Personalized home pages

I still stick with the figure that only 10% of people will ever bother to personalize a home page. As Yahoo, Google and others develop their widgets to drop on your desktop, this seems to offer a carrot to get people to spend a bit of time providing basic information to better personalize content and apps.

So, does life begin at your browser default page or your desktop in the future? Desktop methinks. Eventually.

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/09/programmed-personal-homepages.html

More useless fun

Digg is becoming a very effective way for me to waste far too much time.

This was a fun discovery...

Ragdoll and Spikes

Dark matter... ummm matters

Read a good article that explained the universe is made up of about:

• 25 percent dark matter (matter does not absorb or emit light)
• 5 percent ordinary matter (planets, K-Fed,and basically everything else with mass)
• 70 percent dark energy (the force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever increasing rate, maybe K-fed fits here too)
  

My e-mail inbox seems to be overflowing with dark energy lately.

Poor Pluto

In a move that will undo the ruler-based nun training I received at a tender age, looks like we are moving from 9 to 12 planets. Pluto was on the bubble, but instead of hanging with the jock (Classical) planets, it now must live with being ranking member of the geeks (Plutons).

I bet UB313 is the first to get a swirly.

The purpose of the Internet

Sure you can book travel, social network, keep up on news, yada yada... but the Internet REALLY exists to provide you this.

Meet Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager

Good for Google

Google is now posting warnings about sites in your search results list that might behave badly

I am sure someone will have a problem with this - but I, for one, am glad to see it.

URLs gone bad

This got sent my way and I thought it was pretty funny.

URLs gone bad

Making fun look like work

Web pages (text heavy please) magically transform into office product clothing...

www.workfriendly.net

While one chicken might disagree...

Alice Cooper...

national treasure

Microsoft's "Windows Principles" are definitely worth a read.

Seems like some sound thinking, but nearly every article I read on these introduced them as the "non-binding Windows Principles". One would expect that this was not a radomly chosen adjective.

IM replacing e-mail?

Interesting article on IM turning e-mail into the next snail mail.

I am guessing this rings true... depending on your age and texting skills.

XBox Portable and the World Cup Head Butt

Of little or no redeeming value, but worth 2 minutes of your time...

XBox Portable and the World Cup Head Butt

Google and evil

After reading Lore Sjoberg's clever post on Google's mantra, I had a few other thoughts.

• If you plan to organize the world's data, offering a free (and useful) spreadsheet is a good start.
  
  
• I see to camps developing on search... (1) the Googlites, who say "damn the metatags - long live search algorithms!" and feel data utopia is only reached by math against the data itself -- and the (2) Boxers, who deeply believe we should apply 50 to 60 tags, ONLY from a defined list (created by the King Boxer I guess)
  

I am probably 90% Googlite, but figure some tagging (with flexiblity for the author to define the tags) is not all bad.

Is PowerPoint Evil?

Edward Tufte has declared PowerPoint as evil in this article.

I am not sure I can agree - although calling presentations "slideware" is pretty clever.

To harken back to the old "guns don't kill people, people kill people" mantra, I think it is more "PowerPoint isn't insipid, but the insipid can not be prevented from using PowerPoint".

And while taking no formal position on the former item, I always felt "guns don't kill people, bullets do" would have been more accurate.

But no one asked me.

Useless, but cute

The big difference between FireFox and IE...

One red paper clip meets Alice

An illustration of the power of blogs, and confirmation that Alice Cooper is a heck of a guy.

Wanna write a book?

The concept of being published continues to evolve.

You can agrue that a blog, MySpace, personal web pages, and so on... all enable someone with a few minutes, a degree of ego, and a desire to say something to be "published". I am not sure that "author by self-appointment" is resume material, but your words are available to others - so maybe it is of some note.

Or course, once out there, the market takes over (e.g. demand/interest in your ideas) and we enter territory much more familiar to Commecon. Anyway... if you want to convert your web musings to hardback or paperback, some pretty interesting options are out there such as: www.blurb.com

How geeky are you?

Geek test.

Just call me Mr. 42 (an emerging geek by their standards)

Wiki work - added some jargon

I totally love pbwiki.

Just added some jargon stuff to the Electronic Communication Commandments.

The visible hand

I am probably late to the party, but this looks like a pretty neat little tool to guide you to other related content - based on what you are viewing:

www.blinkx.com

They also offer some video search capabilities that I have yet to play with (beyond my usual "search on Alice Cooper" test):

www.blinkx.tv