March 26, 2004
First there was Lycos and Excite, matching keywords. Then Altavista, with cleverer ranking. Then Google, which seemed to solve search for good. But the link farms are creeping in, SEO is closing the gap, and the third era of search is quietly drawing to a close. So what comes next — and which company has been quietly assembling the pieces to win it?
March 22, 2004
Cleaning up code for an upcoming O'Reilly Mapping Hacks chapter, I ended up with two small spin-offs. One is a standalone desktop version of Google News Map — same headlines on a world map, minus the browser. The other is a tiny command-line tool that lets you grep the CIA World Factbook for any property you fancy. Capitals, population growth, you name it.
March 18, 2004
American libertarians have a plan: take over New Hampshire and strip away every redundant law. A Free State Project. In Europe, where governments are vastly more intrusive, the idea sounds laughable. But look closer at the numbers and Europe might actually be the better place to try it. All you need is a spare patch of land — and the Dutch happen to have one in mind.
March 16, 2004
There's a famous story about early Russian translation software. Feed in 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak', round-trip it through Russian, and out comes 'the vodka is ok, but the meat stinks.' Machine translation has improved since, but only so much. Poetry in Translation runs your sentences through Google: English to German to French and back. Results vary.
March 15, 2004
Back from Armenia and Georgia, where the offered drinks start before breakfast and never quite end. Travel guides can't decide if it's Asia or Europe, which raises a thornier question: where exactly are Europe's edges? And if it's really an idea rather than a place, what's stopping Canada from joining?
March 06, 2004
Batumi was supposed to deliver sunshine and Soviet boardwalks. It delivered a foot of snow and a locked Byzantine fortress whose gatekeeper was, by all accounts, still sleeping off the night before. What followed involved goats in crumbling apartment blocks, orange trees in the snow, and the dawning realization that 7am may not be too early for vodka.
March 03, 2004
There are not many good reasons to be blogging at 4:54 in the morning. A live interview with Australian radio, where it is comfortably lunchtime, is one of them. Turns out the Internet really is global: a researcher down under stumbles on Visual Poetry, and suddenly the word 'ungodly' applies to your alarm clock.
March 02, 2004
The world champion at memorizing binary digits clocks in at 100 bits per minute. Computers find this hilarious; humans find it slightly terrifying. But how do you actually pull it off? Some napkin math with Hans-Peter suggests a trick involving 1024 carefully chosen words, ten colors, and a sentence like 'seven gray birds jumped happily into the dark river.'
February 29, 2004
Leaving for Georgia on Thursday, and reading up beforehand has done what reading about a new country always does: made the planet feel enormous again. Languages with 46 cases that make Finnish look like kindergarten, fifteen ethnic groups, kings whose empires you have never heard of. With this much undiscovered country still on Earth, why are we sending people to Mars?
February 28, 2004
The Economist is the favorite magazine, but not always for the easy reasons. They are more libertarian than comfortable, which sometimes pushes them uncomfortably close to Republicans. And then they publish a leader making the conservative case for gay marriage so cleanly that it dismantles Bush's argument using his own premises. Anyone still suspecting the magazine is conservative should read it.
February 26, 2004
A BBC poll on religion lands roughly where you would expect: Nigerians top, Russians and the British bottom, the US being the usual stubborn outlier. But a different BBC poll a few years earlier ranked the happiest and unhappiest countries on Earth, and the names at the top and bottom look suspiciously familiar. Coincidence, or something stranger?
February 25, 2004
Yahoo spent years trying to turn its name into a verb. Google spent the same years sending trademark letters to anyone who dared. The asymmetry isn't just branding stubbornness, it points at something deeper about what each company thinks it is, and why one of them quietly wants you to stop saying its name.
February 22, 2004
A new project. A small bit of JavaScript that reads the text of whatever page it's living on, hands it to Google Image Search, and pulls back something relevant to display. Your blog gets a fresh, context-aware picture without you ever having to choose one. What could possibly go wrong?
February 21, 2004
European leaders keep wringing their hands about the weak dollar. Meanwhile, every company exposed to currency risk hedges it routinely with options and swaps. So what is stopping countries from doing the same? In fact, the way Euro governments structure their debt isn't just unhedged, it's actively making the dollar's slide hurt more than it has to.
February 19, 2004
Journalists love quoting Google hit counts as proof of cultural relevance — Abba still pulls 1.4 million, so they must still matter. But search for USA, then USA -Cheese, then USA +Cheese, and the math refuses to add up. So what happens when you try to predict a presidential election by counting hits per state?
February 17, 2004
Pick a date — any date — and Google will tell you what happened on it. Not the famous-person-was-born version, but fragments out of the lives of strangers. The newest in the Google hacks series turns search into something like a random window into other people's diaries.
February 16, 2004
Imagine one of those magnetic poetry sets on your fridge — except the fridge is 1600x1600 pixels, lives on the internet, and anyone can move the words. Each visitor sees a 500x500 window. You can rent your own patch and embed it on your site. What kind of poems do strangers leave behind?
February 15, 2004
Comcast wants Disney. Sony wants BMG. From the outside it looks like Big Media is winning — getting fatter, not breaking up. But why are the giants suddenly swallowing each other? Look at who actually made digital music work (hint: not a record label) and a different story starts to emerge.
February 11, 2004
If you're a straight man, two men kissing should logically be excellent news — that's less competition for the women. Yet the reaction tends to run the other way. Why? A Wednesday night theory involving polygamy, evolutionary math, and Seinfeld's claim that men just have very low sales resistance.
February 05, 2004
SpamBayes catches roughly three quarters of incoming spam, which is the good news. The bad news arrives when you try to email yourself an attachment with no body text — apparently very suspicious behavior. So now there's a small daily ritual that involves typing nonsense words to outwit your own filter.
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.