words, words, words

This comic made me laugh out loud.

Because I am a nerd, I am excited about the new Google Toolbar 3 (beta) for Firefox. I spend most of my waking hours in front of a monitor looking at Firefox. Oh God, that sounds depressing. I guess it beats being a bodysnatcher.

I was reading last night about how, in Victorian times, stealing freshly dead bodies from their graves was actually pretty well paid. There was a distinct lack of corpses for anatomy classes. This was due in no small part to the fact that your body, the one they stuck in the ground, was the one you got when you were resurrected. i.e. a body buried with no head or no guts results an eternity of walking into things and indigestion. So, since people didn’t want to be chopped up, there was a great business digging them up and selling them to medical schools.

Don’t ask where I find this stuff.

I was thinking about personalization while walking around Oxford Circus tonight. This is a bit of a conundrum. Like Seth Godin, I think that yes, if I buy a plane ticket to Lusaka, I would want to know the best way to see Victoria Falls. However, at what point can you start to profile people based on their searches? Does Google have a moral obligation to “do no evil” and report “evildoers”? Where would that stop? With Phillip K. Dick and Precrime?

That said, Google seems to be greasing the wheels of acceptance testing with their personalized search features. In an Official Post on the Google Blog it seems like they are selling the idea of personalization.

Look at the way they are also writing about this:

Keep in mind that personalization is subtle—at first you may not notice any difference. But over time, as the search engine learns your preferences, you’ll see it. For example, I (Sep) am an avid Miami Dolphins fan (no joke). Searching for [dolphins] gives me info about my favorite football team, while a marine biologist colleague gets more information about her salt-water friends.

Nothing says, “Hey, I’m just one of the guys, trust me…” like talking about football. That’s one of the the reasons why whenever you are trying to sell a scary concept, it is always a good idea to tie your concept to a popular sporting team or a cute animal. Or hell, why not both! It… looks… like… Flipper… could… go… all… the…. way… !!!

The iPod phone.
Completely underwhelming.

I’ve decided to post my nerd stuff on a different site. If you want to the url for that blog, send me an email (bkoplitz@gmail.com).

Today could be pretty interesting as MacWorld is set to start and everyone can’t stop talking about iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. It is the only thing that people are waiting for. Look, if I had my way, there wouldn’t be an iPhone. And if Apple were smart, they would come out and say that there will NEVER be an iPhone because they are working on something different and better.

Phones are dead. I talked about this a few posts down. They should work on building WiFi access into the iPod and then integrate iChat so that people can make mobile video over IP and mobile voice over IP calls to people. They already have the software built and have the users.

I think that we have been looking at this iPod thing too narrowly. In our minds we associate iPods to music and videos, just as we partner making “phone calls” to phones and phone lines. However, lets step away from the music / entertainment vehicle of the iPod… I think that the etymology of the word “pod” is a good place to start. There are two main definitions. First a pod is the vessel that contains the seeds of a plant. Secondly a pod is a group of whales. Therefore a pod could be either a bunch of seeds encased together or a bunch of huge
mammals. Now, I’ll go with the first rather than the second. The fact that we think of songs as the seeds in the pod is probably an approach that is too narrow. What if everything in your life was a seed? Lets include “phone” calls, video “phone” calls, entertainment (music, video, music videos), Personal Organizer (that stalwart Christmas gift), basically everything but your keys as the seeds.

So purely as a thought experiment lets take this phone thing one step further. What proof do we have, really, that we are not already using VOIP on our mobile phones? We, as consumers, have been hypnotized into paying too much for shitty service, so if it were switched to VOIP it isn’t as if we would even be able to say, “Hey, my service sucks!” Welcome to the club!

A few years ago… I’m not sure how many, maybe four, I said that “Skip Movie” would be the most common phrase on the Internet. Perhaps I even said that it would be the single most clicked hyperlink.
I said this as a reaction to my disgust with the number of stupid Flash movies that were populating “cyberspace”. I thought that companies that previously didn’t have a way for the customer to skip their flash movie would suffer. Any customers that were forced to be entertained by whizzing arrows flying past a rotating something-or-other under flavorless and unoffensive house music (Think Thievery Corporation) would lose business. Companies that provided an option to Skip Movie would sell their crap and prosper.

The Internet was not intended to be a shopping mall, nor a high-speed porn delivery vehicle, let alone an enormous and invisible bathroom wall for people to scribble on.

Now, I think that the web has taken a huge step forward (backward or backward toward it’s ARPA days). It has become even more information oriented. Save the buzzwords of “Web 2.0″ for the pundits and stock pumpers, we are facing a Copernican revolution in the way information is created and shared. Functionality, not form is going to be the most important part of the future of the Internet. Information on the web needs to be as accessible and shareable as possible. Selecting the “Text Only Version” link may soon become more popular as people try to get to the heart of the information.