Designed by Google wiz Anna Patterson, Cuil.com started taking search requests this morning. It’s painfully slow still, but I LOVE the layout of results. All those 9 years ago when I made my first Google search, I was drawn to the simplicity and sense of an “alternative” to the clutter of Yahoo and Altavista. Cuil seems to rekindle a lot of those same feelings.
Google and Disney have teamed up to create the most detailed 3-D model in Google Earth to date. Save yourself a flight, an $85 ticket, and a $7 soda, and gather round Google Earth!
His eyes were cold, vacant, menaced. He shuffled through the front office with great conviction, picking up an outdated copy of Q magazine on the way by. It was clear this part-time employee was in no mood to jabber, there were greater matters at hand.
It was Tuesday morning when I first noticed the nasty big fly putzing around the office, ungracefully bashing into walls and grazing my head once in a while. Nicki soon became the target of the fly’s aggression. By late-afternoon, and after several failed efforts at destroying or releasing the creature, I had developed a defensive twitch. Based on the fact that a typical fly lives just two weeks and the heft of this particular specimen, I simply gave up and let Mother Nature run her inevitable course. That was, until Ryan Goan (the aforementioned part-timer) manned up this afternoon.
Q Magazine in hand, he confidently walked into the kitchen and closed the door behind him. Never one to question the decencies of that highly complicated man, I simply went about my work and paid no attention to the frenzy in the kitchen. It wasn’t until I heard that terrible buzz, that I turned my head towards the kitchen. Ryan was in full offensive position, swinging all limbs like an attacking cougar!! Q Magazine in one hand, Pledge spray bottle in the other. In a flash, I saw him bat the fly to the floor, spraying a direct shot of solvent onto the insect, and follow through with a punishing crack of the magazine and another!
I managed to capture only several pictures before the assassination had been carried out and Ryan humbly returned to his desk. In a word, it was… amazing.
I noticed a little t-shirt icon next to the CNN headlines today, upon further clicking I learned that CNN is selling custom t-shirts with dated headlines as of today… Come on now!! Why can’t the headlines just be the headlines? It’s bad enough that the deliverers (those reading the teleprompter and offering their personal “spin” on what’s happening) have become a-list celebrities, but now we’re expected to cover our bodies with headlines! I imagine the shirts are geared to be collectibles someday, like an old McDonald’s Star Wars cup or Rolling Stones ’72 Tour poster, but since when is Ted Turner in the business of selling collectibles? This is just another step in the evolution of news becoming entertainment and not a practical source of information.
As a footnote, if anybody wants to buy a Max the Millennium Beanie Baby, I have one for sale for $3700. 
Google released the latest version of their geographic playground last week. The imagery-rich Google Earth 4.3 seems more deserving of a full version number update, but it leaves one to wonder just how much more sophisticated a full version 5.0 could really be.
Having cut my teeth in business at a mapping company, I have an appreciation for where GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology is coming from and where it’s going to. It wasn’t 5 years ago that very low-resolution painfully out of date satellite and terrestrial imagery (often in indecipherable shades of black and white) was available on only a very limited basis, and a respectable company could still charge several thousand dollars for enormous, awkward images of a select few locations. When the company called Keyhole released their EarthViewer product about 4 years ago as a paid service, heads turned throughout the GIS industry. The product was revolutionary in its simplicity and in typical Mountain View style, “gussied up” and ready to be purchased by a certain search company. Google did just that and in June 2005, released the product as Google Earth at no cost.
Today, just 3 years later, Google Earth is a household term and used by a hugely diverse array of industries. Thousands of layers are available documenting everything from crime statistics to dolphin migratory routes. Arguably, Google Earth has become the official map of the world (a costly feat that many government agencies failed miserably at).
With Google Earth 4.3, viewers can access the amazing, yet still somewhat unknown, database of oblique images known as Google Streetview. These images are available in a growing grid across major population hubs. It will only be a matter of time before the images are available for every street in the country, maybe the world.
Check it out!
If you think this is cool, wait a year for Photosynth to make a splash.
Having trouble coming up with that perfect Web2.0 sounding company name? Well worry not, for the Web2.0 Company Name Generator has arrived!! Some of my favorite results (so far)
Ainoodle
Twidel
Wikimba
Gexo
Jabbercube
Quible
Once you’ve got your name picked out, just toss it in the Web2.0 Logo Generator (with optional “BETA” crest).
Following the untraditional release of their latest record IN RAINBOWS, Radiohead released a live studio film of the entire album under the title ‘Scotch Mist’ onto YouTube. If you haven’t had a chance, check it out. It makes a great background music, and is arguably just as good as the album itself.
About a year ago, I was introduced to the great free library of original recordings at Daytrotter.com. Recorded in Rock Island, Illinois (halfway between Des Moines and Chicago), the music acts “..use borrowed instruments, play with their touring mates, utilize an often unkempt toilet, eat some food and then cram back into their vans for the last half of the drive. What they leave behind is a pile of ashes, sometimes a forgotten stocking hat and four absolutely collectible songs that often impart on whomever listens to them the true intensity that these musicians put into their art, sometimes with more clarity than they do when they have months to tinker with overdubs and experiments.“
Some of the standout acts that have passed through the Daytrotter studio are: The Cold War Kids, Of Montreal, The Walkmen, The Rentals (Weezer Alum), Presidents of the United States, and a couple hundred less notable acts.
Each totally legit mp3 comes with original cover art. Check out Daytrotter for something familiar or something new!
…I could never really get the hang of those things anyway. Media behemoths NBC Universal and News Corp have teamed up to create the potential YouTube killer hulu – a pleasantly simple, and frighteningly generous little site. I can picture a day when hulu has courted enough major providers to make people really question why they’re spending $20-100/month on a television package. YouTube could easily find themselves as a new public access or PBS-like source for the content you won’t find on the major stations (like the Dramatic Prairie Dog).
I’ll leave the full description of the service to the professional copywriters of the aforementioned corporations.
