February 2, 2004

Site Search Still Sucks

Jim Rapoza over at eWeek laments over the sorry state of customer facing corporate search. Here are some good quotes from Jim’s article:

“…there is one thing about the Web that remains poor: site search capabilities.”

“As we said in the 1997 article, if visitors or customers can’t find what they want on your site, they will often simply leave.”

“The search capabilities on most company and content-oriented Web sites are as bad now as they were several years ago. In fact, eWEEK Labs was dismayed to find that we could have easily rerun an article we wrote back in June 1997 on how to improve site searches…”

January 30, 2004

CBGB’s Photographic History

Nostalgia: In the mid-80’s the Sunday Matinees were sweaty, smelly, sometimes scumbag filled Slam Dance Fests, but man… were they fun!

January 29, 2004

The Internet Never Forgets

The other day I was browsing through the Wayback Machine and discovered a number of four-year-old weblog entries I posted to my then homegrown blog tool. They weren’t earth shattering entries, but I figured I’d bring them back home.

So, after a few quick regular expression hacks I managed to format them for import into MovableType (complete way links to archived pages on the Wayback Machine)

Brewster Kahle, you rock!

January 27, 2004

Mapping Google News

This is nifty:

Google News Map: “Why not parse Google News, find the first name match and draw a map with the latest headlines on the coordinates of the countries.”

January 26, 2004

My First Week with STeVo

Last week I finally completed building my Home Theater PC (HTPC) — aka PVR (personal video recorder), DVR (digital video recorder), homebrew-TiVo or what my wife Catherine lovingly calls STeVo ;-)

On my Wiki I put together some of my initial observations and install notes for those of you interested in building one these boxes yourself [more here]

January 23, 2004

Rich Client Ubiquity

Michael Sippey has a couple of good comments regarding Salesforce.com’s recently released “Office Edition,” which integrates its hosted SFA tightly with Microsoft Office:

“The company that championed went overboard with their “no software” positioning is now touting their integration into the world’s most widely used piece of personal productivity software. Which really isn’t that big of a deal, when you realize that this fits in perfectly with Microsoft’s strategy of morphing Office into a combination productivity app and very rich client…”

January 22, 2004

Virtual Ass Sniffing

From the Dogster about page:

“Why Dogster? We are dog freaks and computer geeks, unafraid to admit that when we see a dog, any dog, our heads turn and we howl with delight. Who wants a cookie? Who does? Well, we do and we think it’s about time there is a social networking application that is truly for the dogs. We hope you do too! All the dogs in the house say Wooooof! … Wooooooooof!”

January 21, 2004

MAGNET-URI Project

Kazaa is promoting a BitTorrent-like distributed P2P alternative that can be embedded in other P2P networks and web links, which they are calling Magnet links (via Anil Dash’s Links)

More here…

“Magnet links allows users to directly download large media files saving website creators and bloggers money on bandwidth costs and effectively propagating files on p2p networks that attract millions of users per day.”

“Magnet links” uses…

“MAGNET-URI, [which] is an open URI-scheme and supporting practices/code for enabling seamless integration between websites and locally-running utilities, such as file-management tools.”

January 20, 2004

Windows Services for Unix

Anil Dash put together a first-class summary of the *nix goodies found in Microsoft’s Windows Services for Unix, which was recently re-released as a free download (passport registration required).

Even though I’m using Samba at home to connect my Windows and Linux file systems, it might be nice (and more efficient) to use the native NFS support in WSfU instead.

January 16, 2004

Do you remember?

Bob Mould of Sugar and of course HÃ¼sker DÃ¼ now has a weblog.

Welcome Bob! I certainly do remember with many of your songs still cycling through my playlists.