Apparently some people (red staters?) have been complaining to Google that the top results for ‘failure’ and the phrase ‘miserable failure’ are turning up the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush.

Google’s Director of Consumer Web Products, Marissa Mayer explains this phenomenon:

By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.

What people should be complaining about is the quality of the speech he gave last night. One of my friends remarked that the President’s drooping jaw looked like he had a stroke. That speech was missing two very important words that many people needed to hear in this country:

“I’m sorry.”

Update: using the following neat tool, you can create your own Bush speech!

Looking for a lightweight, no software solution for AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo? Meebo might be the answer. While this might be good for instant messgae chatting when you can’t install software or don’t have the software on a machine, the Meebo AJAX client doesn’t offer the full feature set of the four standalone clients or even multi-client interfaces like Trillian and Qnext. Still, it’s an impressive use of AJAX. Interested uses can follow along with the Meebo Blog and forum. I saw a few folks wondering about Google Talk in Meebo via their forum. Wouldn’t that be something?

The following is a useful tip which will save Photoshoppers optmimzing images for the web bandwidth.

I came across a tip at PhotoshopSupport.com that can save you up to 70% in file size. Go into the “File Handling” section of Photoshop’s preferences and change the the ‘Image Previews’ option from the default “always save” to “never save” or “always ask.”

I’ve been using it for a couple days and comparing image sizes. Smaller file size. no reduction in image quality — nice!

The Nintendo Revolution controllers looks more like a TV remote than a traditional game controller and is intended to be held with one hand. Nintendo is turning heads with its break out of the mold creativity via 1UP (pictures):

The controller for Nintendo’s upcoming Revolution home console system is a cordless remote-control-like device designed to be used with only one hand. Two small sensors placed near the TV and a chip inside the controller track its position and orientation, allowing the player to manipulate the action on screen by physically moving the controller itself. For example, you could slash an in-game sword by actually swinging the controller from side to side, turn a race car just by twisting your wrist, or aim your gun in a shooter by pointing the controller where you want to fire.

Cool, I want to play it now! I still don’t think with this revolutionary controller, they will get back atop the console videogame market. They need third party gaming support and unless/until they get it, I would count their chances rising to the top again unlikely. With that said, I’ll be standing in line to get one of these systems on launch day in 2006.

The next year looks to be very exciting for console gamers hardware-wise. I sure hope the games take it to the next level as well. A lot of games for the current nextgen systems get boring too fast. Some of my favorite games ever were for older systems like the SNES.

I wondered what the big deal with the search engine baidu.com (BIDU) was when I heard the stock dramatically shot up in value upon going public. Turns out one of their hot features was an mp3 search engine which allegedly made it easier to listen to and download illegal copies of songs, via thestandard.com.hk:

Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and their local subsidiaries, Cinepoly, Go East and Gold Label, are suing the search company in a Beijing court for infringing the copyright of hundreds of songs. They allege that the search service makes it easy for users to listen to and download illegal copies of their songs, said a source close to the music companies.

Baidu’s stock has gone from a high of $153.98 to $81.24 as of this writing.

Mike from Techdirt was also cynical on the IPO from the beginning: Why Baidu’s Investors Should Have Done Some Research:

So, the company now has two choices: fight the lawsuit (which means spending lots of money) or get rid of the downloads and take away their competitive advantage. This was pretty predictable for anyone who actually took a couple seconds to look it up before the company went public. No wonder Baidu’s VCs are so pissed off they’re still stuck in the lockup period.

Wonder what the stock price will be like when the lockout is over?

Increasingly these days bloggers need to verify stories for accuracy and to avoid being made a fool over a hoax. The most recent hoax appears to have been generated out of a fake press release. The domain Grotica.com is registered by WebmasterWorld, not Google, but that diddn’t stop pressbox.co.uk from picking it up:

Called Grotica, the new service uses sophisticated image processing tools to automatically categorize still photos and movies according to subject matter and degree of explicitness. Google’s powerful keyword search functions have been further enhanced for this application with over 3000 synonyms for anatomical terms and erotic activities.

Search Engine Journal adds:

Titled “Google unveils new erotica search engine” the release should have immediately set off the crap alarms at Pressbox. Not to mention the terrible boilerplate release style and the obvious joke in the PR contact’s name and contact information : Linda S. Boreman, 650.253.4950 [the real Google media contact number], lovelace@google.com. Wouldn’t the hiring of one of hiring most famous porn stars, Linda Lovelace, make news?

Yeah, considering Deep Throat pron star, Linda Lovelace died over three years ago that would really have been something!

Hoax alert!

Houston, we have a date! And it’s not Black Friday (the shopping day after Thanksgiving). Thank goodness for that, I might actually have a chance at getting one of these systems without preordering with the announced launch date.

In an announcement at the Tokyo Game Show, the company said the new Xbox–Microsoft’s entrant in the next-generation console wars–would hit store shelves in North America on Nov. 22, in Europe on Dec. 2 and in Japan on Dec. 10. The company clearly wanted to take advantage of the holiday shopping rush just before and after Thanksgiving in the United States.

Marking calendar now for Tuesday, November 22 at 12:01 am PST. Wonder if I’ll have to be one of the gaming dorks down there at midnight aching to get my hands on that sleek nextgen gaming system. Damn you, Microsoft! (I mean this in a good way, of course).

And there’s no way I’m going for the $299 version unless it’s my only option to get one.

Was talking to my friend, Lestat, about one of our two current office configurations as far as computer setups in the main room. I shot some pictures to show where I sit and work. Picture #1 below:

The first office configuration shows a dual-monitor CRT screen main system and Tablet PC in portrait mode to my left on a v-shaped glass desk. About 6-8 feet away on a secondary desk in front of the main dual-monitor CRT screens elevated is the second beefier system that we’re currently using to watch TV via Slingbox (also have this software installed on the Tablet PC) and to act as the backup machine for the network. It keeps the important files on the network backed up. It’s not a completely automated backup system, but that’s the long range plan.

When I sit up in my chair I can see the picture on the distant monitor pretty clearly. See the screenshot above. I control this secondary backup machine via Synergy from the main system. I can also control the Tablet PC via Synergy so only one keyboard and mouse needs to be used for all three computers.

The Tablet PC, primarily in landscape mode, acts as an email filtering system for some of our POP email boxes and for keeping handwritten notes from telephone calls. The telephone is on the desk to my right. I also use the Tablet PC for IRC chatting.

To the right (not pictured) is another computer on a third desk that is used for our weekly radio show and a few other non-business uses. There are three microphones and a mixer also there. Behind that machine, also not pictured, is an eMac on a fourth desk. From there I maintain the Mac Mode blog and am learning how to use a Mac. The Mac is used as a radio via RadioShark and a chatbot for the IRC channel for the radio show.

We’d like to replace the four CRT monitors we have with LCDS, but not really ready to part with the extra $$$, although I know this would reduce the power bill, so it’s a matter of trading dollars upfront for savings on the backend. Anybody got a good line on buying 4-5 LCDs in bulk? Go ahead and pitch me, but only on that (will remove other unrelated spam, as always).

I’m curious what readers setups are like. What does your current office configuration look like? What OS and configuration are you using for your office or home network?

The New York Post claims Microsoft is in talk with Time Warner to buy a stake in AOL, via Bloomberg:

Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, would pay New York-based Time Warner an unspecified amount of cash for a stake in AOL and combine it with its Internet unit, MSN, the newspaper said, citing two unidentified people familiar with the situation.

If this rumour is accurate, why would Microsoft do this? They pass up better acquisition possibilities like Flickr and Konfabulator and announce at the PDC05 that they are doing Microsoft Gadgets? Huh? Maybe Microsft Gadgets will be cool — in the future — but right now I think their PDC which they only do every couple years is being upstaged by Google, Yahoo and other technology releases and news.

It’s kind of sad that this is happening because Vista has some promising things coming like superfetch, significantly improved RSS integration in Office and Vista and more according to Scoble. He cites in that post a couple of attendees saying “the hype created … is totally worth it” and “amazing first day” so perhaps the rest of us that aren’t there need more time to see stuff coming out of there.

Yesterday, tech.memeorandum was dominated by stories about Google’s Blog Search and today Yahoo’s Instant Search and other non-PDC stories. Bloggers, at least, aren’t talking in huge numbers about PDC05 (1,226 posts) vs Google Blog Search (2,106)

Sure, there is very good Channel 9 PDC05 coverage, including podcasts I am going to listen to some of those a bit later. I’m certain there will be several things to get excited about as a developer.

Unfortunately, from a customer perspective it’s still a wait, wait, wait scenario for the most part with Microsoft. Bill Gates would probably attribute this upstaging in the PR deparment to it currently being Google’s “honeymoon” but Microsoft is missing key opportunities, IMO. If they don’t ship (and they are releasing some new things, keep reading), then they should buy the right kinds of companies/services and if they don’t want to buy (it’s not a can’t situation there), then they shouldn’t be surprised by other companies grab the interest and PR.

However, from a developer perspective, times are shaping up to be pretty good at Microsoft right now. MSN Developer Center was released yesterday which serves as a portal for the various developer areas: MSN search Toolbar with Desktop Search plugins, Microsoft Gadgets, MSN Virtual Earth and MSN Messenger. Lots of different things for a developer to plug into and offer goodies!

Now back to AOL — or AOHELL as some former disgruntled customers call it — this is just the type of company that Microsoft should try to avoid at all costs. It’s just a rumour, remember. And my opinion if the rumour is true. Hmm, what do you think?

Yahoo has released another potentially useful tool called Instant Search http://instant.search.yahoo.com/ - which the Yahoo Search Blog defines as:

And that’s what led us to develop Instant Search, which went into beta today on our next.yahoo.com site. As you type your search into the Instant Search box, it checks to see if there is a single, relevant answer for your query. If there is, that single result instantly appears on the page, just below the search box in a kind of “speech bubble”.

I used the word “potentially” because this tool works best in very specific search situations which might be served by going directly to the domain. I’ll do searches by domain on some obvious things like weather (weather.com). I wonder if the ultimate plan will be to integrate this with the full on Yahoo search. It would be useful there for trying to determine one search result as you type. I do think if they do that it should make it user-defined. Ramming it down users throats with no on/off switch would be ill-advised, IMO.

Functionality
Worked error-free in recent versions of Firefox and IE. I didn’t test on Safari, but I saw one Safari user reporting that it worked fine there. AJAX fans will groove on this type of app and it’s a pretty good use of dynamic user interaction.

A few of my own test results
Puyallup weather - the weather nearby (pictured above)
Safeco Field - no result for a major sports landmark in Seattle
Space Needle - resulted in spaceneedle.com.
nfl - nfl.com (doh!)
apple - apple.com
apples - Washington Apple Commission (bestapples.com). Didn’t realize there even was an apple commision.

Seems like an extra step to go to a search engine to search for a company, like I’m sure people looking for Apple, the company, will try apple.com first. As for the weather, the movies and other local activities or when planning trips, I see some use for a tool like this.

Others are saying
Ken Leebow: “Yahoo! : Way to go!”
Erin Bradley tested movies, weather, dictionary, definitions and mathematical equations and “… all returned exactly what I was looking for on the first time around. It’s a wee bit slow, but I could definitely see myself using it every day.”
Greg Linden (hey, you’re nearby, Greg, cool!) thinks the algorithm needs “a little work.” I agree.
Charlene Li likens the search to snap.com’s home page where “the search categories change as you type each letter. Snap.com also shows news stories on the side.”