Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for February 2003
You can see Lance Armstrong’s failed marriage
You can see Lance Armstrong’s failed marriage coming on his wife’s online journal.
Google is not a search company
With their acquisition of Pyra and new Content-Targeted Advertising offering, it should be apparent that Google is not a search company. What they are exactly is unclear, but their biggest asset is: a highly annotated map of the web.
Search engines gather pages without regard to their positions in cyberspace. With their map, Google not only has the pages, but they know how those pages are related to each other. If you take a look at their offerings, many rely on this map in one way or another:
- Search: Pages are returned based on how important they are (i.e. their positions relative to important sites) for a given query.
- News: A submap consisting of just news sites is divided into sections (tech, sports, etc.) and stories within those sections are grouped together by specific topic.
- Content-Targeted Advertising: Since Google’s map is annotated and they know which pages are more important than other, they can provide highly targeted page-specific ads and determine accurate pricing without having to audit each site’s traffic for their customers.
- Web Directory: Same idea as search…ranking due to importance.
And now with Blogger, they can watch the people who are building the pages that comprise Google’s map to gain knowledge about their map that they can’t get from scraping.
Google’s money won’t be made with search…that’s small peanuts compared to selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly-utilized map of the web. And I have a feeling that they know this (Google is famously tight-lipped about what kind of company they are and how, exactly, they plan to make money), but they’re just not letting on lest other people get ideas about trying to compete with them.
Bar Monkey is a machine that automatically
Bar Monkey is a machine that automatically mixes and dispenses alcoholic drinks.
New York Songlines
Although the web allows for communication on a global scale, I love the local resources it makes available just as much. New York Songlines is a fascinating site with annotated maps of New York City maintained by Jim Naureckas. Simply designed, each map is a linear representation of a single street (here’s Bleecker Street, for example), with links available to switch to cross streets (here’s where Bleecker crosses MacDougal). The maps are annotated with information about who lived where and when, contemporary commerce, location info for notable movies, and architectural history.
Some examples from the map for MacDougal Street:
93: Was the San Remo, famous bohemian hangout of Burroughs, Miles Davis, Tennessee Williams, James Agee, Jackson Pollock, W.H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, Village character Maxwell Bodenheim, photographer Weegee, etc. Gore Vidal once picked up Jack Kerouac here. Lost popularity because the bartenders beat up the customers once too often.
121: Authentically charming since 1927. Featured in Godfather II, Serpico, Next Stop Greenwich Village and the original Shaft. JFK gave a speech out front in 1959.
130-132: Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in this 1852 house.
Open-source government
Adam Greenfield has written an RFC on the idea of an open-source constitution for post-national states:
The question then becomes, what kinds of constitutional structures are appropriate to furthering the stated aims in an internetworked, interdependent age? What sorts of arrangements of power between humans can account for the deep variation in beliefs and assumptions among the six billion of us who share this planet, while still providing for a common jurisprudence? What measures can be taken that enhance the common security without unduly infringing on the sovereignty of the individual?
I believe that a useful model for the desired structure can be found in the open-source or “free” software movement.
In practice, the open-source software community is quite good at producing software for techies by techies (Linux, Apache, Sendmail) but not very good at making software for use by a general audience. Will open-source government turn out the same? Constitutions for constitutional enthusiasts?
Joggle - weblogs and forums with Jabber
Joggle - weblogs and forums with Jabber. I’ve always thought Jabber was perfect for building webloggish software systems, someone is finally heading in that direction
To google or not to google?
Paul McFedries, who runs the excellent Word Spy, has received a letter from one of Google’s lawyers concerning his citation of the word google (v.):
To search for information on the Web, particularly by using the Google search engine; to search the Web for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend.
The letter reads in part:
This definition implies that “google” is a verb synonymous with “search.” Please note that Google is a trademark of Google Technology Inc. Our brand is very important to us, and as I’m sure you’ll understand, we want to make sure that when people use “Google,” they are referring to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching in general.
Frank Abate, a participant on the mailing list, responds to Paul’s query for information and advice and points out that Google can’t really do anything about it:
Of course google is used as a verb. And why not? It only makes sense, it is short, it is fun, it works. And what the Google (TM) lawyer knows, but does not say, is that the company he represents cannot do anything about its use as a verb, legally. They cannot sue, as one cannot claim proprietary rights to a verb. Jesse Sheidlower recently pointed this out to me; apparently it is an explicit part of US law re trademarks.
I can’t speak to the specific legal matters in this case, but having some experience in getting such letters from lawyers, it looks as though Frank is right. That letter from Google is a bluff, an example of a corporation using their signifincant corporate resources (i.e. time and money) to make individuals - who generally have neither time nor money, relatively speaking - do what the corporation wants them to do, regardless of legality.
When companies get big, do they just naturally turn into bullies or is it a conscious decision? (via Grant)
Update: I’m well aware that Google, in order to protect their trademark, has to send out such letters. By law, trademarks need to be defended by the entities that own them or else they could lose that ownership. But still, it seems a little bullying when letters are sent out with the implication (however indirect or slight) of legal action when no legal action (assuming that Mr. Abate is correct) can be taken. Just rubs me the wrong way, although I’m unsure of a solution given the legal options available.
Allowing the generic use of “to google” by critical/academic sites like WordSpy does *not* constitute an abandonment of trademark (in fact, trademark abandonment involves a *very* high standard that is far in excess of allowing people to casually use your mark). What’s more, trademark specifically does NOT protect your mark from use in criticism, parody, instruction, and other first amendment contexts.
Whoa, French chef allegedly kills himself over lowered restaurant rating
Whoa, French chef allegedly kills himself over lowered restaurant rating.
Caring for Your Introvert
Rarely does a passage of text resonate with how I am as a person as the opening paragraph of Jonathan Rauch’s Caring for Your Introvert did:
Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?
Well, except for the “dynamite” part of “dynamite presentation”.
The Internet has helped me a great deal in this regard. Email, IM, and my weblog allow me to communicate with people when I want and how I want, without worrying about all the things introverts worry about when interacting with people: small talk, first impressions, awkward silences, etc. With the web, I can carry on a conversation with a whole group of people and stare down at my shoes at the same time. That’s an amazing and special thing for me.
There’s a text ad on the Google
There’s a text ad on the Google search results page for “Jason Kottke”.
Presentations from the first Amazon Associates conference
Presentations from the first Amazon Associates conference. 3.2 MB zip file
It Must’ve Been Something I Ate
Meg and I are both currently hooked on the writings of the obsessively funny Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue’s food columnist. She’s tucked into The Man Who Ate Everything while I’m reading It Must Have Been Something I Ate. It’s like Mr. Wizard meets David Sedaris meets The Galloping Gourmet.
The best part of this whole Steingarten-a-thon is that Meg has started cooking meat. You see, Jeffrey loves meat. And butter. And lard. And cheese. And eggs. He doesn’t believe the hype about salad. He believes people can eat meat, fat, and cheese and still be healthy (see the French Paradox) and probably a whole lot happier. I am delighted on so many levels to hear this viewpoint - my viewpoint also - expressed so convincingly.
In the last week, Meg has twice stopped at Ottomanelli’s Butcher Shop on Bleecker, once for filet mignon for Valentine’s Day (which when combined with mashed potatoes and a small salad, is surprisingly economical for how damn good the meal is) and this past Friday for a whole chicken (which took far too long to cook due to a faulty oven, but turned out wonderful anyway due to Meg’s skill in the kitchen and Dean Allen’s whimsical directions). My tummy and taste buds are plently happy. Thanks, Jeffrey.
Newsquakes - graphical representation of where news is being made
Newsquakes - graphical representation of where news is being made.
A family photographs itself once a year
A family photographs itself once a year for the last 27 years.
A little bit of tenderness
I’m tweaking the templates and stylesheets on kottke.org right now, so you might notice things looking a little funky for a bit. More after I’m done.
Ok, the tweaking is complete (as far as I know…please let me know if anything looks amiss). For most, the changes are pretty minor: smaller font size for the post titles on the front page, post titles link to individual posts, and little font size and weight changes here and there. If you’re using OS X, you should be enjoying a new typeface everwhere but the sidebar.
Boring administrivia: Movable Type rebuilt the entire site - 2403 individual archive pages (including 1432 comments), 59 category archive pages, and almost 5 years-worth of monthly archive pages - in about 30 seconds. Fast. The version of MT I’m running on my iBook was a bit slower in updating the local version of the site…and has almost slowed to a crawl now that I’m using MT + MySQL. I have yet to upgrade the version of MT on the server to use MySQL…I’m hoping the pokey speed of the local version is due to my wee iBook and not the MT + MySQL combo in general.
Super Mario Bros shows the initial joy
Super Mario Bros shows the initial joy but the eventual mental and moral decline due to drugs.
Faking the Lomo effect
I’ve always liked the look of Lomo photos (typically bright colored and highly saturated with darkened edges), but I didn’t want to worry about getting another camera or messing with film & scanning. Yesterday I asked people if there was a Photoshop filter that could turn a regular photo into a Lomo-style photo. Several people responded with the Melancholytron filter and a tutorial on achieving the Lomo effect without using filters.
Since I didn’t feel like downloading anything, I tried the tutorial. I started with this picture:
I took this photo on my first trip to NYC in January 2002; it’s the Vesuvio Bakery on Prince Street in Soho.
I deviated only slightly from the directions, using one of the overlayed feathered black layers and decreasing the opacity of the white gradient layer to below 50%. Here’s the result:
Pretty cool. Now, I wish I could get my camera to do this automatically…it would be fun to slip into Lomo mode now and then.
Socials & More