- How to carry a woman:
Take it from a world champion: The best way for a man to carry a woman is to dangle her upside down over his back, with her thighs squeezing his neck and her arms around his torso.
- Guilty until proven innocent:
“The 1,500 companies who received letters from SCO about potential infringements should be worried, big time,” said Rob Enderle, a research fellow for the Giga Information Group of Santa Clara, Calif. Based on what he saw, Enderle said, “The evidence appears to be very compelling.”
- I represent a very important constituency, QED:
It would be nice to see the creators of these P2P networks put all of their efforts into adopting one of the many technologies available to filter out infringing music rather than arguing that the networks are being used for things like “speech.”
- But I’m a politician not a serf:
McKinley worked with Csikszentmihalyi to design the GIA system. It’s partly based on technology used to create Internet indexes such as Google. Software crawls around Internet sites that store large amounts of information about politicians. These include independent political sites like opensecrets.org, as well as sites run by government agencies. McKinley created software that ferrets out the useful data from these sites, and loads it into the GIA database. The result is a one-stop research site for basic information on key officials.
- Greenspan the Slasher:
He cut it once, he cut it twice
He cut it twelve times before
But still they believe to the core
That this cut was needed even more
- The State provides the Service and the Media provides the Vaseline:
An emerging sixth estate in Global governance and influence is arising - the blogosphere. In this article I argue the case for the blgosophere being an emerging sixth estate rather than being an extension of the fourth estate - mass media. Some of you are perhaps sniggering and questioning “Blogs a power? Those personal journals that contain personal thoughts, journals about looking after kids, and personal biased crap?” Yes, these personal journals are becoming a real influence in global governance.
- My Quanta is Faster than Your Quanta:
Measuring the spin state of one photon in an entangled pair instantly reveals the state of the other — spin up for the first instantly means spin down for the second, whether 30 meters or 30 light years separate the two particles. They can never exist in the same spin state at the same time.
For those of you that don’t know about it, Google released a new version (beta) of its IE-only toolbar which has built-in support for blogging through a feature called BlogThis! (which has actually been around for sometime as an independent add-on). The biggest catch, it only works with, yes, you guessed it: Blogger (blogging software that Google acquired in February from Pyra).
As Dr. Jenkins points out, this was somewhat bittersweet. On one hand Google now makes it easier for a larger, untapped market to start blogging, but on the other, Google limits which players can compete.
Blog Herald now informs us that there is a grass roots movement to convince Google to support other blogging software (I can just see the glowing trail of non-Blogger bloggers marching with pitch forks, demanding representation and then carrying Marie Antoinette out of the palace…).
Anyways, Blog Herald points to Voidstar as the original source of these unfolding events:
The new Google Toolbar has a blog this button that is hard coded to work with Blogger. This seems inevitable, but also sad. It would be very cool if someone could hack this to work with other blogging systems.
While we’re at it, here’s a couple more lazyweb requests.
- A version of the Google toolbar to work with Mozilla and Firebird.
- A version of the Alexa toolbar again for non IE browsers.
- An open method of obtaining the Google page rank.
My thoughts on the requests:
Get an alternate plug-in for the Mozilla-based browsers if you want a Google query field built into the browser. Why use a closed-source bar on an open-source project?
Alexa, utter crap. It ranks up there with pet rocks and the cue cat. It is not by any stretch of the imagination (except maybe by their Marketing Department) a professional or accurate representation for web site popularity or traffic. If you believe it is, then take a statistics class: 77% of the population knows that you are obtuse.
Page rank, currently I do not pay attention to this at all. I do enjoy knowing all the sites that link to a site (as Technorati has popularized specifically for blogs and you don’t need to toolbar to find backlinks), however, for all practical purposes it means nothing to the layman. If you want your site to rank high on Google the best way to achieve that: use a blog (no joke). Because Google loves blogs (for better, not for worse), your site will not only be indexed more often, but also within weeks of going live (and then as you post articles, those get indexed which then could drive more traffic to your site).
The goal of this last point of course is to get other sites to link to you. That is the primary (definitely not the only) way that Google ranks pages.
Following this trend, I predict that it will continue to have more features added to it and could eventually fuse with other service providers to add headlines, stock quotes, ads and maybe even RSS-like updates (subscribe to blogs, channels, etc.).
In fact, before biting the hand that feeds you (this comment refers to the Blog Herald post), did anyone think about Google maybe wanting to add Echo support to the toolbar sometime down the line (or into Dano for that matter)? That prediction should be taken with a grain of salt, but at the same time, crazier things have happened: Windows still exists.
Anyways, I personally have no use for the bar, it’s proprietary (go build your own, like he did) and is at the mercy of a management team inside Google labs.
Oh, and I guess the only thing that confuses me: why on earth is anyone still using Internet Explorer? Friends don’t let friends use IE.
