Banana Slug provides serendipitous searching. Gary says: "Banana Slug is a Google search tool that my good friend Steve Nelson built based on a trick that I devised for finding new and unusual stuff about ukuleles on the Web. Since Google returns the most popular pages, I started searching on ukulele+some random word that occurred to me. Like ukulele and pickle. So Steve built Banana Slug, which does this for you automatically.

"Here[base ']s a description from the site:

BananaSlug was designed to promote serendipitous surfing: finding the unexpected in the 3,083,324,652 web pages indexed by Google. Directed Google searches return pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages' popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path.

So we give you a little boost. We "seed" your search with another word, chosen at random, and this accidental encounter results in pages you may have overlooked. What, if anything, do all the results have in common? You tell me! We show the seed word at the end of the page, along with the number of results, and how many seed words we needed to try before we got results (it doesn't always happen the first time!).

"I[base ']ve already found a new (to me) ukulele performer using Banana Slug. Jennifer Foster. Listen to her song,Ukulele Dropout."

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
6:36:50 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The Internet Under Surveillance
In his forward to the recent Reporters Without Borders report on the state of internet censorship, Vint Cerf, widely regarded as the "father of the Internet," calls for web users to exercise their critical thinking skills when accessing online information. (SearchEngineWatch) [STOP1984] 
5:48:07 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Iran Joins China in Blocking Blogs. Hoder: July 9 Unrest, Updates. Confirmed reports are saying that akunews (prominent student news website) and major blogging services websites... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 
5:41:30 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Another Funny Google Search Result. Anthony Cox created nifty bit of modern mythology by gaming Google to turn up a hilarious "I'm Feeling Lucky" result... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 
5:38:18 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Rheingold Preaches Mob-Logging. drjparker writes "Howard Rheingold author of Smart Mobs and The Virtual Community among other works has an article in the Online Journalism Review in which he ... [Slashdot] 
5:34:45 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Cringely On Electronic Tapping. sckienle writes "Robert X. Cringely, the PBS one, has an editorial discussing electronic wire-tapping and the Big Brother concerns. There isn't any new ... [Slashdot] 
5:33:39 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Psychedelia from yesterday and today. Bob Masse's Rock Posters ~ Thirty-five years of poster art by one of North America's premier poster artists. [MetaFilter] 
5:22:02 AM      comment []   trackback []  



anywhere but here?. where r u? where would u like 2 b? Just answer those questions in the popup window (hit "click here to find out how..." or via email or text message)--your response will live online and will be launched at sunset from the banks of the River Avon on July 13th 2003...Possibly to be discovered by someone, somewhere. More info here (you can be anonymous if you wish, and javascript and flash are in the popup) [MetaFilter] 
5:13:54 AM      comment []   trackback []  



BBC RSS feeds list updated. Yesterday, BBC News Online made available 68 new RSS feeds for every section of their site in both the World and UK editions. Radio users can use the XML coffee mugs on the BBC RSS feeds page to easily subscribe to the new channels using Radio's aggregator. [UserLand Product News] 
4:57:51 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Loose endings.

Richard Bennett has some interesting shove-back on the end-to-end qualities that many believe are imbued in (or ideals of) the Net, and which World of Ends is mostly about. He raises good points that need to be argued, even if he can't resist the customary put-downs:

There are a number of kludges that have been adopted in TCP to approximate a truly end-to-end capability, but none of them really make it a reality because there's not enough smarts in IP and its various kludgy cousins (ICMP, IGMP) to make this work. So freezing the architecture at this stage would be a serious mistake, which is why you never see network architects arguing for the things that Searls (a Public Relations man), Lessig (a law professor) or Dave Weinberger (a philosophy professor) want.

The story of how the Internet came by its odd architecture, which it doesn't share with the much better-designed ARPANET, coherent architectures like SNA and DECNet, and extant PDNs, is a story of ambitious professors, government grants, and turf wars among contractors that's not at all a tale of the best design winning out, but more on that later. This "end-to-end" fantasy is simply historical revisionism, and we need to nip it in the bud before it does any more damage.

A lot of comments follow. Worth reading.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
4:50:53 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Ultra-liberal feed parser.

This is an ultra-liberal feed parser, suitable for reading RSS and Pie feeds as produced by weblogs, news sites, wikis, and many other types of sites.

As I guessed and as Mark replied, his ultra-liberal feed parser now supports initial Pie (nee nEcho (nee Echo (nee Pie))) feeds.

But you know what else? He left in support for RSS. My news aggregator remains fully able to read all my feeds even after dropping in his new code. No breakage here. [0xDECAFBAD] 
4:34:06 AM      comment []   trackback []