Today I changed my RSS feed from excerpt to full text. I did not realize this was the default MovableType setting, but I do appreciate full text in other people’s feeds, especially for offline viewing. I would like to follow the best practices of blogging and incorporate any community tools that are out there, so please let me know if there is something I should be aware of.
IBM filed a patent application last week for a “method and apparatus for conducting business via the worldwide Web in which business programming is isolated from Web user interface programming.” Can JSP + Java Beans + J2EE backend really be patented? Guess we will have to wait and see.
MusicPlasma is a search engine to help you visualize your musical taste. Enter a band’s name and you will see that band’s near neighbor relation. The “more the artist is famous or representative of a specific style of music the more the halo (circle) around the artist will be large.” For some reason Norah Jones eclipses Bob Dylan. Overall a very cool tool. Flash required.
Technorati is
now faster than ever before! Try out the new
beta. Nice work Dave and Kevin!
Yahoo! established
Yahoo! Research Labs yesterday. They have an
implementation of Nutch and
hot searches of the day. Some good research papers on clustering as well. I would like to see a university partnership, similar to what Google has going on with
Stanford.
USA Today reports that Cingular submitted an offer to the AT&T Wireless board of directors over the weekend. The board is currently in session to consider the deal. AT&T Wireless has a current market capitalization of $27.9 billion.
NY Times covers the move to create software to block pop-up advertisements on the Web. Microsoft claims that Windows XP Service Pack 2 will not block pop-ups unless users enable the feature. DoubleClick is developing technology that will work around Microsoft and other software vendors’ attempted blocks.
“In December 2001, 1.4 percent of the Web ads measured by Nielsen/NetRatings were pop-ups or pop-under ads, which appear behind the main browser window. That rose to 8.7 percent in July 2003. But it has declined since, to 6.2 percent in December.”
Microsoft already has anti-spam technology in client software such as Outlook that updates itself as the advertisers change their methods. Any client software designed to block these ads should probably be updated in a similar manner.
Bill Gates has built a privacy buffer around his Medina estate according to
an article by Warren Cornwall in The Seattle Times. The city will not let gates use the properties solely to house his cars, but some Microsoft employees occupy the houses to keep the codes alive. He now has a corridor to the main road, which makes sense to me.
Lego has an
858 piece set for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers. $90.
CalTech receives a portion of the profits.
Which
Family Guy character are you? Take the
quiz!