Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Google has introduced personalized search as well as a bunch of other tools.

According to Wired in this article, Congress would like to make it a crime to share music. Shouldn't it also be a crime to share books too then, or at least to photocopy them? Isn't that what copyright is for? That requires the owner to prosecute, and if you donate enough in campaign contributions then I guess the government will take care of it for you.

Of course it isn't right to share copyrighted works. However, it is interesting to note that cable television wouldn't exist today if it weren't for the theft of copyrighted materials. Just think - no Sex in the City, no Sopranos - if someone hadn't stolen network television programs and "shared" them. Why wasn't that illegal?

This site shows a graphical comparison of hits returned from the identical search performed on both Google and Yahoo. It's just kind of cool to see.

Electronics Boutique purchased some stolen video games. They got caught, but are willing to sell them back to the rightful owned for only what they paid the thief. They had already sold her Playstation and memory card, so she couldn't get those back. I'm not clear why police are not just charging them with posession of stolen property, and returning it to the owner. This is probably not the best impression to leave with customers.

When I was about 10 years old I got a set of World Book encyclopedias for my birthday. They got me through a lot of school projects. Unfortunately, thanks to the internet, encyclopedias are going the way of the dinosaur. The internet provides more timely information quicker. And now collaborative efforts like Wikipedia are driving another nail in the coffin.

My encyclopedias still look really nice on the shelf in the den, but they don't see a lot of use anymore.

In what could be a script from the old "Outer Limits" television show, on July 1, 2005, the Motion Picture Association of America will assume control of your television. Based on an electronic flag that they insert into programs at will, the digital outputs will be shut down. You have no say in the matter, courtesy of the FCC. Does this signal the end of time-shifting or commercial skipping? What other control will be taken away from me?

Maybe it's just me, but I'm also tired of being forced to watch certain previews on DVDs, when my fast forward is disabled courtesy of the manufacturer. And even more ridiculous is forcing me to watch the Interpol warning at the beginning. What does this achieve? If I'm going to break the law, then the warning won't stop me.

Does the customer still have any rights? Not unless you have your own lobby I guess.

Advertisers are increasingly using rich media with technologies like Macromedia Flash to deliver ads to web users. This has been necessitated by the prevalence of pop-up blocking software. Companies are now beginning to offer blocking software for rich media like Flash. Perhaps those companies that insist on forcing me to watch a Flash production to enter their website will now cease and desist. I'd actually prefer useful information to flashy video.

Seems that Ask Jeeves is jumping into battle with Yahoo over credibility. Ask Jeeves will no longer accept paid inclusions, as a way of differentiating themselves. After studying the issue, the decided that paid inclusion resulted in more commercial and irrelevant lists of web sites, this hampering the search experience. Oddly though, they indicate that they will still allows operators to pay to submit their sites, but that payment would not guarantee inclusion in the index. Isn't that kind of like paying for a car, with no guarantee you'll actually get one?

This 1999 article from Salon mentions that Alta Vista was considering adding paid relevant links. I was working with the Open Text Web Index a while before that and we considered and rejected the same idea, believing that it would destroy the trust our users had in us. Boy were we wrong! It's amazing how this has become such common practice now.

Yahoo will now charge companies for the guarantee to be included in their index. "Paid Inclusion", as the process is known, is not new, and can be used by companies to guarantee that they are included in the index, and perhaps with more relevant information than might otherwise be found. Yahoo states that they will still try to index as much as they can. However, as the charge is expected to generate $100 million in revenue annually for Yahoo, it might be tempting to crawl the web a little less frequently.

A new documentary entitled Almost Real showcases people who are really living life on the net. One subject suggests that he values email above human contact. This seems to contradict John Naisbitt's "High Tech-High Touch" theory that the more technology we have, the more we crave human contact. Is it possible that some people just take the internet far too seriously? Could it ever be a substitute for real life? Can we really survive without human contact?