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Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Ask.com Explains Smileys

I like this – Ask now shows the meaning of emoticons entered into the search box. For example, search for :-/ and you’ll see “:-/ is an emoticon that typically means skeptical, uncertain, or wry” (along with a couple of links to smiley dictionaries). You can also enter acronyms like LOL, which results in the onebox “LOL is chat shorthand that typically means Laughing Out Loud.”

[Thanks Gary Price.]

Don’t Download This Song...

... by Weird Al Yankovic. (Apparently, the video premiers on Yahoo Music tonight.) [Via Waxy.]

Google Joins Anti-Child-Porn Coalition

From a press release on MissingKids.com:

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and its sister agency, the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC), have announced that Google has joined the Technology Coalition and the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography, two critical industry initiatives to fight commercial child pornography over the Internet.

Google will be joining the Technology Coalition, teaming up with other major online companies to launch an aggressive new campaign to fight child exploitation on the Internet. The Technology Coalition will be funded within NCMEC to develop and deploy technology solutions that disrupt the ability of predators to use the Internet to exploit children or traffic in child pornography. (...)

Google will also be joining the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography, a group of leading banks, credit card companies, third party payment companies, and Internet services companies working to stop the flow of funds to child pornography web sites.

Naughty Google Suggest

Ionut points out that when you enter ple into Google Suggest, the top suggestion is a little, well... unexpected.

Blogger’s Dog Logo

Why does Google’s Blogger show a dog with a hat in their logo today? I suppose they are celebrating birthday (Blogger was launched 7 years ago, in August 1999)?

[Thanks Kushtrim Xhakli and TomHTML.]

Update: Haochi found the exact date of Blogger’s birth, and it’s indeed today – as Blogger maker Evan Williams wrote back then:

Monday, August 23, 1999

We just launched a cool new tool at Pyra. It’s called Blogger. It’s an automated weblog publishing tool.

Calgoo Google Calendar Add-on

Desktop application Calgoo works on top of your Google Calendar and adds features like offline access. The guys behind Calgoo use the Google Calendar API to provide this service.

Note the “Calgoo First Draft” (Alpha? Beta?) download is quite heavy at 26 MB. The more important problem to me however is that they request me to enter my Google Calendar user name/ password – I won’t do that, no matter how much I have reason to trust the company.

[Image by Calgoo.]

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