November 20, 2003

Stolen Domain Names

It’s appalling to hear that VeriSign (aka Network Solutions | Internic) is STILL letting people steal domain names!

“…it appears that it is still possible to steal domains with the minimum of effort. We have been contacted by the owner of the valuable domain DVDmovies.com who was amazed, only last month, to find that his domain had been moved and registered with another company, without his knowledge.”

“That the registrar at fault was no less than VeriSign – owner of all .com and .net domains – makes it worse. The fact that the company was also recently chastised by the US Appeals Court and ordered to pay millions of dollars in compensation to the owner of Sex.com for wrongly transferring his domain makes it all the more incredible.”

November 19, 2003

Presentation Layer of Search

Raul Valdes-Perez, president of Vivisimo is quoted in
an article at New Scientist about improvements to the user experience of search interfaces. In particular he is talking about Google News, MSN’s newly announced Newsbot and Vivisimo as yet to be released spontaneous clustering approach.

“[Raul Valdes-Perez] says that the engineering of search and rank algorithms “has gone about as far as it can go”. Now the way to improve the user experience is to work on the next layer of algorithms that determine the presentation of the “search and rank” results.”

November 19, 2003

Web of Human Knowledge

Ross Mayfield links to a fascinating article on
Boxes and Arrows by Alex Wright about Paul Otlet: The forgotten forefather of information architecture.

“In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext,” Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards.”

November 18, 2003

Popularity Metrics

In Tim Bray’s latest essay on search he points out what I feel is an often overlooked aspect of Google’s PageRank when it is applied to enterprise search:

“[PageRank] Won’t Work for You If you’re writing or deploying a search engine for your Intranet or product catalogue or portal, Google’s PageRank trick probably won’t work, because most Intranet and catalogue and portal pages don’t point at each other. The Web is unique in that it has millions of authors independently making decisions about what’s important; aggregating those decisions is what makes PageRank so powerful.”

November 17, 2003

Disposable Email Addresses

I order to protect myself from a potential deluge of spam from suspicious service offerings, I wanted to use a disposable email address.

Of course Google turned up a gem, which I had heard of before, but never used called Spamgourmet

Their service is simple, but clever and best of all free! Basically, after you register a valid email address, you can then create a temporary email address, with a limited message forward limit, at any time.

November 14, 2003

Sleep Is Now An Option

Well, in light of the fact that within a few months, sleep will likely become a scarce commodity for me and Catherine. So, I think perhaps I should investigate the “Sleep Is Now An Option” drug.

Provigil … was a drug originally developed to treat narcolepsy, the inability to stay awake. Now Cephalon, the maker of Provigil, has received a letter of approval from the FDA extending the approved uses of the drug to treatment of jet-lag and swing-shift syndrome.
In reality the drug is set to replace the caffeine in No-Doze as the all-nighter anti-sleep aid of choice. In fact, it’s much better than No-Doze – with Provigil, you can literally stay awake for days, alert and with a remarkable lack of side effects. “(via SciScoop)

November 13, 2003

Irish Eyes Are Smiling

It’s official, Guinness is good for you!

November 13, 2003

Further info on Wallop

Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch interviews Microsoft social computing group researcher Lili Cheng, which reveals some more insight (including screen shots) into MSFT’s social-networking software code-named “Wallop“:

“We’ve been really interested in blogs, wikis, authoring and syndication around RSS, and social networking software in general,” Cheng tells Microsoft Watch. “We were imagining how these things could combine. And Wallop is our first experiment in this space.”

“A lot of these ideas (RSS, wikis) are more novel and intriguing,” she says. “They are about aggregating sites and getting more information out. It matches the way people communicate.”

November 12, 2003

Pacman via Excel

I’m truly amazed! I wish I knew Japanese to provide more details, but apparently Nobuya Chikada has created an excellent remake of the classics Pacman and Space Invaders in Microsoft Excel (Yes, I said Excel!) Do check it out. (Link via Les Orchard)

Note: you’ll need to lower your Excel macro security level to get it to run (at least that’s was what I had to do in Excel 2003), but it’s certainly worth it!

November 7, 2003

Google Deskbar

I usually don’t like to add too much extra paraphernalia to the default Windows desktop. However, after about an hour of sporadic usage, I think the Google Deskbar is on its way to becoming required gear for me.

“Google Deskbar enables you to search with Google from any application without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Installs easily in your Windows taskbar.”