Sunday, July 24, 2005

At encouraging variance from the facts

Says here I'm 33 years old.

Your Findage May Vary

Okay, it's been four hours since we posted on Sam the Ugly Dog (below), and now we have backblogs from Euan Semple, Alex Bellinger, Rick Segal, Bruce Umbaugh, AKMA, Lloyd Davis, 100% Pure Crap, David Weinberger, and Suw Charman.

All but two of those come from a Technorati search for world's ugliest dog (sans quotes). I found Euan's from a pointer from Suw. And I found Rick's when I was showing Susie (Sam's owner) a typical TypePad blog. (That was quick, Rick!) No results (that is, no new posts today, activated by this post here) have come in so far from MSN, Google, Yahoo, IceRocket, Bloglines , Blogpulse or Feedster. (Though when you click those links later more will surely come through.) Disclosure: I'm on the Technorati advisory board. Another disclosure: I didn't expect Technorati to do so well. (And no, I didn't give anybody at Technorati a heads-up about this "test.")

We need to be fair. This is one test among a zillion one could conduct. All these engines have different emphases. All miss stuff. All find stuff others don't. For example, IceRocket found this blog entry about Sam from early this month. It wasn't what I was looking for, but it fit the search and none of the other engines found it (that I noticed, anyway). And all the RSS engines (those other than Google, MSN and Yahoo) delivered results much more slowly than we're used to from the familiar static Web search engines.

Technorati delivered early, I think, because they place a premium on quick results from The Live Web. I'm looking forward to seeing what the others do as well. For example, I'd like to see how BlogPulse graphs the results over time. Or how PubSub does feeding my aggregator results for the same keywords. (Nothing so far... but up until this month PubSub has been the leader — for me, anyway — at delivering the largest number of results from different sources.)

In a podcast interview with Jeremy Wright (don't have a link yet) last week, I said Live Web search was at the same evolutionary stage that static Web search was when Infoseek and HotBot and AltaVista were still pioneering. Meaning we should cut all of the current engines the same kind of slack we gave those guys back in '95-'97. The RSS engines are the ones pioneering here. Hats off to all them.

Ski-fi

Dave is choosing between skiing and hanging in New York this next Winter. (At first I wrote "Winer." Coincidence?)

On the skiing side, Dave says,

The reason to do it now is that I can do it now. In a few years it might not be possible for me to spend a whole winter skiing. Time goes by very quickly, I've found out. All of a sudden I'm 50. Soon, all of a sudden I'll be 70. You say there are plenty of 70 year old skiers, and you're right. But there are also plenty of people who aren't skiing at 70. That's the fallacy of old age. We all hope we'll be the ones who are left standing and healthy, but then there's my uncle, who died at 58. :-(

In six days I turn 58, which was also the age at which my father had his first heart attack. Pop lived another twelve years, but his athletic life was over. His heart was a time bomb. After that, as he often said, he lived on "borrowed time."

Although Pop was an avid skiier in his 20s and 30s (he was in the ski patrol at some mountian in New Hampshire or Vermont, I forget), I didn't learn to ski until my wife pushed me into it, at 43. I'm still an intermediate skier at best, but there's no activity I love more.

And there's no better bait to get me to come to a small conf than to hold it in a ski resort.

So that's my vote.

The Sam Test

Our friend Susie has the world's ugliest dog. Really. Sam has won the ugliest dog contest three years running. If he lives long enough, he'll establish himself as the Lance Armstrong of canine ugliness.

But Sam's site has a problem. Look up "ugliest dog" on Google, and 237,000 results come up. Yet there are no inbound links, Google says, to http://samugliestdog.com.

Yet.

Technorati finds no references to the URL and 20 with "ugliest dog" as a keyphrase.

So we have a challenge here.

Susie will be over shortly, and I'm going to try convincing her to start Sam (and Tater, his nearly-as-ugly companion) ... (surprise) ... a blog.

Also an ugliestdog tag. (I see Sam is already tagged ugliest on Flickr.)

If all percolates well through the 'spheres, I'll have a great story to tell in my talk (here's the .pdf) tomorrow night. The title is Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting & RSS — what do they have to do with your future?

You know how to help.

Where abouts

Been comparing maps.google.com with the new virtualearth.msn.com. The latter is beta, and just came out. Lots of glitches (e.g. I just got 3 errors in "248 of 253 items" loaded into this page), but still, very competitive.

Distributed study

Rick Segal: Blog Search = Opportunity. In which Rick puts a bunch of search engines to task, finding links to a post he'd made 24 hours before.