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The New York court system has blocked TNN’s proposed name change to “Spike TV, television for men”. Apparently Spike Lee, the guy who goes to New York Knicks basketball games, is so damned famous and important that he deserves the exclusive rights to the name Spike.

“The court is of the opinion that in the age of mass communication, a celebrity can in fact establish a vested right in the use of only their first name or a surname.”

I mentioned Applied Semantics about 2 months ago. They were an independent web-based company whom developed technologies that could read a website, have an “idea” as to what was being said and in turn, conjur up an ad that was relevant to the material on the site. They were purchased by Google and it appears that this technology is now finding its way onto the market.

It is called Google AdSense, and Mr. Travers at MarketingFix informs us that just about any web-based publisher can use this technology to:

…fill up inventory that would have gone unsold, which definitely makes sense. In other words Google starts from the assumption that publishers are in a position of weakness, which might not please everyone, but is probably realistic in many cases (though I hear from many people that they’re filling up inventory again.)

So those of you with websites and blogs, check it out. Based on their FAQ, it seems like a better deal that BlogAds (though if you are really a leet geek, you’d roll your own ad generator). Those of you without websites and blogs, well you’re just marginalized losers at this point, there is no sense in even acknowledging your existence (kidding kidding, you’re still good for tax revenues and Ponzi schemes, thanks).

I also mentioned Semaview and Semantic agents several weeks ago and added to the unknown hype surrounding RDF and OWL. Sean pointed out a new Mozilla-based news aggregator called NewsMonster; the cross-platform weblog manager with a brain! This software is feature packed (much more robust than Syndirella) and has oodles of future-thinking, cutting-edge technologies, like RDF support:

Want to find an RSS item on a specific post and with a given reputation threshold? No problem. Just create a new agent. NewsMonster agents run in the background and are constantly trying to help find goods, services, and events for the user. Want to find a date in the city? How about a used guitar? NewsMonster agents can take care of all of this for you.

NewsMonster supports a system of agents which allow the user to discover new and interesting relationships. Agents respond can respond to explicit advertisements created by users, reputation thresholds, or more advanced RDF queries which can potentially involve reputation.

Additionally NewsMonster utilizes ‘Blognet,’ a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructure that delivers information via various semantic-based protocols. It’s actually a little more complicated and a lot more pedantic than that, so be sure to visit their FAQ on Blognet.

And speaking of technologies that could possibly revolutionize the web, Grub – the distributed web crawler. For those unfamiliar with this technology (despite reading my Pulitzer report on it), Grub is a project that utilizes your individual bandwidth to collectively accomplish indexing the entire web. The folks behind it are still pruning and developing the network infrastructure (servers and such), so software applications utilizing the results (like tool bars) are still non-existent. The long-term goal is to create real-time web indexing, so that each and every page of the internet is categorized instantaneously. This in turn can help news junkies, researchers and just plain old Joe Blow locate information, faster and with more accuracy (though the results and how they are displayed, like relevancy, requires yet more specialized software – something that the geeks at Google excel at).

Grub has been running on one of my computers now for over a month and has crawled over 4.3 million URLs. 66% of the URLs are unchanged, 20% are updated, 4% down and 9% redirected. Unfortunately, less than a thousand users are currently using the program to sweep and index the web, amounting to approximately 40 million URLs in the past 24 hours. At this rate, only 1.2 billion sites will be indexed, well short of both Google and real-time crawling.

Ignoring the proprietary nature of the underlying software (the Grub client itself is open-source, all the other layers are closed) and the fact that their network topology requires a central server (versus a DNS/shard system), this particular implementation of distributed crawling could work for Looksmart (the parent company of Grub) in the long-run battle against Google and Overture. At the same time, I do not personally use Wisenut (a search engine that utilizes the Grub results) on a day-to-day business, for a host of reasons; primarily because it cannot be integrated into a browser and the search results are less than stellar. Currently Google more than suffices so I’ll need stock options to sway my opinion any time soon.

So my digital amigos, you have all been updated. Be fruitful and multiply.

Bring out your dead:

In this treatise, you will find practical principles on how to raise the dead! These same principles will work on how to heal the sick, how to cast out demons, and how to cleanse the lepers. These are the four things that Jesus specifically sent His disciples out to do:

‘And as you go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons: freely you have received, freely give.’
(Matthew 10:7-8)

Unfortunately, in most churches these days they’re preaching to the dead, casting out the sick and raising the demons! The idea of raising the dead is frankly absurd or preposterous. ‘When you’re dead, you’re dead! Call the morgue and arrange the funeral!’ Yet, in the days of the early church, believers didn’t let death have its way so easily. They followed One who had experienced death Himself but, through His resurrection, conquered death forever. As a result, they believed they had authority in His name to challenge even death itself!

The good news is that such ‘preposterous’ faith is still possible! God can use you to raise the dead! God can use you to heal the sick! Think about it. Wouldn’t it be exciting to pray for people with colds, cancer, or tumors and see them recover? God can also use you to cast out demons. Few things in life are as rewarding as seeing someone bound by demonic forces find marvelous release.

Oh, and that essay goes on and on, this is just the tip of the iceberg. As much as I like the enthusiasm of holy rollers, I’m one of those backwards “I’ll believe it when I see it” types — though imagining things, like perpetual life, sounds like an entertaining activity I should to start practicing. Remember, if there is a will, there is a way…