King  Gary 

Read/WriteWeb has announced that today is the “day without Google“, meaning that all participants are supposed to live today without using Google search (they should’ve made it more interesting by disallowing use of ALL Google services, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader!)

I just checked the average number of Google searches that I make a day, and it turns out that I do nearly 200 Google searches a day. I also have a total of 28,555 Google searches since Google started tracking my searches.

Could YOU live a day without Google search? I know I can’t!

Popularity: 7% [?]

I just finished watching Apple‘s WWDC 2007 keynote. Below are my thoughts on what has been announced.

Safari

It looks like Apple really wants more than that measly 2% browser market share that it currently holds, with Safari. They’ve just released Safari for Windows as well, giving Windows users the opportunity to try out one of only a few Apple-created application available for the alternative operating system recently (iTunes was a great move for Apple since it was the iPod‘s tipping point.)

People have already told me that is really IS a lot faster on Windows than Internet Explorer, so I’m happy about that. I rarely, if ever, use Safari on my Mac since I depend on my Firefox extensions, but as a web developer, this news is great for other developers on Windows because they can finally test their websites in Safari without a Mac.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 6% [?]

While going through my instant messenger contact list, I began thinking of new ways that I could use to sort my list. There hasn’t been any innovation in terms of how contacts are shown in a contact list. A list always consists of a list of groups, and then there are contacts under each group. Each contact can only belong to one group.

It would be interesting to see tags applied to contacts. I’d love to see a web-based instant messaging client take an initiative on this, such as meebo, or desktop clients such as Adium or Trillian, because they are more flexible and can apply these types of features without requiring that the actual network support it.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 8% [?]

I’ve recently been receiving more spam comments on my blog that have bypassed WordPress‘ spam protection program, Akismet, more often than usual. I marked them as Spam, which aids Akismet in detecting these types of spam again and protects other bloggers using Akismet’s service from these comments which currently bypass the filters.

I also commonly receive email in Gmail that are spam and that bypass the filters. The Gmail spam protection system works similarly to Akismet’s, in that they both use a network filtration system by relaying any emails that one user considers spam to all the other users; the more times the same email or comment gets marked as spam, the more the system will believe that to be true and protect the other users from receiving the same item.

I’ve reached the point in both Gmail and WordPress where the number of spam/day that I get in my Gmail and the number of spam/day that I get in WordPress are about the same; I’ve currently got 12140 spam; divide that by 30 days, and that’s 405 spam per day. In WordPress, I’ve got 6130 spam comments, over 15 days; that’s 409 spam/day. They’re nearly the same by now.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 8% [?]

Something Awful wrote an article talking about Wikipedia, discussing that if you take two articles that are similar (the example they give is Knight and Jedi Knight), then you would see that the article that is more related to nerds, which is the latter in this case, is longer and more comprehensive than the former.

TechCrunch also picked up on this, and Michael agreed with Something Awful and the claims that it makes. He says that “People contribute to articles they care about. And Wikipedia’s community cares about light sabres, fantasy characters, video games and acne.”

I digress.

The examples that are given include the following:

• Modern Warfare v. Lightsaber Combat
• Prime Number v. Optimus Prime (the Transformers character)
• Girlfriend v. Video Games
• Half Life v. Half Life 2
• Love v. Masturbation
• Bathing v. Acne

I will analyze the first two examples, below.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 9% [?]

John C. Dvorak, a writer who is no stranger to writing about bad news, asks the question of whether it’s time to sell your Apple stocks. He bases a large part of why you should sell your Apple stocks on the fact that he received a phone call that stated the iPhone keyboard is going to play a key role in the failure of the iPhone.

A lot of people have talked about how a keyboard that has no tactile response will feel after long sessions of usage; it’s no secret that tactile keyboards have their clear advantages. You use a keyboard every day, and it has tactile feedback because you can feel when you’ve hit a key square in the middle or when you’ve hit two keys at the same time by accident (I still do that sometimes – and my fingers reach for the ‘delete’ key automatically.)

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 28% [?]

Six Apart has announced that they will be releasing their Movable Type blogging platform as open source later on this year. This is a major move by the company which made a poor decision in the past when they heavily enforced their MT 3.0 license and which gave rise to WordPress to become a major player in the blogging platform arena, and arguably, the CMS world.

Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 has posted his thoughts on how he thinks the battle between WordPress and Movable Type will play out, now that both will soon be open sourced. WordPress has really taken a strong foothold and has now become the blogging platform of choice among millions of users worldwide.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 8% [?]

Yesterday, Ask.com made a major relaunch of its search engine. The primary theme among its changes seems to be that its aiming for a more simpler, sleeker look overall so that there’s not as many things fighting for your attention.

Let’s face it. Here we have a company which rode atop a gimmick that was birthed during the dot-com bubble heyday; I’m talking about Ask Jeeves. Other search engines that also had a mascot include sites such as Mamma (one of the few that I can recall), and most of those have died off enough so that they hold a negligible share of web search. Ask is still around because they’ve managed to reinvent themselves as a search engine with a pretty good domain name, and I would say that that’s what’s kept them in the game thus far. If they were named something more web 2.0-ish, like Mahalo, then they wouldn’t have lasted as long as they did.

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 8% [?]

There’s some chatter going on with regards to Guy Kawasaki‘s latest web venture, Truemors, a “rumor reporting site. Users text, email or call in a rumor and other users vote on it. Popular rumors make it to the home page.” (from from TechCrunch) and how Guy mentions that it (only) costs him $12,000 for the entire website to go from an idea to reality.

There’s already been quite a bit of criticism about this, most recently from Mathew Ingram, who’s post is entitled “Kawasaki: How I wasted $12,107 on Truemors“. In my opinion, he’s pretty much gotten it spot on; I agree that Truemors is a pretty pointless endeavor, once you look past the fact that it’s founded by Guy. (The multiple TechCrunch posts increased the site’s exposure to me, more than anything else. Those gave it way more hype than it deserved.)

CLICK HERE to Continue Reading »

Popularity: 10% [?]