Wednesday, July 28, 2004
BlogShares
BlogShares is “a fantasy stock market for weblogs (...) where registered users can speculate on the value of a blog by buying and selling shares."
German Blogging Coverage
Hard to believe: the German number one news show on TV Tagesschau started its own blog covering the Democratic National Convention and other political issues. In the meantime the German Spiegel (Germany’s number one online and offline news magazine) covers bloggers at the DNC.
Blogstreet Neighborhood
Blogstreet visualizes your blog neighborhood (above is mine):
This tool makes use of the open Touchgraph Java applet which also powers the GoogleBrowser.
Random DNC Blogger Quotes
“So we’ve been working on this thing...dnc.shellen.com. If you have ever visited the Blogger offices we call it the post scroller. We have an LCD projector pointed at the wall that displays a post at random from the Blogger database. In essence, our team gets to see on a daily basis what bloggers are talking about and how they are using Blogger. (...)
This version of the post scroller has been customized to track posts from the blogosphere about the Democratic National Convention.”
– Jason Shellen, Blogger: Live from the DNC, July 26, 2004
Internet Explorer Conversion Day
“Are you doing anything particularly significant on the first day of the month?
How about making a conscious effort to help convert ONE user from the evils of IE to a better browser? (...)
Try reminding them that their browser is their window on the world wide web. It makes sense to view it through a modern, standards compliant, safe window. IE hasn’t been kept up to date for some time, and is degrading their web experience. The web experience that they are ultimately paying for.”
– Richard Allsebrook, International Internet Explorer Conversion Day, 28th May 2004
Google and Chinese Censorship
Reporters Without Borders accuse Google and Yahoo of directly and indirectly bowing to Chinese government censorship demands.
Google’s Semantic Web in 2009
Paul Ford looks into the future in August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web (July 26, 2002).
Microsoft Spam
Looks like Hotmail users are in for some spam. This one will definitely make it past the filter, because it’s from Microsoft itself. The email advertises Microsoft’s new search interface.
Google Answers Worm Questions
“What happened yesterday was that someone sent the latest version of the MyDoom computer virus out for a spin, and this version flooded search engines like ours with automated searches. Fortunately, we were able to quickly identify those queries and block them, so that, for most of our users, at no point was our site significantly impaired.”
– Urs Hoelzle, Global Worming (Google Blog), July 27, 2004
Microsoft Newsbots
Microsoft released their own automated news service at newsbot.msn.com (Firefox-users beware the rendering is sometimes messed up). This version of the Newsbot is new, though others were available for some time. Here is an overview of the different country-versions:
- Belgium
- France
- Germany
- Ireland
- Italy
- Spain
- Switzerland (French)
- Switzerland (German)
- United Kingdom
- Latin America
- United States
- US (Spanish)
- South Africa
- India
- Indonesia
- Malaysia
- Philippines
- Singapore
Google Bet
This is an older bet for $2000 between Dave Winer (predictor) and Martin Nisenholtz (challenger) mentioned by Jason Kottke today:
“In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site."
Googlish
“Wouldn’t it be cool if all the people who used Google had their own language to speak?”
Introducing (humorous) Googlish, Google’s try at human language development.
Google News and Subscriptions
Searching Google News for “Obama”, I saw many (too many) sources requiring subscription:
- Chicago Tribune
- San Jose Mercury News
- Dallas Morning News
- Los Angeles Times
- KING5.com
Let’s take Mercury News as example. Though sign-up is free, it’s a hassle, as all of the following fields are required:
- Email address
- Password
- First Name
- Last Name
- Home Address
- City
- State
- Home zip code
- Country
- Gender
- Year of birth
- Do you subscribe to The Mercury News in print?
It is every site’s choice whether or not to deliver content straight-away, or ask readers to register first. The problem here is that Google News lists those sites. I find this starts to clutter up the search result. (Google.com itself handles search in a more realistic way; it finds text in sources which are public. It acts as average visitor without any special status.)
Thankfully, Google thought of a way to help us. If you want to search Google News without listing sources requiring you to register, type keyword -subscription.
Justin send in a great suggestion; you can use the Firefox Bugmenot extension. After installing it, restart Firefox. Now when you access the web site needing registration, right-click anywhere and choose “Bugmenot” from the menu – a new window will open, providing an active user-name and password for this site.
Google News and Blogs
Chris Bowers asks you to tell Google News (news-feedback@google.com) that blogs deserve to be included as much as anyone else. “In fact, especially come convention time, many blogs will actually be producing on the ground, first-hand reporting, rather than just commentary on primary source news."
Googlenym
Another word for Memomark (see the Memomarker) is Googlenym, as coined by Dave Weinberger. Googlenym is another word for Google URL. And a Google URL is when you tell someone which words to search for to get to a certain web page... as opposed to having to communicate the full URL.
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