Archives for January, 2005
Blogfodder Dump
Monday, January 31st, 2005
Cleaning out the blogfodder folder. I really, truly wanted to put together more significant posts about many of these items, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day… Jon Udell on desktop search. “Google’s PageRank showed us that relevance is a collective judgment. Services such as del.icio.us, Flickr, and Furl are likewise showing us [...]
What’s in a name? Plenty, it seems.
Monday, January 31st, 2005
Infoworld is reporting that MS has agreed to change the name of the upcoming EU version of Windows. Apparently EU officials noticed the same naming issue that I did, and feel that the upcoming Windows offering should have a name carries a little less of a “this version sucks but your legislators demanded it” air.
alienabductions.com down
Sunday, January 30th, 2005
Just so you all know: Any email you’ve sent to me in the last week or so at an alienabductions.com address probably didn’t get to me, and the addresses will likely continue not working for the next few days, at least. Note that this applies even if you didn’t get an explicit bounce. Yes, the [...]
One of These Things is Not Like the Others
Thursday, January 27th, 2005
I subscribe to a few Moreover ad-supported RSS feeds. They were preloaded in FeedDemon when I installed it, and I’ve held on to the subscriptions mostly to get a better idea of their approach to ad-supported feeds. It’s worth noting, however, that I consider all the Moreover feeds to be utterly useless except for this [...]
So, like I was saying…
Tuesday, January 25th, 2005
Lo, how the mighty have become…well, no longer the flavor of the month. As I was saying a few months ago, it used to suck to be a search engine. Then, yesterday, Scientific American published an article exploring the search for better Web searches. As usual, read the article in full, don’t accept my interpretation [...]
Thesis, Antithesis: Amazon Makes Intelligent Use of Email
Tuesday, January 18th, 2005
Shortly after trashing eBay for their sad little email personalization efforts in a recent post, I received an email from Amazon. The start of that email is reproduced below: Dear Amazon.com Customer, We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased “Svefn-G-Englar” by Sigur Rós also purchased the work of M83. For this reason, you might like [...]
Moleskine Madness
Monday, January 17th, 2005
I’ve been a notebook geek for most of my life. Whether it’s spiral bound sketchbooks, crappy little dimestore reporter’s notebooks, or the familiar marbled grade school composition books, no PDA has yet been able to supplant plain old paper notebooks as my tool of choice for orgainizing my thoughts. Over the last couple of years, [...]
Personalizing, My Ass
Monday, January 17th, 2005
No, not this sort of thing — note the position of the comma in the title, please. Advertisers love the word “personalization,” particularly in the context of online advertising where everything is handled by machines — often tied to a database of information about the individual being targeted — and the costs of personalization are [...]
Vacuum Cleaner Meets Octopus
Thursday, January 13th, 2005
Since Gwen’s birth I’ve been assigning titles to each day — it helps me differentiate between them, in place of the eight hours of uninterrupted sleep that used to mark the boundary between one day and the next. Among these fine days we’ve had Holy Crap!, Grandma-o-rama, and Big Girl Shirt Day. Mona gets full [...]
Gwendolyn Claire McNamara
Thursday, January 6th, 2005
My daughter was born on this past Tuesday — January 4, 2005 Monday — January 3, 2005. I’ll get back to posting in a week or so, but we’ve got some family bonding to do right now. Beautiful, isn’t she? Update: It has been pointed out to me that four days averaging less then four [...]
