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Monday, August 30, 2004

Quote Finder

This blog’s new Quote Finder checks possible sources or quotations for every sentence of a text using Google. This could be used for a variety of reasons, one of them to check if a text is really original, or copied from another work. You could also find out if you have used a very common sentence, or an idea someone else had before. Finally you may just check how often parts of a text of yours have been quoted online.

GoMeme Analyzed

Here is an in-depth analysis of the GoMeme set loose by Nova Spivak a while ago. [Via Waxy.]

Mastery vs Mystery

[Nielsen]

Search engines are the archetypical embodiment of the mastery ideology. They place users firmly in the driver’s seat and take them where they want to go. You can get anywhere on the Web using a subservient interface that accepts any words you throw at it and serves up a simple, linear list of rank-ordered choices.”
– Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox, August 30, 2004

Googling Flash

The following search query lists (more or less random) Flash files:

filetype:swf +the

Creative Commons Search

The Nutch-powered Creative Commons Search engine promises to deliver pages which are published under the Creative Commons (restricted public domain) license. [Thanks Capt.]

Google Phishing

[Hacking]

Beware of phishing (the act of leading a user to a fake website to grab passwords and other private data) using the Google URL. The following leads to my own fake Google page:

http://www.google.com/url?q=%68%74%74% 70%3a%2f%2ftinyurl.com/3zc8r

Of course Google is completely innocent here. I’m just using their service as jump-board to my own page. After all, people trust what is served by Google.com. [Via Don Park.]

Update: Brian wrote a sister entry on this post.

Broken Telly

“A script in this movie is causing Macromedia Flash Player 7 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?”

Now that’s an error message you don’t want to see. Especially not on TV. Kanaal 2 (a Belgian TV network in the Dutch language) was showing it the whole last night – they offer SMS-live chat, apparently scripted in Flash. Luc Van Braekel made a photo.

Plugging Firefox

I received an email from the Mozilla foundation thanking me for mentioning Firefox, and urging me to further promote it by using one of the following logos:

Get Firefox

Get Firefox

Get Firefox

Get Firefox

There you go. While I do not really care which browser other people use (hey, it’s their choice*) I personally use Firefox and love it. Especially because it allows me to enter “google this that” in the address bar, getting rid of having to use bookmarks. Also it’s great to always see the PageRank of a site in the lower-right. I’ve become accustomed to use a site’s PR as a level-of-trust indicator**.

*Except for when they are browsing on my computer, where I don’t allow a JavaScripted Internet Explorer out of security concerns. At the German Heise.de news forum, there’s a new security flaw exposed every week.

**PageRank is not the only trust indicator, but one of many. Another is the URL. For example I would trust http://212.293.399.129/credit-card/ less than http://www.paypal.com/credit-card/

Yahoo’s Election Roundup

Yahoo offers their own Election 2004 Blog Roundup. [Via Zawodny.]

The Incredible LinkTron 5000

Jeff Atwood’s Incredible LinkTron 5000™ returns the memomark for any given URL. What’s a memomark? It’s a small set of relatively obscure terms in a web page which list it on top when you search for them in Google. This works best for pages which do not change often, e.g. an archived blog page (as opposed to a blog front-page).

The LinkTron resembles my own Memomarker of last year but works on a large word-pagecount data table to deliver the best memomark possible. The memomark meme has been invented by likeminded minds in different times and blogs and is also called Google URL, Googlonym, or unbreakable links. It has also surfaced in the “Robust Hyperlinks” project by Thomas Phelps and Robert Wilensky in Google’s 2002 programming contest.

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