Takumi's Blog

I noticed this ad from Ask while I was in California on spring break… what I thought it meant then was “the algorithm sucked, and that’s why ask jeeves is no more.” I might have been wrong then. Here’s a small bit from SEO’Brien:

A couple weeks later that puzzling billboard was replaced with various messages apparently meant to provide clarification: “The algorithm is from Jersey,” and “The algorithm is banned in China”

The first confirms the campaign is from Ask; their Teoma algorithm was developed in Piscataway, NJ.

It was the point about China that left me scratching my head again. Yes… it is…. so what? This is a message I would have expected from Yahoo! years ago when Google was banned from China leaving Y! the dominant engine (other than their own). Now, of course, Google is live and well in China (though still facing challenges).
So Ask is seemingly pointing out that their own algorithm, that which killed Jeeves, is banned in China.

After reading that post, I think what Ask is trying to do is say “hey, we didn’t bend to China’s laws just to have our search engine function their.”

I think it’s a good ad campaign, so many people complain about how Y! and Google changed their algorithms to fit China’s requirements, and now here’s Ask which stood up to the rights to share information freely.

A List Apart’s web design survey was surprisingly fun to take. I usually hate taking surveys, but A List Apart’s website has helped me a lot in the past, so I figured what the heck.
It’ll be interesting to see what the statistics are once it’s finished…

On a side note, the software running the survey seems pretty interesting too

Even with all these internet-based games, blogs, and myspace, email is still the most common internet activity!…. Okay, so maybe I’m not that surprised, I check my mail whenever I can (but it does take a while to write the replies)…

Anyways, that was one of the statistics Stanford got out of a survey of 4000 internet-using respondents. Some other facts are:

The more time people spend on the internet…

• … the more they lose contact with their social environment
• … the more they turn their back on traditional media
• … the more they spend time working at home - and at the office
• … the less time they spend shopping in stores and commuting in traffic

For more details, and more facts, check out the full report here.

Google’s added a feature that’s been in Google Earth to their Google Maps! You can add your own points just like in Google Earth, and they one-upped it too, you can share it with friends!.

This will be a great way to share those places where you hang out with friends, went on trips, or maybe even where you plan to go… Can’t wait to use this to show friends and family the places I’ve traveled to before.

For all the hype around Joost, I think it is not even close to a 1.0 release.

The interface is nice, it has a dashboard type capability to chat with other users while watching the same show, which is kinda like having someone sit next to you while you watch it. But, the video playback sucks.

I’m *really* disappointed. It pauses/skipps every 5 seconds, even though data is coming in at around 150kilobytes/sec! And even if I just pause it, and wait 5 minutes for it to stream ahead a little, the moment I start playing it starts skipping/pausing on its own!

I’ve been to the forums with the error, which is error #121, and they said its because of bandwidth issues on my end. (as you can see from the speetest results).

I can’t wait until they solve the issue… until then, well, I’m just going to be waiting for the next version.

I enjoy Battlestar Galactica. Sometimes it can get slow, but hey, what TV show doesn’t have boring episodes, right?

There are many games that are based on TV shows out there, but they all cost money. I guess this game, called “Beyond the Red Line“, will be one of the first that wont. When I mean one of the first, I mean a game that has fairly good graphics and based on a popular TV show.

The graphics look great from the screen shots, and I’m downloading it now… Hopefully the game play will be great too!

Google has recently released their Desktop search application for the Mac platform. I’ve of course, downloaded it, and it’s indexing my computer as I write this.

The installation and setup of it was very simple, it uses the same Privacy list as the Spotlight search function in Tiger, so you don’t have to add the list to both of their settings. I think it does a good job of searching for word docs, emails, history, but for documents that require images, video, it’s not something I want to use. It does after all, show the results in the Google Search layout (which is strong in text-based results).

I like the features that comes with Google Desktop, maybe Apple and Google can work together to make some parts of it built in functions of Spotlight… (ie. being able to search through emails, chat logs, etc.)