As a self-titled weblog about the intersection of media, technology, and finance, the appearance of Blogs on Jeopardy cannot go ignored.
I’m off to Web 2.0 tomorrow. Look me up if you’re there.
Year: 2004
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Reunion Brunch
The other great thing that happened this weekend is that we hooked up with some old friends from our Tokyo days for brunch at the Carnelian Room on top of the Bank of America building in downtown San Francisco. It was great to catch up with everyone but it’s hard to believe that we’ve all got kids. I had to do a double count before reserving a table for eleven!
The kids were much happier to when we finished and were away from the poached eggs & truffles and able to scream with great abandon in the parking garage.
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More ways to get there. A9 from Amazon
Amazon’s A9 came out of beta with much fanfare and continues to get rave reviews because of a new feature which keeps track of your search history. This can be quite useful for those that are trying to retrace their steps to get at a vital piece of information. Bookmarks are single points of reference like an address. But the human brain doesn’t always work this way – sometimes it’s easier to remember how you got somewhere. A9’s Search History takes this geographical metaphor to the virtual world of clickstreams.
I notice that Ask Jeeves has a similar feature on it’s My Jeeves which is currently in Beta.
The other feature that I enjoy using is the image search which throws up images related to your search query right alongside and in context with the web hits. This is especially useful when doing searches on individuals. For those of you into vanity searches, it’s always a kick to scroll through all the people out there that share your name.
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Home at Last!
Almost two months to the day of searching and we finally got the house of our dreams. We are now going to be residents of the Island of Alameda!
We must have reviewed at least 50 houses and were in bidding wars on three of them. I was beginning to get blase about the whole process, with all the offers & counter-offers, and it was getting to be kind of enjoyable. Such a game! Our realtor came to meet us while we were eating dinner with Mie & Dav so we could sign our latest counter-offer. Dav mentioned that the last time he went to dinner with someone who was sitting on an offer, they won. He must have some kind of real estate karma thing that rubbed off on us – thanks Dav!
I’m glad it’s over. We were cooling our jets in Berkeley on the latest round of bidding when our realtor called and said, “So, are you ready to move in?” We immediately whooped it up and sang “we got a house. . . .we’ve. . . got. . . a. . .house” all the way back to the apartment.
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Fear Monger
How do you win an election when you’ve driven up the national debt, sent 90% of the active military into harm’s way to neutralize weapons that don’t exist and ostracized yourself from the world community by ignoring them and mis-pronouncing the names of their leaders.
You scare the bejezus out of the electorate, that’s what!
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The uncertain future of Internet Explorer?
It’s been three years since a significant update to IE. Has Microsoft abandoned IE?
Microsoft’s last major browser release was in August 2001. The company in the summer of 2003 discontinued its browser for the Macintosh and said it would issue no more standalone versions of IE. Last month, the company released new IE security features in its Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the Windows XP operating system, but said only XP users would get those improvements.
Rumors are now that the next version of IE will only be for those that upgrade to the next version of Windows (who says the two are not a bundled together?) but no one knows for certain. In the software business, a foggy roadmap for your developer community is as good as a kiss of death.
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Mexed Missages?
Phew! The first presidential debate is over and President Bush grasped to his single flip-flop theme like a mouse to a reed in a stormy sea. Bush kept coming back and accusing Kerry of changing his position on issues, over and over with such regularity that I began to think this was all he had in his bag of tricks. As one pundit said on the local TV station here, “It’s one thing to have conviction in your ways but you can’t pound the pulpit for 90 minutes and say the same thing.”
Towards the end, in exasperation, Bush blurted out, “You cannot lead if you send mexed missages.”
You could almost hear the groans from the Bush green room.
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Google News Forever in Beta
Why has Google News been in Beta for three years? Because as soon as they try and place ads on the Google News pages to monetize the traffic, they’ll be hit with a barrage of cease & desist letters from publishers around the world says Wired’s Adam Penenberg.
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Improving RSS
In response to the growing popularity of RSS and it’s increasing demands for bandwidth, Bloglines has announced a new web services API which they are making publicly available.
In other news, the redesign of My Yahoo is all about leveraging RSS feeds as the preferred method of integrating content into the portal. With the daily promotion Editor’s RSS “Picks of the Day” it’s sounding like 1995 all over again.