Sherry Koyama, a coworker and valued yahoo-literati partner of mine, is displaying some paintings online at the SF art bureau. Very cool stuff... (thx zegna)

I never really write about blogging, but the bandwagon is too irresistible right now. The current hype about blogs is akin to the hype surrounding WebPages when they first came into the mainstream. Remember circa 1996... "wow! you've got a website? cool!". The difference is simply that blogging provides an easy and incredibly well organized way to publish to your website. It's still a website though, and the hype will probably fade fairly quickly. At one time people thought everyone was destined to have a personal website. I still doubt that will happen. Anyway...

Generating this hype is the big announcement that Google has bought Blogger, one of the original blogging tools. It's quite fascinating to see everyone jump on this announcement, and hypothesize about what Google will do next. Pretty much every newspaper in the world covered the announcement as a monumental affair, even though most people still wouldn't know a blog from a fog.

Here's a synopsis of the most interesting points made recently:

Wired Mag: Why did google want Blogger? - To improve their search accuracy by analyzing what people were talking about.

The Guardian: The Genius of Blogging. - To beat the mainstream media to the juiciest online content. Great article.

Forbes: Google Goes Blog-Crazy. - Not much of a clue, but suggest Google might enter the "build your own website" arena.

Danny Sullivan: Ad distribution. - Google may plan to place ads on (presumably) free users weblog sites.

Dave G: Dosn't matter. - The important thing is that it legitimizes the medium. And the medium is huge.

Incidentally, most of the best blogs use Movablye Type these days, which sorta downgrades the quality of content that Google may be able to exclusively analyze. In the meantime, I'm inclined to agree with Dave G that the most important thing at the moment is the hype itself. Blogging takes us back to the general idea that the internet should be a great democratic place where anyone can publish thoughts on anything at negligible cost for the benefit of all. Anything that promotes that is good.

It's definitely too early to start singing big-time praises, but i have to admit that since the congestion charge went into effect on Monday, there has been noticeably less traffic on my street in the morning, and noticeably more bicycle traffic. Pretty impressive start.

Thanks to Kristin who suggested killing a .dll file! I did a little research and found the following:

http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/SubSearch.html

Works perfectly, no more "enhanced search results!" Apparently the culprit is some spam company called High Traffic Ads. The software gets into your system via a popup ad. This is easily the most insidious infiltration I've ever suffered, and I recommend writing nasty letters to those 'high traffic' guys. On the other hand, the generosity and good nature of the web still lives on. Thanks for the replies.

PS - Apparently, Ad-Ware does not yet protect you from this one.

It seems this problem is not Google. It's some garbage I accidentally installed. I get "enhanced results" now after searching on all major search engines. It is really infuriating when this kind of thing happens. Still can't find anyone else who's got the same problem. oh well.

Has anyone noticed the "enhanced results" that are appearing when you do a Google search? Am I the only (un)lucky recipient of this?

When I do a simple search for "Heathrow", a side-frame suddenly appears containing what are purportedly "enhanced results". They just look like ads to me. This is the first time Google has ever annoyed me. No one else seems to have the problem, perhaps I inadvertently downloaded some crapware that caused this. Could it be related to the Google search bar? I want it gone.

The BBC is reporting an upcoming terrorist attack in London "on par with September 11th".

I'm flying out of Heathrow on Friday. The whole place is crawling with soldiers and tanks, yes tanks. That and this "orange alert" thing have actually gotten me a little nervous. At least more so than in the past. Still, there's nothing I can do about it is there? The good news is I'm flying Aer Lingus and no one's after the Irish yet.

CNN says today: "Bush to raise terrorism threat level... for only the second time ever". Well, "2nd time ever" doesn't really mean anything if the system's only been in place for a year or so, does it? This whole thing seems like an out-of-control video game, startlingly reminiscent of the giant "defcon" scene in Wargames, but even more theatrical. The fact that this is "Breaking News" on CNN is even more startling.

I've decided this "lattice" by THINK is my favorite WTC design, though I never really liked any of the 6 'finalists' much.

However, despite what the newspapers keep saying, none of these proposals will be the world's tallest structure. Those honors go to KTHI-TV in North Dakota whose boroadcast mast reaches 2,063 ft. Nor are either of them the worlds tallest self supporting structure, that honor still goes to the CN tower in Toronto at 1,815 ft. Just so you get the facts straight.

I want a "PDF Warning System" on my browser. Often, I click on a link and it turns out to be a PDF document. My computer then essentially freezes for 3 minutes while Acrobat Reader loads. Very annoying. I know that I can look in the status bar and see if the link in question is a PDF, but it's not instinctual to do this. Even the [PDF] marker on Google search results seldom prevents me from clicking on one.

I want a popup warning that says "you just requested a PDF, do you want to continue, Yes or No".