Google's Blogger Play launches, begins to spiral out of control

Blogger Play is a great new site made by the Blogger team. It shows a pretty slideshow of images as they are uploaded by Blogger users.

This is a much more visual form of the scrolling display that can be found in most of the buildings here on Google campus. I predict that it will be equally addictive.

After hearing the product had been released, I spent about 30 seconds on Blogger Play before seeing this:


Uh oh. Does that mean that by posting to this Blogger Blog the above image, which now will appear in Blogger Play for other viewers, I am setting into motion an infinitely nested set of images?? IT WILL SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL

Flex coolness: www.officialmancave.com

I was checking on a domain I wanted to buy, eless.com, and, much to my dismay it's owned by a domain farmer. For some reason, one of the ads these squatter-spammers had on the domain piqued my interest. Taking care not to click the ad, for this would reward the evil industry of squatter-spammers, I copied the domain and pasted it into my browser bar: http://www.officialmancave.com

It seems like this is an Alltel-funded advertisement experience. I see clear examples of Flex components such as the book component in use, and they feel really nice within The Man Cave experience. All hail Flex! Check it out!

Zurfer-like Picasa mobile shows off a Google Maps mash-up; adds location to your photos

Yesterday evening, Google announced the launch of the very descriptively-named Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices, which is another big step in the quiet photo sharing revolution.

With Map My Photos, Picasa joins Zurfer, which was launched two weeks ago by the Yahoo! Research Berkeley lab, in allowing us to mark photographs with location metadata, or "geotag" them, and then experience spatially-organized albums. Make sure to check out the Picasa team's test gallery for a demonstration of the mash-up at work.

Dell Linux PC storefront fails the thoroughness check

At the time of writing, the following could be seen atop the Dell Linux storefront:


I'm not sure if they wanted "system" to be plural or for the words "one of" to be removed, but one or the other must happen! I notified Dell support. I wonder see how long it'll take their corporate structure to respond.

Update 6/1/2007 @ noon: In the comments, JohnP@Dell said: Kyle, Great catch! ...Passing your post on to our Web team.

Wow, Dell definitely passed the responsiveness check. Now, on to buying my new Ubuntu machine...

Update 6/5/2007 @ 10:40: I forgot to check the site for the last few days, but I looked this morning and the grammatical error is fixed. Good job, Dell!

Microsoft's user happiness video won't play in their own media player

Microsoft is known for declaring and enforcing their own technology 'standards', rather than observing the well-formed standards that have been agreed upon by others. This creates a divide (and, hence, the lack of a true standard) in nearly every sector of the tech industry they touch.

Today, I needed to install Internet Explorer (IE) 7 on a Windows machine in order to test some front-end code against this new browser, which, unfortunately, is a necessary step since the IE line is notoriously standards-resistant and IE7 has a growing user base.

After a quick Google search, I found myself at the Internet Explorer Home Page (which, for the geeks out there, doesn't declare a doctype). On that page, the following link caught my eye:


Well, this will either be enlightening or highly entertaining, I thought. So I clicked the link, which leads to a .ASX file -- If you don't know what a .ASX file is, that makes two of us. I was then met with the following:

As you can see, Microsoft's Windows Media Player, running under Microsoft Windows XP, attempted to open a file that's in some sort of Microsoft 'standard' format, from Microsoft's website -- and failed! I figured there was an off chance that Firefox, the one non-Microsoft part of this equation, was causing the problem, so I tested it in IE6. And it failed again. I'm LOLing, but they're LOLing all the way to the bank.

Microsoft, if you're going to try to ignore standards and dictate your own, at least get your $#!+ working first.

Shopgoodwill.com: buy weird crap from the kinds of people that will NEVER use the internet

Tonight, I realized that I now buy nearly everything online. In fact, I really only have IRL shopping experiences at thrift stores, Asian/Mexican bazaars here in the Mission District, or Walgreens (the place that bleeds me dry when I purchase something I need urgently enough not to buy it online). It's impossible to replace the ambience of the bazaars with a website, and Walgreens is necessary for stated reasons, so I decided to look for online thrift stores.

After a quick Google search, I stumbled upon this site, Shopgoodwill.com, and I thought to myself "uh oh... this could be a pretty important find." I made a mental note to blog about it if it were, indeed, a pretty important find. And here we are.

It didn't take me long to find the Men's Clothing section, and I wasn't disappointed to find this:

Mens XL Disco Shirt DESCRIPTION: This shirt needs cleaning.

Then, in the Women's Clothing section, this:
Fake Fur Vest

However, the clothing selection here suffers from the same thing as Goodwill's brick and mortar incarnations: the inverse bell curve. See the following graphs:




As you can see, at Goodwill, more people fit into the 'WTF' size range or the ~0 size than anything else (the second graph). Because of this polarized populace, there are remarkably low numbers of size 'M' people at Goodwill, considering that this is the size most represented in the population as a whole (the first graph). And, I assume as a result of this, the number of size 'M' garments is also dangerously low. This inverse bell curve, I found, applies to both the selection and the people at Shopgoodwill.com.

I left the clothing section behind, happy with what I found there.

At first, the weirdness of the crap I was digging through felt like an adventuresome treasure hunt and yielded hilarious results, like any reasonably good day at the real thrift store. This is a ringing endorsement -- I had found a new hobby! However, as my search went on, the item selection deviated increasingly from the norm:

Newspaper Clip in frame from 1936
Two Old Hand Saws
Oil Painting of a Girl on a Beach
Case of 500 - 3"x2"x2" Boxes

This is brilliant! I'm finding more and more bizarre crap -- the kind that is definitely not available for purchase on other websites, because the people selling this crap aren't the kinds of people that use the internet in the first place. These products are provided by people dumping their junk off at several federated Goodwill locations nationwide -- and many of these people aren't advanced enough as netizens to become sellers on sites like eBay and Craigslist. But Shopgoodwill.com lowers the barrier to entry for the internet economy, if only in this weird little niche. Some Goodwill dumpers are people moving house (or, hopefully, moving trailer) with a need to offload a ton of junk quickly. Others are donating the contents of the storage shed of a recently deceased uncle -- perhaps one with oil paintings? Most are probably thrift store community members who have no idea that there's even an online component of the system that sells their bizarre crap.

This bizarre crap is mixed with another kind of crap -- the kind that, while it may be available on eBay from time-to-time, I would never find because it's not like I perform constant searches for items like these -- these are the kinds of products that I don't know I want til I see them.

And for that kind of impulsive and weird consumer, vintage and thrift stores have long been a haven. Shopgoodwill.com is a kickass extension to that.

If you find weird junk at the site, post it in the comments!

Ninjawords -- because 18 DEX > *

Phil Crosby said that online dictionaries made him feel like shouting, in his words, "get out of my face and show me a definition!” We've all experienced this problem first-hand many times over the years, especially as dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online, and even Wiktionary bloated their pages more and more (though, in their defense, Wiktionary's "bloated" pages consist mostly of value-added content as opposed to graphics, ads, and inefficient layout coding). That's why he created Ninjawords.

In line with his original goal, Phil's solution is fast -- for me, on a mediocre broadband connection, a single lookup takes less than half a second from the time I press enter to the time I start reading the definition(s). Additionally, it is primarily populated with definitions from Wiktionary, which I'm all for. But to top it all off, Ninjawords has additional features that set it far ahead of the pack. For instance, you can enter multiple search terms by separating them with commas, and the results are all returned instantly on the same page. Also, when you have a typo, Ninjawords not only offers guesses as to what you meant to type -- it also automatically returns the definition of the most relevant suggestion.

The minimalist interface takes a queue from Google, and is welcome respite from the terrors of Merriam-Webster:


Check out the site for yourself!

Wiktionary: Replacing them all

Only an evolving medium can describe an evolving entity like the English language, especially if the entity evolves as quickly as the English language. Today, Wiktionary is four years old, and it makes the competition look incredibly slow -- slow to keep up with the language, and slow to load in my web browser.

If you were to look up the word podcast on Merriam-Webster Online, you would be greeted with the following:

As you can see, it's not in there, but I doubt that Merriam-Webster questions the legitimacy of the word: they use the word quite often. As I write this, the root word podcast appears on Merriam-Webster’s main page four times -- once as a common noun ("this free podcast delivers a daily dose of word power and fun"). Their podcast section is even listed as a free daily feature:

Isn’t it ironic? A dictionary website, whose main draw is ostensibly to find definitions of words, uses a word that’s missing from their own dictionary multiple times on the main page! A further irony is the fact that podcasts are a free service of Merriam-Webster, yet to find out what the word means, you’d be forced to search for it at another site.

While it’s possible that the word’s definition would be available from Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com, the by-subscription site whose link is visible in the above screenshot, this gives rise to a whole new set of questions. Google has demonstrated that low-fi content (such as dictionary data) can be offered for free in a profitable business model based on targeted advertising, even when the backend is as comparatively complex as that of Google Search or Gmail. So in the case of Merriam-Webster, this seems like a no-brainer: If you really do have good dictionary content stored somewhere, make it free! While you’re at it, cut down on the bloatiness of your site.

I know that the word podcast does indeed appear in Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English, as can be found through a dictionary.com query, which searches through the "Preview Edition" of that text. But why doesn’t it appear on Merriam Webster’s main page? Years ago, I relied on their site for definitions. (They won me over because they had a clever little JavaScript prompt that allowed me, even back in my Internet Explorer days of 2000, to search their site for a definition without first loading the main page.*) They lost my business soon thereafter when I started to notice that even quite pedestrian words were occasionally missing from their data. I shudder at the thought of paying a subscription fee to access word definitions, so around five years ago I stopped using Merriam-Webster’s site altogether.

What’s more, I noticed that the New Millennium Dictionary, which does contain the word podcast, is missing from the list of versions that are included in the Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com package. This suggests that Merriam-Webster is withholding content even from paying users. But it’s not just Merriam-Webster with problems…

The above screenshot is from the subscriber-view (it would appear that my university is a paying customer) of Oxford English Dictionary (OED). As you can see, the word podcast is absent from this site as well, despite the fact that the related New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) named podcast their word of the year for 2006. Meanwhile, on AskOxford, they proudly announce the addition of two seemingly useless words, even while "podcast":

I applaud Oxford for leveraging the publishing power of the web to update their online version of OED four times per year, which is a bit more often than a print version could feasibly be updated. But the first question I have to ask is, “why only four?” It’s not like web publishing is all that difficult — I even manage to update my silly blog more often than four times per year, and when I do, there are quite a few more words. Further, I can’t for the life of me think of a single technical, financial, or user-oriented reason that OUP stands to benefit from the practice of buffering their updates until a predetermined day each quarter.

The OED bills itself out as “The definitive record of the English language”, yet it fails to define words like podcast and laptop, each of which has over 100 million Google hits (whereas liposculpture has abount 300 thousand) and is in daily use all over the developed world. Omissions like these are rampant in MSN Encarta Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary (which even lacks “blog” as a term), and every other print-and-web dictionary I could find. Clearly, these companies are behind the times.

Now, I’m not the kind of tech-head that demands webization or “web 2.0″-ization of all things, but nearly everyone I know already relies on the web for definitions. And right now, they are users that are up for grabs, searching for a product that doesn’t suck; a free product that won’t intentionally omit words to solicit paying subscriptions; a product that loads quickly; a product that is up-to-date.

The product they’re looking for is Wiktionary. Wiki technology is exactly what a dictionary needs. It is a platform that thrives on changes, change-averse language pundits (see my previous entry). Because language changes far faster than the publication cycle of top-down dictionaries, a by-the-users and highly iterative approach is needed. Wiktionary uses that approach. I encourage all of you to compare your current web-based dictionary of choice with Wiktionary and see how you like it. In instances where you find it failing, you can just edit the entry and justify your changes on its accompanying discussion page. I believe that the more active users a wiki has, the more accurate and useful it becomes — especially if Wikipedia is any evidence. Because a definition can be quickly added, edited, or deleted by any reader, Wiktionary has the potential to be everyone’s go-to resource for word definitions — I know it’s mine.

–

*Note: Nowadays, this is possible for most of the sites I use — it’s a built-in feature in Firefox to create similar shortcuts. For instance, if I type “wp ninja” in my browser’s address bar, I get Wikipedia’s search results for the query “ninja”. I have set up similar shortcuts for about 20 sites, including Facebook search, Urban Dictionary, my university’s online student directory, and a registrar WHOIS search.

Writing your own headlines (ignoring your own deadlines)

My parents, both nurses, recently moved to Columbia to work at the University Hospital there. Out of curiosity, I was browsing the Wikipedia article on Columbia, MO, when I came upon a link to an article entitled Columbia College ranked among “America’s Best Colleges”. I was intrigued, but upon reading it, I noticed an astounding difference between the meaning of the headline and the meaning of the story:

The college ranked 35th for the second consecutive year in the Best Comprehensive Colleges-Bachelor’s category for the Midwest region.

As I was reading, I honestly thought the number of qualifiers would never end.

Ernst & Young Irony

I stumbled upon this about a year ago at ey.com. Note how the black doesn't line up.

Update 1/31/2007: This flaw is still on the site. I'm starting to feel guilty that I noticed this and didn't email them about it, or something. I'd surely lend them a hand if the logo didn't make such a bold claim...

Update 4/2/2007: Their website took a huge while to respond, and the flaw is still there. I'm seriously thinking of calling them to let them know.