To check the Google tag hacking idea, I've created a script to generate tag search tokens from del.icio.us RSS feeds. I plan to run this nightly on many different tags, but for now i've just done one run on the tag googlehacks. The generated page is here.
Feel free to mirror a copy and link to that and/or my copy. The more the merrier in getting some momentum for the tag search google bomb. When I get the full setup done with nightly updates, I'll share the script to generate the html, not that it's in any way complicated.
The tags I use consist of the prefix 'deli_' in front of the tagname. Tags with non alphanumeric characters are mangled (all non alphanumerics replaced by _).

I've been thinking about whether this might get me accused of link farming, but I wouldn't think so. This isn't farming. I actually don't want the pages of links themselves to be popular. I am only interested in injecting search tokens in the searchable text set for other pages. For people uninterested in these made up terms (currently leading to empty searches) this shouldn't be an issue. The search tokens won't crop up in result lists, won't taint any search for "real" search terms and I wouldn't expect them to affect page rank either.

Who knew? You can specifiy of that a URI is to be treated as data, not a reference. It doesn't work in IE, but for the rest of you there might be a miniature graph next to this colon:
Details on how it works here.

(Via Sam Ruby)

Doc Searls must be unaware of the ban comic sans campaign.
Also, note the delightful freudian slip from a recent blog conference.

[UPDATE: del.icio.us tag search field test underway]

By exploiting the same mechanism that google bombs rely on, you can generate your own page sets and search only those pages with Google. A minor example.
Since text in links leading to pages count as text on a page, you can simply doctor link text to generate your search subset by including a special token like 3f4h9hgfh98fh9p348gh .
Now searches for e.g. hosting can be bound to the pages I link to by requiring my link identifier token in searches. By augmenting the scheme a little (e.g. by agreeing on a naming convention along the lines of gtag_tagging for the google tag 'tagging') we could have google search of our tag database quite easily. Obviously this is just a poor mans replacement for being able to limit search by forward links.

Desktop search engines are nice, and tagging is all the rage, but tagging still isn't all that, because del.icio.us isn't also a search engine.
Obviously what we would really like is for a major search engine to just embrace tags. This of course would lead to immediate scandal, because everybody would be screaming "Autolink Scandal!" 2 minutes after launch. After all, it's not really that nice for a content provider that I get to augment his content and tagging does exactly that. (Incidently, have the political defamation tags - a la Google Bomb - begun to appear?)

If google tagging were to become widespread, Google should embrace it and simply start supporting real tags through e.g. rel attributes (like technorati) and Tim Berners Lee should declare victory for the semantic web. There is no important distinction between RDF and tagging at present. Later it might be nice to turn tags into full blown RDF assertions to qualify them. Berners-Lee might not see this is semantic victory though, because the ideas on semantic assertions based on RDF metadata will not come to pass because of tagging.

Kære forretningsfolk.

Vil I ikke nok holde op med at sige "vækste" når nu det hedder vokse. Og for os fra naturvidenskaberne der har kunnet ordet meget længe så er det faktisk også virkeligt træls når I taler om "et parameter". Det må I også godt holde op med.

Ordbog 1986. Det efterfølgende ord er et ubeslægtet tilfælde

Jeg ved godt ordbogen har givet efter, men det hedder altså "en parameter" hvis det skal være rigtigt.

Venlig hilsen

Claus

Dvs. Grønland er. Det ser man ved at følge denne GPS-udstyrede Grønlandsekspedition.

København set med Keyhole

Google Maps er som bekendt overcool. Og endnu mere cool er applikationen fordi den har satellit billeder af hele USA. Man går jo i al stilfærdighed og håber på at Google Maps kan komme til at dække Danmark. For at se hvad det kan blive til downloadede jeg Keyhole, den satellitfoto-applikation som Google har billederne fra. Billedet af København er ikke så lovende.

Isn't this technorati tag terribly insensitive to gay women?

Nyd det smukke Rumsfeldiana her.

[UPDATE: Regler klarificeret, se nederst]
Tekst TV er et fremragende sted at finde poesi som found objects (tidligere fund her), og en naturlov siger at jo dårligere TV kanal jo mere corny Tekst TV. Således også idag hvor der pludselig var både begyndelse, konflikt og slutning i en mærkelig samtidshistorie om skyld og medier på skodkanelens Tekst TV:

Anklager mod ny pave i sex-sag
Lene Espersen fastholder uskyld
Gravesen træner igen

Pave i sex-sag
Lene fastholder uskyld
Gravesen træner

Jep, der var den.

Eller var den? Straks ser man at "Anklager pave" også er en god førstelinie, og hvem ved måske overser jeg også guld i anden og tredie linie. F.eks. denne:

Ny pave i sex
Lene Espersen uskyld
Gravesen igen

Kære Mary & Frede.
Vi gratulerer og lykønsker jer! Vi håber at barnet ikke vil lide af kollik, herpes og lignende.
Er der ugler i mosen, så er der bajer i (netto)posen.
Tillykke med denne guds gave. Hils storken.
Nina, Luna & Elisabeth Elisabeth - Apr 25, 2005 13:58:40

Dette er kun en af mange gyldne lykønskninger på DR's royale babygratulationsside.
(I et udslag af ubegribelig lamhed er gratulationerne nummereret med nyeste først så det der var permalink til teksten ovenfor vil ikke være det når du kigger på siden. Gå efter tidspunket og bladr selv.)

Jason Fried foreslår at hvis man vakler mellem to kandidater, så skal man vælge den kandidat der skriver bedst.
Det råd er jeg helt med på. Fried siger det fordi det han mener folk sandsynligvis vil være bedre til deres primærfunktion hvis de kan skrive, men sekundært så skal man jo samarbejde med andre og det er alt andet lige nemmere hvis man er en god kommunikator. Det er simpelthen for dyrt, især i små organisationer, at have et fordyrende mellemled af folk der kan tale med hinanden ved siden af specialisterne der ikke kan.

Don't miss this mock newscast of catastrophe coverage as the plague hits the eastern United States. The newscast is done just like real local news with plenty of on the scene reporters and studio talking heads conjecturing on disease spread and a possible terrorist angle.

This reminds me of something that happened when I was in Canada as a math student. I had a room in the house of this familiy who rented out their top floor to exchange students. The other guy currently staying there was a Iranian guy studying chemistry if I remember correctly.
One evening, quite late - after 10PM - he came to my door and said to me quite excitedly. "Claus, you gotta come down. You've gotta see this on the TV. There's this huge thing that's fallen out of the sky in Europe. They can't figure out if it was a plane crash or something, but it's all over the news!". I went downstairs, and sure enough there was a newsshow and they had helicopters flying over a crash scene. We sat and followed it for a while. The news on what exactly had fallen down wasn't easy to come by. There was some mystery - maybe this was a satellite or some military dark ops plane in a place where it shouldn't have been.
As I sat there I began to think that some of the faces of the news anchors were oddly familiar. Even some of the crash victims seemed to be someone I had seen before. And then slowly it dawned on me.
They were actors.
What we were watching was an updated television version of "War of the worlds". My Iranian flatmate hadn't noticed that the newscast was running on the local movie channel, and I having not seen the beginning of the show had also been duped.

Udefra lignede det, pga de brud bygningen lavede i teksten, at der stod BOLIVIA på den gigantiske streamer der hænger ned igennem Aros' centrale faux guggenheim torv, men det var Bill Viola der var programmet. Udstillingen er kun 5 værker stor, og det ene af dem er endda i den permanente samling, men Viola er alligevel rigeligt en rejse værd.
I to af værkerne udnyttes de muligheder for gigantiske formater der er i Aros' særudstillingsetage med maximal effekt og overvælder fuldstændig. Til gengæld hænger Going Forth by Day faktisk lidt trangt.
Violas visuelle suverænitet, det monumentale og den totale oplevelse af rum, billede og fantastiske lydkulisser bliver man ikke færdig med lige med det samme.
Der vises en glimrende dokumentar hvor Viola forklarer uhyre bevidst om sine billeder og hvordan de hænger sammen med kunsthistorien.

For tiden kan man, mod alle odds, høre om min fødeby i medierne. Skærbæk, udmærker sig normalt mest ved at ligge tæt på Rømø der pga sine enorme sandstrande er overmalet med tyske turister om sommeren. Men nu har Skærbæk gudhjælpemig været i adskillige nyhedsudsendelser, fordi kommunen afholder VM i Skolefodbold.
Jeg kan stadig huske den gang der var DM i knallert-speedway i byen. Skærbæk har åbenbart et eller andet med juniormesterskaber.

Der sker normalt ikke det helt vilde i Skærbæk. F.eks. synes jeg det er rørende at springvandet i parken ved siden af kommunekontoret stadig er vartegn for byen på lokalsiden Skærbæk.com (kom ikke og sig at man ikke følger med!). Park, springvand og kommunekontor er bygget samtidigt, en gang sidst i 70erne eller først i 80erne. Springvandet var indrettet med den højteknologiske feature at det om aftenen var oplyst med farver fra bunden af bassinet og folk kom simpelthen kørende ind om aftenen for at se det ellers ret stilfærdige vidunder skifte farve.
Mest betegnende for byens stilfærdigighed er nu nok alligevel kommunens motto, der også er den usandsynlige titel på en reklamevideo der skal lokke nye beboere til kommunen:Du kan godt bo i Skærbæk. Jysk understatement når det er aller bedst.

There are two notable things about Google search history.

• Google wasn't first with this feature
  
• It's not really what you're after - it's a catalogue of searches you made, not of the results. So the product plug "Remember what you saw on Google, no matter where you are." is quite simply a misrepresentation of what you get.
  [UPDATE: Oh I get why the plug is defensible. They do keep track of what URL's you clicked as a result of search, so technically speaking the data that you actually saw on Google results page when you did the search is there. But obviously you're interested in the full text of the resulting page, not just the text in the search engine results list]
  

On closer thinking: Actually Bruce Sterling is extremely old fashioned. In the quote below he pretends that the device he uses to connect to the network somehow matters. It doesn't. And why is he using a device that ties him to something like a desk?
To borrow a phrase from Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling may be an edge case, but he's a leading edge case:

So, where're all my records and CDs? They're inside the laptop. DVD player? Laptop. Newspapers? I read Google News in the morning. Where're my magazines? I read Metropolis Online, I write stories for SciFi.com. Where's my TV? I got no TV: Compared to Web surfing on broadband wireless, watching a TV show is like watching ice melt. [...] Where's my fax machine? Laptop. Mailbox? Laptop. Filing cabinet? Laptop. Working desk? Laptop. Bank? Laptop. Place of business? Laptop. Most people I deal with have no idea I'm here in California. They'd never think to ask me. Why should they? They send e-mail, they get what they want, game over.

isen.blog's F2C: Freedom to Connect conference will be properly wired:

This link will provide (a) streaming audio, (b) high-speed interactivity for everybody in the room, (c) a back channel so in-room participants and remote participants will be able to contribute to a group chat (thanks Greg Elin and Manuel Kiessling).

Could there be an Organic business opportunity here Nikolaj?

A whole new breed of microcompany could be under way - the Independent Web Service Aggregator.

I wonder if this entry on the Google blog has passed through Google's legal department. If it has it's almost an endorsement from Google of quite thorough Google Maps hacking, in that the blogger mentions and even praises the marriage of Craigslist and Google Maps that I've mentioned before.
Let's hope this means that Google reall think this kind of service is a benign use of their data. Considering how eager Yahoo has been lately at beating Google at developer friendliness, this could be a very big deal for the search landscape around us.

Antarktis er blevet ramt af et isbjerg. Når en ting der er lille - og mobil - rammer ind i en stor ting der er er landfast, plejer man så ikke at sige noget andet end at fastlandet er blevet 'ramt'?

Efter alt at dømme vælger SF Villy Søvndal som ny formand, og dermed afsluttes det tredie formandsskifte i år, som er afgjort ved valg og i organisationer der har set bedre dage.
Det er som om man næsten kan se bare på de gamle og de nye navne, hvilken af de 3 organisationer der vil lykkes med noget der bare ligner fornyelse. Som en læserservice opstiller vi nu et lille skema. Klip det ud og hold øje med fornyelsesscoren.
I TV avisen spurgte intervieweren en kommentator: 'Hvorfor Benedict'. En mulig grund kunne simpelthen, for den konservative Ratzinger, være at være den 16ende. Kontinuitet og historie frem for alt.

DSBs online billetbestilling er blevet forbedret på 3 vigtige måder siden sidst jeg så den (lang tid siden, indrømmet)

• Man kan uden problemer betale for mange rejser samtidig
  
• Man kan selv printe billetterne ud og slipper altså helt for køen på stationen
  
• Man kan vælge præcis hvilken plads man vil sidde på blandt de ledige pladser (vist max 7 alternativer vist)
  

Som bekendt var Sigmund Freud en varm fortaler for kokain, og i en mere ubekymret tid havde matematikeren Paul Erdos et 50 år langt stabilt forbrug af amfetamin. Stoffets dårlige rygte idag taget i betragtning er det besynderligste nu nok alligevel at Heroin er et registreret varemærke for Bayer koncernen.

[UPDATE: En læser gør mig opmærksom på at Bayer naturligvis havde kontor på Stoned St. på det tidspunkt]

If you can stomach the high density of numbers, here is solid evidence why Labour is absolutely certain to win the election in the form of Gordon Brown's budget presentation a 45 minute barrage of Labour policy performance. Numbers heavy, serious, strong political rhetoric with tremendous power.

The GMail filesystem - an actual, mountable Linux filesystem stored on GMail.
This is less surprising than it sounds, because good GMail libraries exist and good "File System on Anything" libraries exist, but it's still a very cool hack and it underlines some of the important points that are anti-software patent and pro open source.

• It is not only hard, but impossible to predict the uses of technology you choose to share.
  
• It is not only hard, but impossible for you to realize the full potential value of a software invention you make
  
• Arthur C. Clarke famously remarked that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Something close to the converse is true for software - "Even magic is just made of fancy combinations of technology". If you want magic, you should support and encourage rapid and widespread combinations.
  

Adobe is buying Macromedia. Adobe no longer has any incentive to promote SVG, and since Microsoft jumped ship along time ago on SVG ( in favour of proprietary technologies spearheaded by Longhorn), SVG is probably over and/or will be merged into Flash somehow.

Bemærk den brilliante [briligjantøh] udtaleguide [udtaløhgajd] for ordet barter.

[UPDATE: Jeg kommer også til at tænke på en bekendt, der som barn en gang havde skrevet i en stil at hun skulle til et 'brøllerp']

The headquarters for Digital Hollywood, Loews Santa Monica, actually charges 25 cents a minute without a cap for wife in the lobby and mezzanine

It's beginning to look like the only thing protecting the desktop from irrelevance is the lack of a widely deployed easy to use infrastructure for private URL spaces. What's changing the desktop from enabler to encumbrance is our poor ability to integrate our local data with the many web service providers that are quietly starting to dominate the attention landscape. The ability of data to integrate into these services is beginning to dominate all other uses of data.
This struck home with me as Infoworld gave up on homegrown taxonomies and started just using del.icio.us instead. The thinking used to be that providing structure was what a content provider did, but now Infoworld is turning that model on it's head and just trusting the common taxonomy instead.
With any luck this will also mark the beginning of the end of the ridiculous notions of deep links and front pages. Clearly, when Infoworld gives up owning the taxonomy, each Infoworld page has to survive on it's own merits, independently of any site map Infoworld has canonized.

I am aware that this may seem like old news to many readers, and I agree that it is, conceptually. As a practical problem however, it is only now becoming a huge problem as the variety of services available to augment your data just keeps growing. It's also worth noting that so far SOAP has had nothing to do with this new services world.

Beautiful idea: Overlay of 50 images of the Eiffel tower. Image originals found automatically from Flickr tags. Part of a series.

(via tveskov)

I dag, da jeg sad med C. nede på voldene og nød en Tuborg, bestemte jeg mig for, at jeg vil genoptage min hashrygning. Tanken har strejfet mig flere gange de sidste par måneder, og nu har jeg altså bestemt, at det skal være. Selvfølgelig har min belsutning rod i at det nu er sommer, men det skal ikke forhindre den i at være både velovervejet og rationel. Jeg er udmærket klar over konsekvenserne af det, jeg vil kaste mig ud i.

En domstol i New York giver EMI ret i at deres rettigheder på gamle indspilninger slet ikke er tidsbegrænsede, men derimod evige, og en domstol i London mener at man slet ikke behæver at have skrevet et værk for at have copyright på det - det er skam nok at have lavet en god nyudgivelse af det (uden at betale royalites til nogen forstås). Begge nyhder her.
Det er som om kampen for frihed går den forkerte vej.

Man vænner sig til en del, men nogen gange så er avisernes, endda IT avisernes, faglige cluelessness simpelthen overvældende, som f.eks. i torsdags, hvor Computerworld kunne oplyse os om at Microsoft planlægger at bruge TCP i den næste version af Windows.
(Den rigtige nyhed er om en netværksaccelerationsteknologi med kodenavn Chimney)

Actually it was Just who thought of it, but the appearance of Google Video Upload combined with the "Infinity + 1" program leads one to believe that Google actually have invented infinite storage...

Så er Reboot tilbage efter et års pause.
Reboot er i år dobbelt så lang som den plejer at være. Programmet er nu et 2 dages et af slagsen, og talerlisten ser overordentlig lang, varieret og blog-agtig ud. Det bliver sjovt.

Indtil videre ser det ud som om vi går glip af den sidste år annoncerede Doc Searls - Nej, han kommer faktisk. Til gengæld har Thomas Mygdal stjålet nogle sider fra HC Andersen 2005 Fondens eventmanual og udnævnt nogle Reboot ambassadører, så jeg regner bestemt med at Olivia Newton John (eller Ted Nelson) kommer til Reboot og synger Xanadu.

Det lader til at Peter Sestoft var alt for beskeden da han i sin tid lavede Den Stokastiske Rapportgenerator. Mig bekendt har han faktisk aldrig indsendt en ansøgning med baggrund i en af rapporterne.
Denne artikelgenerator har imidlertid genereret en meningsløs artikel der er blevet accepteret på en konference.

Det trækker ned i historiens værdi at arrangørerne i forvejen vides at drive konferencerne som en pengemaskine på linie med online diploma mills.

Apartments listed on Google Maps
People have started annotating Google Maps satellite images - sadly not on Google Maps itself, but rather on Flickr using exported images.
myGmaps provides a direct Google Maps annotation system. I can't imagine this service will not be shut down as they are effectively stripping all Google content except the map itself.
Also, people are sightseeing on Google Maps.
GMail is being used as an online back system.
Greasemonkey simplifies and automates end-user customizations of websites (for Mozilla users only). This is a good thing as we recall from the allmusic redesign scandal.
Yahoo's term extraction service has a nice interplay with Technorati.

Embracing user defined extensions of your service can be a powerful thing...

There's only 6 minutes from Intercourse to Paradise.

Political side joke: You need to go left to actually get from Intercourse to Paradise.

The Starter Edition is a simplified version of Windows XP, oriented at users who have never had a computer or have little computer experience. It can open only three programs at the same time, with a maximum of three windows for each program and cannot connect to computer networks.

Nøjjj, hvor er vi overraskede. Mette Frederiksen stemte på Frank. Hvis hun troede vi ikke havde regnet den ud, så er hun godt nok naiv. Det hjalp ikke på anonymiteten at Frederiksen jo allerede valgte offentligt side da hun gik ind i den overfladiske kritik af Poul Nyrups kritik af Frank Jensen.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt kan, med Mogens Lykketoft som eneste højprofilerede modeksempel, gå ud fra at alle de medlemmer af folketinget, der ikke ville støtte hende offentligt, faktisk støttede Frank Jensen.

The very old assertion that collaborative spam filtering is not really what you want - because some people oddly enough like some kinds of spam - rings particularly true here at classy.dk headquarters currently. GMail spam filtering is beginning to systematically allow various kinds of bogus stock tips as ham instead of spam. I can't think of any good reason for this other than the possibility that many people actually grade these messages as ham. They are as repetitive as other kinds of spam and don't appear to be particularly well crafted to beat filters And furthermore stock tips are the only spam messages I am still getting. No xanax or vicodin offers make it through.

Google Gulp.
Four great productivity drinks that alter your brain chemistry for faster processing. Strictly limited beta edition.

(Link: .g)

Det var større end nogen rockkoncert, selv om publikum var en del ældre. Hverken Frank eller Helle havde taget turbussen fra de sidste 3 ugers roadshow med til Vega. Måske var Frank bange for at komme til at drømme om Helle hvis han skulle overnatte i turbussen.
TV kompenserede for de manglende kæmpebusser og geartrucks, så det blev et sammenrend i den rigtige størrelse istedet for det det var: En konvolutåbning og en ganske kort tale tirsdag aften. Den første TV-truck ankom til Vega allerede i morges. Kl 9 stod den med udslået antenne og ventede, som en overpyntet 15-årig før en Nick og Jay koncert. Da eftermiddagen var slut holdt de overalt og skyggede fuldstændig for Vega. Hovedindgangen var barrikaderet bag en enorm OB vogn fra TV2 Sporten.

Da jeg passerede de mange interviewhold der var ved at gøre klar uden for Vega kom en ung fyr spadserende forbi. Om det var det han hørte i sin iPod ved jeg ikke, men han fløjtede "Når jeg ser et rødt flag smælde" uden at tænke over det da han gik forbi Vega.
Han lignede ellers ikke en socialdemokrat.

Jeg var knap nok færdig med at opfinde en træt metafor om valgkampen som sportskamp, med slap anledning i den reklamerende OB vogn, da en anden observation meldte sig istedet:
"Uanset om hun vinder afstemningen, så har Helle allerede vundet kampen i partiapparatet - det er kun med hende som formand det giver mening at forsøge at relancere Socialdemokraterne som cool parti ved at flytte partievents til koncertsteder som Vega". "Vel er vi på Vesterbro, og vel var det Folkets Hus i gamle dage og vel foregår arrangementet i noget der vist hedder Stauning-salen, men det er der jo ingen der kan huske, og de fleste kan faktisk ikke glemme det hurtigt nok. Det her er snarere et forsøg på at overhale de selvfede radikale indenom".

1. Man skal ligne formanden så meget som overhovedet muligt.

Formanden

De andre

Se også det hvidskjortede management team for virksomheden Sonus Networks.

I dag har Classy.dk skulle stå til regnskab både for hvordan Britney Spears påvirker unge piger og for hvor vidt man kan få hjemmelavet tandpasta fra Høng.

Keep them flash files loading, Loading, loading loading - Rawhide!

Good find by Just

"Darcs is a revision control system. [...] based on a "theory of patches" with roots in quantum mechanics. "

Utterly cool. Possibly too cool.

"Note that these charts are actually Flash, so you can right-click and zoom in on the details of the graph". How nice. And Flash is vector graphics, so the graphs is sharp and crisp at all zoom levels.

Sidenote: Is Sifry subliminally perpetuating the "liberal mainstream media" myth, by listing mainstream media as blue and "citizens media" as red in this graph?

Amazon has a new interesting feature based on the full etxt data they have because of the Search Inside feature. They show you the phrases from a particular book that are statistically improbable, i.e. standout phrases, phrases that are unique to a particular book. This is very useful, I'm not sure it's surprisingly useful, but it's certainly useful.
I am reminded of an IBM research paper on hierarchical bayesian categorization which used similar ideas to obtain useful hierarchical categories of documents. Since I read that paper I've been wondering when we would see this applied in the real world, but no search engine seems to have emerged from the IBM project.
Oddly related projects: Technorati "related" tags and by extension, applications of Yahoo's term extraction service - this is like open sourcing the context algorithsm underlying e.g. Adsense.

I am slightly unimpressed with A9's Opensearch. A standard protocol for publishing search interfaces is a good idea. Whether basing it on RSS 2.0 is a good idea remains to be seen - but at least something somebody calls RSS is widely deployed and it is also extensible so that a search engine may extend the metadata published in search results.
What is decidedly underwhelming is the Opensearch aggregator A9. Seeing the data overkill of a 5-way multi-search aggregated into an A9 user profile brings me back to pre-google days when everybody, mistakenly, thought the problem was finding the right data. That's not the problem. It's not finding all the junk that's hard. A9 is like a browser based version of those desktop super searchers that were popular back in the 90s. And like those tools it is quite simply solving the wrong problem.
The next question then is what the right problem for Opensearch is if it is not the Opensearch aggregator. Personally I think the Opensearch search profiles will be extended with some kind of search profile indicating the grammar of searchable assertions (e.g. a specification telling me that I can search a particular database for the address of post offices based on postal codes). My search for post offices will then lead to this search profile and I will be able to use it. It will be sort of a weakly linked version of the semantic web. The inly version of the semantic web that could ever work.

Now that Google has started answering questions, it's time to start the game of finding the web's answers to deep questions. We'll start at the lighter end of the scale and get the boring answer to the question What is the Matrix?
Or we could ask What is Life?, or Who is God.
Any other good ideas?

Google has begun actually parsing the language on web pages to be able to answer simple factual questions by quoting webpages. As an example here's the population of Denmark. I think Peter Norvig gave a talk on this at some recent O'Reilly conference where he talked about using Google's vast amounts of data to beat traditional AI approaches to language parsing.

If my guess on how this works is correct, then Google's approach rhymes perfectly with some of my own, sadly unrealized, ideas on how to build parsers and also with Jeff Hawkins' ideas on brain function as described in On Intelligence. What's interesting is to use our sensory experience to build good prediction models for further sensory experience. In Google's case the sensory data consists of text utterances on millions of web pages. Google only lists one answer to a question, but I would be very surprised if these weren't in fact just the most likely answers based on statistics derived from googles database of text data.
In short, I'd be surprised if this was just Google's own implementation of Googlism.

Some of the less pretty results - e.g. the answer to the question Who is Jane Fonda also indicate that Google is actually storing these autogenerated assertions as metadata (i.e. maintaining an "Is" property for the string "Jane Fonda"). My guess is that such a database of actual utterances is your best shot at any good model of language and reasoning. Obviously you want to add structure to your model - but this too has to be based on the statistics of actual utterances.
If I was a stockholder in Cycorp - a company busy building a basic database of this kind of knowledge manually - I would be trying to get out of that investment. The odds of succeeding by parsing actual utterances in the metadata format natural to us (language) should be much higher than the odds of succeeding in doing this manually.

[UPDATE: "Anders Fogh Drop it like its hot" søgere: Læs kommentarerne]

Jeg hører aldrig radio, og derfor hører jeg heller ikke radioparodier af tidens hits. Er der nogen der kan forklare mig hvorfor folk søger efter en sammenhæng mellem Anders Fogh og Snoop Dogg's hit "Drop it like it's hot" på Google? De rammer min weblog (snart rammer de denne post) og bliver slemt skuffede. Har der været en radioparodi jeg er gået glip af, eller er mine gæster bare mærkelige?

David Byrne runs an internet radio. It's just 3 hours worth of music in continuous replay, but the selection is excellent.
On iTunes the station is listed in the genre 'eclectic'. It's so sad that it is actually true that this moniker - meant to mean free of constraints - actually indicates a style. But it does.

This is the conclusion one must draw from the ThinkGeek "Years Supply of T-shirts" giveaway.

Gå ikke glip af Pollas' parodi (mp3) på DMI's Vejrudsigt (mp3)

Vi tager lige et round up af dem jeg kan huske:Morten, Nikolaj, Simon, Michael og som en ny entry - Søren. Ikke ny som i blogger, men ny som i kollega.

Classy.dk's vidtspredte kildenet har hvisket os i øret at "Uberørt af byens travlhed", salme 842 i Tillæg til Den Danske Salmebog, i virkeligheden er skrevet på Four Jacks udgaven af Kiplings "Mandalay" ('fuld af flyvefisk i leg' og så videre).
For det første betyder det at salmen har et omkvæd - noget usædvanligt i en salme skulle jeg mene. For det andet vil man - hvis man kan huske det listige korsvar på sidste line lige før man går ind i omkvædet - aldrig igen kunne tage følgende uddrag alvorligt:

Slægters fodtrin lyder mod os
op igennem glemte år,
danse-lette eller tunge.
som de følte deres kår,
når de andagtsfulde kom med
deres små til livets Gud,
når de knugede af sorgen
bar de kære døde ud. [Red: og her altså egentlig kor: Bar de kære døde ud]

Her har dagen evighed,
her har kærlighed sit sted,
hvor Guds Søn er sammen med os
under Helligåndens fred,
og da føler vi en stund,
at vi står på hellig grund,
og at livets mening lyder
fra vor skabers egen mund.

If I hadn't seen it in my referrer logs I wouldn't have believed that gppgle is actually a Google owned domain. A sligthly surprising variant of the technique of buying typos of your name to get all the intended traffic. Yes, I do realise that 'p' is next to 'o' on the qwerty keyboard.

Det er jo til at brække sig over at det er en Microsoftee der skal repræsentere IT-branchen i det nye globaliseringsråd.

If you weren't blown away by Google Maps, you'll have another chance now as Google Maps adds the ability to view satellite images instead of maps. As an example, the bass player from my old band moved here a while ago. Nice building, Bjørn.

På given foranledning kan jeg oplyse fra mit nys overståede Paristur at Pavens død gik ganske stille henover Paris. Der var da et par flag på halv, og et enkelt TV hold ved Notre Dame der jagtede reaktioner, men det var stadig bare sol og søndag i gadebilledet, og hvis der var et millionstort sørgetog gik det hen over ihvertfald mit hoved.

I Paris - hvor vejret er 5 grader bedre og man kan sidde ude på terrassen efter midnat. Ambiencen er helt i top, fodturene lange og museerne endnu ubesøgte.
Jeg har forsøgt at uddele prisen for mest prætentiøse drøm, men modtageren var ikke at finde på nogen af de litterære cafeer.

The latest Google-bashing meme revolves around the idea that Google is loosing. It's over. Yahoo is here. A9 is here. (Funnily, nobody seems to mention "MSN is here" in that sentence)
I doubt very much that it's true except in the sense "Search will not be the monoculture that the world of operating systems has become". There are two things in this I'm curious about. First: We all agree this is a Good Thing, right? No monopolistic lock in. Lot's of wellbehaved competitors, because the audience is fickle. Intense R&D to survive. Second: If this is good - why are people giving the message "The world of search regains balance" the spin "Google is over"? Is it just the standard modern day negative "critical thinking" or are people so used to succesful monoculture that they actually prefer these monocultures to live, thrwing, competitive environments?

Min bror havde en hurtig, men præcis konklusion på det store H.C. Andersen 180 års show (det er godt nok nu, men stjernerne er fra for 20 år siden):

Man skal bare ikke give folk 200 millioner