulness derives, to a depressing degree, from the cognitive ability of the user who’s using it.
Read MoreGreat news! After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and then consume all my waking hours, I've decided to quit my job and work on del.icio.us full time. I've given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately…
After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and
then consume all my waking hours, I’ve decided to quit my job and work
on del.icio.us full time.
I’ve given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately
decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment.
Intelliseek launched BlogPulse 2.0 yesterday, adding more sites, more search, and more analysis. It only has six months of data though (before it only had two months). I wish we'd get working on that web time axis! On first glance (and that's all I've given it, caveat) there seem…
Intelliseek launched BlogPulse 2.0 yesterday, adding more sites, more search, and more analysis. It only has six months of data though (before it only had two months). I wish we’d get working on that web time axis! On first glance (and that’s all I’ve given it, caveat) there seem to be some powerful tools in this release, like the Trend Search.
Here’s the release.
Adam posts on thoughts from PCForum and Etech, on his personal views and those of his employer, Google, and why he decided to keep posting regardless. Great stuff. In the end, he writes a passionate defense of a meme I've started to call the "messy web." As long as…
In the end, he writes a passionate defense of a meme I’ve started to call the “messy web.”
As long as we don’t let the ontologists take over and tell us why tags are all wrong, need to be classified into domains, and need to be systematized, this is going to work well albeit, sloppily. What it does is open up ways to find things related to anything interesting you’ve found and navigate not a web of links but a link of tags. At the same time Wikipedia has shown that a model in which content is contributed not just by a few employees, but by self-forming self-managing communities on the web can be amazingly detailed, complete, and robust. so now people are looking at ways in which the same emergent self-forming self-administering models of tagging and Wiki’s and moderation can be used for events (EVDB) and for music and for video and for medical information. It’s all very exciting. It is a true renaissance. I haven’t seen this much true innovation for quite a while. What I particularly like about all this is how human these innovations are. They are sloppy. To me Tags are sloppy practical de-facto ontologies.
Hear hear. Read the whole thing, because he mentions how he takes off all of August, and I am doing the same, though in a more moderate form.
Boing Boing is filing an amicus brief in the Apple V. the Blogosphere case. I've refrained from comment as it's not totally search related, but honestly, this is a very bad precedent. I break news here, and intend to keep doing it, much as I did for MacWeek back…
In any case, we’re looking for examples of blogs breaking news stories. If you have em, send em to BB’s counsel. More info on where and how is at this post.
Over at its Research Labs, Yahoo today announced The Tech Buzz Game, in conjunction with O'Reilly Media. This is a search-driven marketplace creates a futures market of sorts predicting the popularity of various technologies. Very cool. You can even win prizes for best predictions….
Over at its Research Labs, Yahoo today announced The Tech Buzz Game, in conjunction with O’Reilly Media. This is a search-driven marketplace creates a futures market of sorts predicting the popularity of various technologies. Very cool. You can even win prizes for best predictions.
Since I'm on the topic of Boing Boing, we've been testing Yahoo's long tail RSS ads. It's tough to find ads that are relevant to Boing Boing's content, and often the program fails – defaulting to pretty random ads. But when this combination hit my RSS aggregator, I had…
Since I’m on the topic of Boing Boing, we’ve been testing Yahoo’s long tail RSS ads. It’s tough to find ads that are relevant to Boing Boing’s content, and often the program fails – defaulting to pretty random ads. But when this combination hit my RSS aggregator, I had to note it….
After all, it is Friday. Plush toys, indeed.
Porn. Knock me over with a ticklish feather. This sounds like it came from Alta Vista, but I'm sure it's true everywhere…….
My friend John Heilemann points me to the site for this new book, Safe: The race to protect ourselves in a newly dangerous world. This is a bit off topic for my site, but the folks behind the book are old colleagues and wonderful people, and the book itself…
My friend John Heilemann points me to the site for this new book, Safe: The race to protect ourselves in a newly dangerous world. This is a bit off topic for my site, but the folks behind the book are old colleagues and wonderful people, and the book itself is the expression of a new model in authorship, pioneered by Katrina Heron, who took over the editorship of Wired magazine a few months after I left to start the Standard. From the site FAQ:
Safe was a collaborative effort; having multiple authors allowed us to address a broader range of subjects than any one of us could have. It enabled us to talk to a vast collection of thinkers in a relatively short time, and to find links and themes connecting wide areas of counterterrorism-related research. Technology moves quickly, and working together also helped us to make the book as current as possible.
