Very neat – An elegant script to highlight terms when someone arrives at your site from a Google search. Textism Tools: Google Hilite Now if everyone did this I wouldn’t need to hit the Google cache to find what I’d searched for on a page.
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Apple: it’s all about the brand “Ask marketers and advertising experts why Mac users are so loyal, and they all cite the same reason: Apple’s brand. “ Evan Williams pokes fun at Wired’s not too clever article on Apple, “the silly thing about this article is the notion that Apple’s brand and products are completely unconnected”. Marketing people often get confused about the difference between a company that offers products that have unique features and one that doesn’t. The most primitive see brand and features but nothing in between. Pepsi is all about brand and Tivo is all about product. In the middle, however, there are intangibles, things that are not the result of pure marketing spin but do not really offer anything different from competitors from a feature perspective – design elevates these intangibles. The PC industry is becoming mature and saturated in terms of features, people will buy…
Online search is expected to generate more than $2.5 billion in revenues in 2004. That gives an aggregate Market Cap. for all search companies of around $12 billion. Assume that Google gets 40% of this and Google would have a potential value of $5 billion. But Google is perhaps different – it will win a battle with Overture for paid listings, and will dominate the search space – and search is the bedrock of the Internet. Microsoft owned command line access to your own machine and built on top of that. Google owns the command line for access to other machines, a very powerful place to build a company worth much more than $5 billion.
Jeff Jarvis, who knows much more about publishing than most, looks at the New York ‘Cityblog’ and explains why listings on their own don’t pay. My issue with Cityblog and with collaborative blogs like Boingboing is that weblogs are primarily about people. Weblogs are publishing taken to its ultimate extreme in terms of efficiency where there are no distribution or production costs other than the time and effort of the writer and its ultimate utility in terms of benefit for the reader – I read to hear what the writer has to say, and as I get to know the writer the nuances are easier and the communication better. This is why the byline free Economist is so damn frustrating. With weblogs I’ll read whatever Jon Udell says about web services or Jason Kottke says about web design and, because they are all published separately, I can jumble them up…
Jon Udell: Scale-free networks and mirror worlds The inimitable Jon Udell writes about networks – about Javaspaces and Tuplespaces, loose coupling and grid computing – and I can’t help thinking that these uber trends which would seem to be profound leaps and bounds in the punctuated evolution of computing are often to do with very banal issues, often involving the relative strengthening and weakening of various points in the information processing chain that only exist because of cost. Is there a trend towards clustered cheap servers because the weak link between disks and RAM (that justified expensive Sun hardware with a fancy BUS) is no longer needed if you keep things in cheap memory? Is it in turn, the availability of these swarms of cheap boxes that is really driving the possibilities of grid computing? What would happen if the on board memory on a chip were as cheap as…
The raised awareness of the potential horrors of bio-terrorism may shortly lead to the vacination of 0.5M healthworkers in the US against Smallpox and measures to detect containers of bio weapons. Surely then, the most difficult bio weapons container to detect would be a human. In other words, could a suicide terrorist infect his or herself with a disease and take employment somewhere that put themselves in contact with lots of people e.g. in a large restaurant, in order to carry out a biological terrorist attack? The thought that created this fear, was the memory of the story of Typhoid Mary. – Didn’t thousands of people die when she deliberately infected people with Typhoid as she worked as a cook? Looking into the true story of Typhoid Mary however reafirms the notion that one of the most worrying things about biological weapons is that they are more readily weapons of…
Glenn Reynold’s quotes a story from the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Fewer guns: more crime The ‘fewer guns’ is Glenn’s addition, and conclusion to explain the UK’s growing crime rate (incidentally the numbers of guns are also on the increase in the UK – but I don’t need to go into that). From the same newspaper: “Robberies in America are much more likely to be at gunpoint, which is one reason why the murder rate is much higher. The main reason for a much lower burglary rate in America is householders’ propensity to shoot intruders. They do so without fear of being dragged before courts and jailed for life. If American tourists coming to Britain are frightened of being murdered, a rare crime in any case, it is much less likely to happen in London than in any American city… Murder is the most likely cause of death in young men,…
[update: from the URL, I thought that the, admittedly rather shocking, cartoon above was from an Italian cartoonist, it seems that the Italians really don’t like Kissenger from the variety of alternatives that were available. In actual fact it is by David Levine of ‘the New Yorker’ fame] I actually thought that the appointment of Kissinger (who’s application for imprisonment for war crimes was heard by a UK court earlier this year) to chair the inquiry into 9/11 intelligence shortcomings, was a sick joke, perhaps not. The Latest Kissinger Outrage – Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation? By Christopher
I just had to find out what ‘reality is a robotic fish tank driven by Siamese’ was. For a peek into the mind of the criminally insane – or alternatively the mind of installation artists, look no further than this project by Ken Rinaldo: Augmented Fish Reality is a robotic fish tank driven by Siamese Fighting Fish Here is the gist: 1.Siamese Fighting Fish can apparently see out of their bowls. 2.Siamese Fighting Fish can see other Fish in other bowls. 3. Siamese fighting Fish will swim towards the other Fish with the resoluteness of a search and destroy mission. 4. A lunatic/genius artist puts several bowls of Siamese Fish in a room, each bowl is on a minature electric cart and contains sensors to move the bowl in the direction the fish is swimming in. 5. The whole fish-eye view of the impending carnage is projected on the walls…
The year is 2002, I am sitting in front of a computer that 10 years ago would have filled a large bunker and could model the aftershocks of a thermonuclear explosion and I want to find something on this computer. I have two choices: I can use ‘Start:search:for files or folders’ or I can type something into a browser window. The first will clunk and whir and a couple of seconds later will search the few thousand file names on the computer but will not search the contents of those files. The second will fully search over 3 billion files from other computers and return the answer within 0.2 seconds. Microsoft Windows is badly designed.
You couldn’t make up this shit. Most people have some sympathy for Michael Jackson as someone who has clearly lost all touch with reality – but do you trust this man to bring up healthy, well adjusted kids? The latest – after dangling a baby that people think ‘may’ be his from a 4th floor window – a visit to the zoo with his kids in veils. BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Showbiz | Jackson’s zoo outing