This Yahoo! Search issue…
As many have already noted, it would be a HUGE mistake for Yahoo! to give up on search. Apparently, some of the Yahoo! team agree:
This commitment to being the best should be crystal clear from our investments in talented people, research, innovation and new products. Believe it or not, we are still in the early days of search. As all of us at Yahoo! agree, we’re in it for the long haul, and we’re in it to win.
Seriously. Flickr, Del.icio.us, and now, maybe, Digg? They are building an arsenal for one of next revolutions in search. I would like to see more effort in the direction of personalized results, though. Rollyo style, maybe or filtering results by your blogroll.
Etsy just added a custom handmade goods marketplace!
It’s called Alchemy. You write up the specs for the object you want and people bid on the opportunity to create it for you. Fantastic!!!
Some example jobs: Batman-themed, high quality leather laptop bag. Anotomical Heart in Needlepoint. Cute crochet doll of our doggie. He’s a chihuahua mix.
If there was some way to mark blog posts as having high importance(as you can with email), I would be marking this post that way. This is really, really big.
Mosaic of WebCam Stills Arranged Geographically
I’ve been reading the information aesthetics blog regularly as I’m a HUGE fan of data visualization. Today, they linked to the netlag world webcam map. Holy cow – this is a video that you must see.
Says information aesthetics:
An impressive reality video of 1609 different webcams positioned around the world. specially developed software called ‘picksucker’ saved an image of each camera every ten minutes (from 29-01-2004 until 30-01-2004 18:40 GTM), which are placed on a geographical world map & become animated according to time. created by pleix, a community of digital artists (graphic designers, 3d artists, musicians…). Although based on completely different input data, the end result is looks similar to google search activity map.
retrievr / qbic
Craig pointed me to retrievr. Awesome stuff! Reminds me of a Web 1.0 app called QBIC(Query By Image Content) done by the folks at IBM’s Almaden lab 10 years ago.
Looks like others are interested, too:
- TechCrunch on retrievr (…it is a really beautiful piece of technology.)
- LifeHacker’s take (What it lacks in accuracy it makes up for in fun.)
- jwz (But no mattr how many times I tried to draw boobies, it kept showing me flowrs and cats.) [In a roundabout way, I was able to find some.]
Here’s my test. Orange is my favorite color these days. Now, if I could just get an rss feed of the results…
Gaping Void, Zoho
It has taken me a while to warm up to Gaping Void. I realize I’m in the minority on that. If you, too, are finding it hard to warm up to Hugh’s drawings, check out this set. Wonderful stuff.
John Tokash 
