Neomeme

Akismet caught its 400th spam for me today. Its 400th inane, random comment spam nobody would mistake for a legitimate comment, and one that search engines have ignored for years. Initially, I was baffled as to why spammers continue to send out billions upon billions of junk emails hawking ci@lis and offering stock tips interspersed with bits of Hemingway. Does anyone actually fall for this stuff? I would never click on a link in a spam email, enter my credit card information, and buy some prescription-free drugs from a Russian pharmacy? Would you? I am willing to assert that no reader of this blog has ever bought anything from a spam email. But of course, we know that we cannot extrapolate the experience of this enlightened audience to the majority of Internet users. The sad truth of the matter is that spam works. Spam works a lot. Read more »

The New York Times writes today about social networking’s next phase- specialization and diversification into niches, aided by new startups like Ning, which claims to let you “create your own social network for anything”. Oh boy. Myspace lets Joe Sixpack create his own awesome website for anything, producing atrocious monstrosities of blinking,flashing,writhing, non W3C-valid HTML. For my work, I have to do a lot of research on social networks, which obviously includes MySpace as a major segment of the market. Every time I visit MySpace, I die a little on the inside, so much that I am seriously considering using Lynx to browse it. Read more »

I bet you use Google to search the Internet multiple times every day. Good old reliable Google, which has not changed it main user interface in years. You would think that all of the extremely creative Google engineers would spend some time designing exciting Web 2.0-ish new interfaces for Google, and at the very least posting them in Google Labs for us early adopters to play with. Alas, no such luck. Google Labs has plenty of interesting projects, but no additional features for the core search product. Oh, and by the way, have you heard of this new search engine called SearchMash? It looks pretty advanced, chock-full of Ajax, highlighting Wikipedia results, keyword suggestions and more. And the search results are pretty good, too. What is this wonderful new search engine? A stealth startup? A private venture? No,SearchMash is actually a Google research project so secretive it is not even listed in Google Labs. Read more »