Alumni Social Networks
5/30/2005
I think there's a good amount of money to be earned in setting these type of niche networks up. Somebody should get on it before existing social networks integrate that way.
Google Timezones
5/30/2005
The next "hidden" feature Google should introduce in their search is the ability to find the current time in any city/country around the world. For instance, "current time in New Zealand". This would prevent me from installing some add-on to the Finder.
No Open Source Anime Database?
5/20/2005
This is a call for help. I'm in great need to access a massive listing of anime series. Something SOAPy or RESTful will work for me. Shoot me a message if come across anything.
Why Would Robots Ever Risk Their Lives?
5/15/2005
Because we'll program them that way.
Gmail Usage
5/14/2005
I never conceived that I would even need to use more than 50 megabytes of email storage. I now have over 200 megs archived. While it's good to keep a lot of email, it isn't necessarily efficient to hoard everything. The user interface needs to be improved as well. For now, I'm just getting by with some home-grown Greasemonkey scripts. Has anyone been able to connect Pine with Gmail?
Googlebot and Tagging
5/11/2005
I wonder how the Googlebot (crawler) approaches tagging sites. To a crawler, what's the difference between a tagging site and a blog entry with tons of fake comments pushing v!4grA? If you think about it, those tagging sites won't be at the top of the list unless tag concatenation is too unique or if everybody starts linking to them as if they were true MDRs (master data repositories).
Dispensing Greasemonkey Justice?
5/09/2005
I came across Nivi's post on Greasemonkey (GM). I'm surprised we haven't witnessed a debate about this issue yet. GM, if used properly, will help both developers and regular surfers. Who would have imagined a year ago that it would be possible to embed related content on any website? But it doesn't stop there. New cool GM scripts seem to be popping up all over the place. Nivi's post surfaces an important question: at what point will e-commerce applications or any online vendor be challenged by GM?
I don't seem to think that there will be emerging rules. Take something as simple as a price comparison script. Technically, we could replicate the script's features by opening up N browser windows, or by parsing N rss feeds if you're an uber geek, and merely glance and compare text. People already do this and merchants are aware of it. This is probably what traditional mom and pop vendors already hate most about the internet - the ability to rapidly scour for deals. If anything, a tool like GM will start bringing parallel concepts of the semantic web into greater visibility. But all this could change with just one unruly script. People could start dispensing "justice" but who's going to head up that task force? An anti-internet-evolution group?
Also, bonus points will be given to the first person that can tell me what iteration/version of the JL that this image belongs to.
