Lifecasting

  Step aside, reality television.  There’s a new engine gathering steam on the Reality Turnpike, and it’s doing something that you never could.  Remember when movies like “The Truman Show” and “EdTV” were so fictional they were almost far-fetched?  Well, thanks to modern technology, those days are gone.

  As you may have seen on The Today Show Monday, 23-year-old Justin Kan is the internet’s newest sensation.  For 17 days now, he has been broadcasting every minute of his life on the web, and people are beginning to tune in.  The Yale physics and philosophy grad turned web entrepreneur walks around, day after day, with a camera strapped to his head, as webwatchers tune in by the thousands to see what Justin is up to now.

  It’s not always exciting—like the eight (or ten) hours a day that he spends sleeping, or the countless hours spent in front of his computer.  But the show, if you can bring yourself to call it that, has its moments.  Like when a viewer called 911 to report a stabbing in his apartment, prompting San Francisco police to burst in, guns drawn.  Another time they reported a fire.  In fact, the prank 911 calls have forced dispatchers to begin calling Kan’s apartment to confirm emergencies before sending any more officers out.  Not to be outdone, the pranksters ordered $63 worth of pizza and had it sent to his door.

  As more and more people tune in, his technical team (comprised of his two buddies) is working overtime to keep the site running.  I tuned in Tuesday morning, while Justin was still sleeping, and the video server was full.  After refreshing my browser a few times, I got the live video feed, and saw that more than 2,000 other people were watching him sleep.

  Whether or not this will be the wave of the future remains to be seen.  Some claim that it’s a silly idea, a passing fancy.  But the kid is smart, and he has already figured out how to turn this into money.  It all revolves around product placement.  Banners hang on the walls of his apartment, and as the popularity of the site grows, there is no question that more sponsors will line up to be a part of Justin’s world.

  As it stands, the programming is kind of dull.  But this is just the beginning, according to Paul Graham of Y Coordinator, the company that funded the project.  “Ultimately their plan is to have hundreds of people with these cameras.  Each would be a channel; viewers would watch whichever was the most interesting at that time,” Graham recently told the San Francisco Chronicle.  “With hundreds of people, there would always be something interesting.  So why would anyone switch on their TV?”

  It’s true.  This is reality TV taken to the next level.  And it’s difficult to judge it based on the quality of programming provided by this one “channel.”  “We want to find people far more charismatic and attractive than me to go out and do this,” Kan told the Chronicle.  If you let your imagination take over, you can begin to see how this could catch on.

  Take a little time this weekend to point your browser to www.justin.tv, and see for yourself what the future may look like.  And while you’re doing that, I’ll be buying up the domain name www.sanjaya.tv.

 -From Pulse
   April 5, 2007

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Subject: Dear John

  For two and a half years I’ve been writing this column.  Some weeks, the topics are hard to come by; nothing seems to be happening.  Other times, I have an idea weeks in advance.  And then there are the columns that seem to write themselves.  There are long weekends when Britney Spears freaks out, checks herself into rehab, then checks out and shaves her head. 

  Regrettably, that is an issue that I’ll have to pass up—or save for another day—because I had already planned a follow-up on last week’s column about online dating. 

  Last week, I told you about the surprisingly high odds of finding your soulmate electronically, through online dating.  But with Valentine’s Day behind us, many of you may be looking for a way to break up with your one-time Valentine.  (It’s no secret that many of us have held it together just long enough to make it through Valentine’s Day, so that we don’t have to spend it alone.  Oh, and for the goodies too!)  But now, maybe it’s time to cut them loose.

  It seems to be fairly common nowadays to use text messaging to tell that not-so-special someone that it’s over—which brings us back to Britney.  It has been reported that Britney told K-Fed that it was over in a text message he received last November while he was taping an interview for Canadian television.  In fact, a recent survey commissioned by cell-phone maker Samsung Telecommunications America found that 11 percent of Americans think that it’s okay to break up with someone using a text message.

  With the advances in technology, the traditional “Dear John” letter has also undergone a transition and entered the technological sphere.  In these modern times, hearing “you’ve got mail” could mean “I never want to see you again,” as “Dear John” letters have been replaced with “Dear John” e-mails. 

  But if you don’t want to do your own dirty work—whether by cell phone or e-mail—there are dozens of online sites devoted to helping you jettison that dead weight, and doing it with all of the dignity and respect your soon-to-be-ex may or may not deserve. 

  You may want to try the Breakup Butler, which will e-mail an audio message to the object of your rejection, alerting them that your love affair is, unfortunately, over.  It claims to be a “kind, gentle, proper breakup,” but only if “they can get past the fact that you’re using a dumb/impersonal/cowardly web service like this to deliver the message.”  If you would rather the message be unkind, the site offers a not-so-nice message delivered in a female voice.  The service is completely free, and can be found at www.breakingupiseasytodo.com.

  There are literally dozens of other sites that will deliver the message for you in any way you could imagine, but if you don’t want to get into a situation where you’ll have to be breaking up down the road, you may want to check out the rejection hotline at www.rejectionhotline.com.  The site offers fake phone numbers—in more than 80 area codes—that you can give to strangers who come onto you in bars.  When the number is dialed, the caller hears a recorded message that lets them know that you’re not interested.  (FYI, New  Mexico’s rejection hotline number is 505-310-2496.)

  With Valentine’s Day in the past, perhaps it’s time to close the door on that floundering relationship.  Log on and break up!

-From Pulse
   February 22, 2007

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Lookin’ For Love

  So, yesterday was the most romantic day of the year.  Valentine’s Day is a day for couples, a day for jewelry and roses and candlelight dinners.  It’s a day when the love two people share in their hearts spreads to their pocketbooks and finds material representation.  Love is in the air, and $100 bouquets of flowers are in bloom—on every office desk, every kitchen table, everywhere you look.  For singles, nothing is more monumentally depressing than seeing pink, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate everywhere.

  If you are a member of the Lonely Hearts Club who has vowed to have just spent your last Valentine’s Day alone, there is hope.  Two weeks ago, the global market research firm Synovate released their results of a recent survey, and they are shocking.  The survey seems to suggest that it might be time to swallow your pride, ignore the stigma, and try to find love online. 

  Synovate surveyed more than 4,000 people from eight different countries, including the United States, and found that very few people do online dating.  But for the ones who have tried it, it works very well.  Only 15% of Americans have ever used the Internet to find love.  But of that 15%, however, more than 2 out of 5 (42%) claim to have met their spouse or life partner online.

  In an effort to better understand online daters, the survey asked those who had used an online personal ad or dating service what attracted them to other users.  Of the American respondents, only 27% said it was “their picture or how they look.”  39% said it was their “personality in their written description,” while 33% said they “met basic criteria such as hobbies, statistics, etc.” 

  But there is still that 85% who haven’t tried online dating, and there are a few reasons for that.  30% said they wouldn’t because it could be dangerous, 42% say they would just rather see someone in person first, and 22% just don’t think the Internet should be used for dating.  Oh yeah, and then there is the social stigma attached to online romance.  More than one-third of the people who aren’t online daters believe that “only desperate people” go to the Internet to find their love connection.

  The safety issue is certainly a valid concern.  A separate study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that online daters generally had good experiences, but 57% believe that “a lot of people who use online dating lie about their marital status.”  That is reinforced by Synovate’s findings.  84% of Americans believe that people are dishonest in their online dating profiles.  If you want to try online dating, but are concerned about safety, all of the online dating sites offer simple rules that can help keep you out of harm’s way.  And compared to going home with some stranger you met in a bar, how dangerous is it?

  I actually know two people, both women, who found their soul mates online.  One is a girl I went to high school with, and one is a lady I work with.  Both married their online love, and remain married today.  Of course, there may be more I don’t know about.  If you are single and looking, why not ask the couples you know how they met?  You may be surprised how many began as broadband love connections.

 -From Pulse
   February 15, 2007

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Exposed

  She seems to be everywhere.  If there’s a Hollywood party, she’s there.  If there’s a red carpet rolled out somewhere, she’s on it.  If a single starlet should be chosen as the poster child of the jet-set crowd, it should be her.  She is famous because of her last name; she is famous because of her extravagant lifestyle.  And sadly, she personifies success and fuels the aspirations of today’s youth.

  This week, a new website made headlines by exposing the most private details of Paris Hilton’s personal life.  And it’s not pretty.

  How does a person like Paris end up in a situation like this, with so much of her private life posted online for the world to see?  Well, according to legal documents filed by the heiress this week, it was all because of a misunderstanding.  It started two years ago, after a burglary caused Paris and her sister, Nicky, to move from one L.A. mansion to another.  Paris and Nicky put a lot of their belonging in a storage unit—a storage unit that Paris claims the moving company was supposed to pay for.  When the storage company didn’t receive payment, they tried, unsuccessfully, to contact the heiress to collect the $208 she owed.  Eventually, the contents of the unit were put up for auction and sold for $2,775.  The buyers, realizing whose stuff they had purchased, turned around and sold it stuff to an Internet entrepreneur for $10 million—for a profit of $9,997,225.

  The man who paid $10 million for Paris’ property—6,000 square feet of it, to be precise—catalogued, itemized, digitized and uploaded every last piece of it, and for about $40, looky-loos can peruse every morsel for 60 days.  Or until the Hilton lawyers get their way and the site is taken down. 

  The items are shocking, even by Paris Hilton standards, and are not suitable for young eyes or the easily offended.  Paris seems to enjoy being naked, judging from the abundance of photos and video.  She likes doing drugs, too.  One video shows her and her “billionaire-buddies” snorting cocaine—and A LOT of it—off of a friend’s chest.  Another shows her smoking a pipe while extolling the virtues of marijuana.  Paris’ passport, driver’s license, medical records, address book, love letters, and journals are also available.  In essence, her life just became an open book.

  And so much for denying a relationship with Girls-Gone-Wild-creator Joe Francis.  Video footage of the two, as well as footage, captured by Francis, of Paris in a bubble bath, is available for all to see on the new website. 

  As I took the site’s free tour, I began to analyze my own curiosity.  Truth be told, I began psychoanalyzing myself.  What drives our curiosity about people like Paris?  It’s more than voyeurism.  There’s something about seeing these filthy rich pop-culture icons living dangerously and carelessly, compromising their own integrity, and self-destructing.  I don’t get any gratification from it, but it’s interesting.  It’s baffling, almost incomprehensible.  People like Paris seem to have it all, but lack responsibility, integrity, and accountability.

  I guess it makes me appreciate the life I have a little bit more. 

 -From Pulse
   February 1, 2007

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YouReport

  There’s a new watchdog in town, and it’s you.  Yes, you, with your video-capturing cell phone.  Who would’ve guessed that Time’s Person of the Year would also be leading the pack in news journalism?  When news happens, you are there, quick to draw your cell-cam and capture for the world events that may otherwise go unnoticed.  When Saddam was hanged, you were there.  When Kramer’s career went down in flames, you were there.  When an Iranian-American student was unjustly tasered in the UCLA library, you were there.  When news happens, you are there, ensnaring the events that shape our world in your tangled web of grainy video and garbled sound. 

  Of course, in the days following the execution of Saddam Hussein, cell phone video of the hanging swept across the web like a California brushfire. The video has been condemned as much for its existence as for its content, which shows the taunting of the former dictator on the gallows and a post-mortem clip reveals a gruesome, gaping wound on his neck.  Authorities are now calling for the prosecution of the man who captured the footage, in a classic case of “shooting the messenger.”  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking at a press conference on Monday in Ramallah, said that she hopes those responsible for the video will be punished. “We were disappointed that there was not greater dignity give to the accused under these circumstances,” she said.  Let me remind you that, if not for the fear of terrorist attacks, the hanging would’ve happened in a soccer stadium in front of at least 10,000 cheering fans.  “I hope that those who are responsible for the way that came out will indeed be punished,” Rice said.

  I think that video, which I haven’t seen, was a good thing—not because I enjoy the macabre, but because it immediately subverts any conspiracy theories that would have immediately began to swirl.  “Saddam is alive and well in Acapulco,” or “The execution was actually staged by the Baathist Saddam loyalists, who released him, and now he’s living in Bahrain with Michael Jackson,” or “That fat guy in a ski mask was really Elvis Presley.”  The cell phone video eventually made public the hanging that was originally going to be public.

  The Hussein video may be the highest-profile among a recent rash of phone-captured news, but it is certainly not alone.  It’s quite possible that racist tirade unleashed by Michael Richards (a.k.a. Kramer) wouldn’t have been the news story it was if it hadn’t been captured on an audience member’s cell phone. 

  Week after week, we are seeing more of these videos make their way to television news, and they are almost always shocking.  And while most people don’t carry around a video camera at all times, most people do have cell phones.  According to a recent study by InfoTrends and The Yankee Group, about 70 percent of Americans have cell phones, and about a fourth of those have video capability.  Of the estimated 55.5 million cell phone users with video, one-third claim they use it at least once a week. 

  Overall, that’s almost 6 percent of Americans who use their cell phone video recorders once a week, and that number will only rise as video-capable phones fall into more hands.  We certainly haven’t seen the end of this trend. 

  Keep those phones handy, and when news happens, you’ll be there.

 -From Pulse
   January 18, 2007

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Windows Vista

  Every time Microsoft releases a new operating system, the computer industry becomes aflutter with anticipation, and the lives of millions of computer-users around the world have their lives turned upside down until they realize, a) that they can use it, and b) that it makes things better.

  In July 2005, Microsoft unveiled the first beta version of the operating system that will replace Windows XP.  It’s called Windows Vista, and among those of us who have tried it, reaction is mixed.  This week I had a chance to give it a day in court, and quite frankly, I like it.  And I think that, for the most part, you will too.

  I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that it’s supposed to be safer and more secure against the cyber-badguys.  Microsoft has developed a unique new way to encrypt everything on the hard drive, and it can only be decrypted by an on-board microchip, making it impossible for “the evil-doers” to access your hard drive.  It’s called BitLocker, and can even protect against offline attacks.  Of course, it also relies on Windows Defender to protect against malware, just like Windows XP.  And Internet Explorer 7, which you may have already downloaded from Microsoft.com, ramps up security against malicious software using anti-phishing filters and other key features.  All of these are supposed to come together to make your desktop a little safer.  How well it will work against the ever-evolving hackers remains to be seen.

  But what is most striking about Windows Vista is the visual appearance.  It is certainly sleeker and more streamlined than the visually stale XP.  While it’s similar enough to XP to ease the transition and minimize techno-shock, the new features struck me as an immediate improvement.  Chief among them are the “gadgets,” which can be pinned to the right side of the desktop for quick and handy access.  You can add a clock (the round kind, with hands), a handy notepad for reminders, or feed the latest headlines, weather information and stock prices directly to your desktop.  In the future, more gadgets will be available for download from the Microsoft website.  When it comes to practicality, they all beat the pants off that irritating Windows Dancer.

  With Windows Vista, searches are made simpler, too.  I hate to say it, but the new search features are eerily reminiscent of Google.  In my short playdate with Vista, I found the search results to be better organized and more likely to find exactly what I was looking for than XP ever offered.

  But computer guys are having a harder time adjusting.  The version I used belonged to Mike Stout of The Only Company, a computer support and service company in Las Cruces.  Stout is also a beta-tester for Microsoft, and has encountered a few problems with the new system.  “It’s a little harder to find the features that I need to access.”  (These are presumably not features that the average user would typically use—or understand.  Things like registries, administrator settings and networking features.  You know.)

  Overall, I don’t think the launch of Vista will be as unsettling to the average user as, say, Windows 95 was.  It is currently being manufactured, and is scheduled to hit shelves on January 31, 2007. 

 -From Pulse
   December 14, 2006

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Holiday Craze

  With Halloween behind us and the holidays looming, cash registers are lying in wait with eager anticipation to officially ring in the holiday shopping season.  But this year, the traditional Black Friday—the Friday after Thankgsgiving—will come a week earlier for some.

  On November 17, Sony will release their latest gaming console, the PlayStation 3.  This time last year it was the Xbox 360 that had gamers’ hearts aflutter.  I remember passing lines of gamers as I walked into Best Buy last winter, gamers who camped overnight in sleeping bags outside of the store to be the first on the block to have the year’s coolest toy.  This year Sony is a shoe-in for the most-sought-after gadget, and next Thursday you can expect to see the same kind of insanity, I would imagine.

  If you’re a gamer, I suppose the PS3 is worth getting all worked up about.  There are two versions, according to the Sony website.  Both configurations use Blu-Ray Discs, Bluetooth wireless controllers, four USB ports, and a microprocessor called the Cell Broadband Engine, developed exclusively for the PS3, which utilizes eight cores to distribute the processor workload.  (Traditional consoles have used “single-core” processors, which are slower and less efficient.)  However, one version will cost $599 and one will run $499.  The costlier model comes with Memory Stick/SD/CompactFlash slots (similar to the ones found on the front of many computers) and a 60-gigabyte hard drive. The cheaper version comes without the slots and a 20 GB hard drive.  Both models will impress gamers enough to have them digging out those sleeping bags.

  The “Sleeping Bag Effect” is a reasonably new phenomenon.  Remember the Tickle-Me Elmo craze that swept the country during the holiday shopping season of 1996?  Of course you do.  It all started with Rosie O’Donnell showing one off, which ignited a brushfire of demand—demand that (legitimately) far exceeded the supply.  Insanity ensued, and soon the $12 toy was selling for thousands of dollars on the “black market.”  The Cabbage Patch craze of 1986 was similar, but pales in comparison to the Elmo fiasco.

  Now, as Christmas 2006 looms, manufacturers have developed a do-it-yourself equation for the “Sleeping Bag Effect.”  By undersupplying the market during the prime-shopping season, they can generate a higher demand for their product.  As demand rises, the high prices seem less significant, which helps pay for the development of the technology.  The demand-side insanity helps drive press and publicity for the product, and soon everyone knows about the year’s hottest gadget. 

  In the months following Christmas, prices will likely drop as more PS3’s hit the market.  But even that knowledge will do little to curb the “Sleeping Bag Effect.”  No self-respecting gamer will want to wait until April or May to get their hands around their own PS3 controllers.  Ahem, Bluetooth wireless PS3 controllers.

-From Pulse
   November 9, 2006

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Honeymoon’s Over

  YouTube is slowly beginning to lose its luster.  And if they don’t act now, the video-sharing site’s future may be at stake.  On Monday, Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom, ordered that all Comedy Central content be pulled from the site.  Users attempting to view clips of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park were met with a simple message: “This video has been removed due to terms of use violations.” 

  Comedy Central’s content on YouTube has, since the site’s inception just over a year ago, been one of its largest draws, and its removal may set a new trend among the owners of copyrighted content posted by the site’s millions of users.  In the beginning, most companies saw YouTube as a helpful tool, a vehicle for free promotion.  “Getting it off the Internet is no different than getting it off TV,” Jon Stewart recently told an interviewer.  But when the site was recently sold to Google for $1.65 billion, I suspect that the suits at Viacom began to realize that someone was getting very, very rich off of their product.

  It all boils down to two factors: site traffic and advertising revenue.  No, scratch that.  It all boils down to one factor: Money.  YouTube users, according to the terms of use, are not allowed to post copyrighted video on the site, but with 20 million unique visitors per month and 65,000 videos being uploaded daily, it is impossible to police.  When copyright holders ask YouTube to remove the copyrighted material, YouTube must then contact the user who posted it and have the videos removed. 

  While, to the average YouTuber, it may seem like Viacom is raining on the parade, they are actually just trying to protect their product.  And, I suspect, the plug-pulling won’t stop with Comedy Central content.  The media giant also owns MTV, MTV2, BET, VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, Paramount Pictures, Showtime and the Sundance Channel, to name a few. 

  With YouTube’s future at stake, and all eyes watching, this would be a good time for the bigwigs at Google/YouTube and Viacom to call a meeting to hammer out an agreement to share advertising revenue.  YouTube already has similar deals in place with most of the major music companies, including Universal Music Group, and several of the U.S. television networks, including NBC and CBS.

  There are two ways this can be done.  The first would allow users to post Viacom-owned content without restrictions, YouTube to continue to sell advertising on the site, and then break Viacom off a small percentage of the ad revenue.  The other way would be a trade agreement, allowing Viacom to advertise its new ventures on YouTube.  (For example, banners reading “Don’t miss ‘The Real World: Guantanamo,’ this Thursday at 10!”)  Either would be mutually beneficial for both companies.

  If nothing is done to settle this little dispute, however, it may very well mark the beginning of a slippery slope toward YouTube’s demise, and Google’s $1.65 billion dollar albatross.

-From Pulse
   November 2, 2006

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The Urge

  Once again, MTV is revolutionizing the way that we discover new music.  Last week, the network announced its most ambitious music distribution service yet, a partnership with Microsoft called Urge.

  Essentially, Urge is a service that can fill your iPod with a professionally programmed mix of music in any genre you choose, from alt-country or hip-hop to rock or zydeco.  It also provides podcasts of MTV content, like news and editorial features, and celebrity-chosen playlists.  The download of the Urge program includes the beta version of the new Windows Media Player 11, which was specifically designed to work in concert with Urge.

  Its features are almost too numerous to mention.  It’s like Pandora, MTV, Napster and Windows Media Player all rolled into one.  It’s like sharing your computer with the person who programs your favorite radio station.  And speaking of radio stations—yeah, they’ve got those too.  They’ve got 130 of them, to be exact, all in CD quality and every genre imaginable.

  Urge puts more than two million songs at your fingertips.  The service has incorporated the music library of MusicNet, the world’s largest catalogue of digital music.  With the fast download time of the requisite broadband connection, sometimes it’s hard to tell if the song you’re listening to is from your own library or from MusicNet’s.  If you listened to every song in MusicNet’s current library, averaging four minutes per song—and you listened around the clock—it would take you fifteen years.  And the library’s growing by the minute.

  But while Urge allows you to listen to almost any song, anytime, it’s not a free-for-all, and it’s not free.  There are three pricing tiers.  The first (and cheapest) allows you to play or download any of the songs in MusicNet’s library, as well as access to the 130 radio stations and more than 500 playlists.  It costs about $10 a month, but you can only listen while you’re sitting at a computer.  If you want to transfer any of your newly acquired music to an iPod, you’ll need to subscribe to the “All Access To Go” package, which will run you an additional $5 a month.  And if you want to burn any of the songs to CD, it’s going to run you 99 cents per track, which is pretty much the going rate for digital downloads.

  In my opinion, it’s not the access to the music that’s impressive; it’s the editorial content and the compilation of the playlists.  It’s the downloadable and automatically-updating feeds from MTV, CMT and VH1.  Urge will also feature genre-specific blogs about new music, fully integrated with the MusicNet library, allowing readers to instantly hear the music that they are reading about.  The “This Week In…” feature will cover almost every genre of music, provide an accompanying blog that tells you about the tracks, and continuously updates on your computer, allowing you to stay up-to-date with the latest music.  I mentioned celebrity playlists earlier; the service is already boasting playlists compiled by Green Day, Rihanna, Roseanne Cash, Tony Hawk, T.I. and more.  Where else can you listen to the same music your favorite celebrities are listening to?

  With the long weekend coming up, you may want to surf on over to urge.com and get started.  MTV is currently offering a free two-week trial, with unlimited downloads and no credit card is required.  See how many of MusicNet’s songs you can get through in three days!

 -From Pulse
   May 25, 2006

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Un-Googled

Perhaps, by now, you’ve heard of the dreaded “Google death penalty.” It’s more likely, however, that you have not. And neither had I until Monday.

It was on Monday that reports began circulating that the way-high-up muckity-mucks at the world’s most domineering search engine headquarters had imposed an e-fatwa against the German site for BMW, www.bmw.de. The decision to blackball the German automaker was made when it was discovered that BMW had designed its site to manipulate search engines like Google, increasing the “search value” of their site.

The technique that BMW used is a common one in the world of web-design. It’s called “keyword spam,” in which the webmaster fills a page with hidden terms to increase the site’s standing in engine search results. For example, the designer may use black text on a black background, making it invisible to the surfer. In the BMW case, the word “gebrauchtwagen,” German for “used car,” appeared 42 times on the site’s gateway page (the page most accessible to search engines).

We are living in a time when the difference between showing up first in the results of a web search and showing up tenth can cost a company millions of dollars in revenue. It can literally dictate whether a company flourishes or flounders. So it’s no surprise that companies have devised ways to beat the system, little tricks of the trade often referred to as “search engine optimization.”

These techniques are strictly against Google’s policies. If a page is found to be in violation, the sites PageRank is reduced to zero. As a result, German web-surfers who Google “BMW” will not be directed to the company’s official site.

A spokesman for Google told a British newspaper, “We cannot tolerate websites trying to manipulate search results as we aim to provide users with relevant and objective search results.” It’s hard to argue with that reasoning, but there is more to the story than that statement alone suggests.

Google has come under fire in the last week or so regarding the “relevance” of its searches. There are speculations of partiality circulating after Google recently purchased five percent of America Online (AOL) for $1 billion. The allegations against Google suggest that part of the transaction would also give AOL pages “preferred” status in search results.

So is the uber-searcher trying to save face by proving that it will go out of its way to seek out “relevant and objective search results?” It sure seems like a great way to undermine the AOL accusations without dignifying them with a response.

Perhaps you should also take into consideration that this isn’t the first time a company has received the “Google death penalty;” in fact, it’s not that uncommon. You may also consider that it was a blogger who claims to be a Google software engineer who has drawn international attention to the story. And finally, the “death penalty” isn’t really permanent. BMW will be re-included in search results when they are deemed to be no longer in violation.

As far as I could tell, on Monday night, they were no longer in violation.

-From Pulse
February 9, 2006

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Calling Paris

  So last week Paris Hilton’s Sidekick was hacked, and the contact information for dozens of celebrities spilt across the World Wide Web like Tara Reid’s fourteenth banana daiquiri on P. Diddy’s chinchilla rug.  Jay-Z, Ashley Olsen, Eminem, Lindsay Lohan, Russell Simmons, Fred Durst, Christina Aguilera, Ashlee Simpson, Usher—they’re all there. 

  This prompted a clever tee-shirt manufacturer to start printing shirts that read “Paris Made Me Change My Number.”  You can expect to see these on the back of your favorite celebrity soon.  It’s sure to be the hot Spring look.

  But this “number-spill” raises some societal issues, as well. 

  • If they can get into our cell phones and raid our address books, what else can they get to?  We are constantly warned about identity-theft, and last week’s gag on Paris should make us think twice about how we handle our own affairs. 

    Now, I’m not one of those techno-paranoiacs who thinks that Big Brother (or worse) is always watching.  In fact, I’m probably a little naïve.  But, in today’s technology-driven world, it’s wise to be cautious.  It’s a madhouse out there; information flows freely, and punishment for the bad guys isn’t as stiff as it should be.  It’s just something to think about.

  • The larger issue, though, is that we rely so heavily on digital address books in cell phones, Sidekicks, Blackberries and PDA’s.  Many of us are lost without them.

    For example—and this is horrible—I don’t know my mother’s phone number.  It’s in my cell phone, not in my head. I don’t know the phone numbers of my best friend, my barber, my favorite restaurant.  Nor have I memorized the phone numbers of my doctor, my mechanic, my insurance agent or my favorite movie theater.  The only phone numbers that I have committed to memory are the ones I dialed frequently before I got a cell phone.

    Fifteen or twenty years ago, that would be a different story altogether.  Most of us would know these frequently-dialed numbers.  They are our connection to the rest of the world, to our inner-circle.  But, as a culture, we have become so reliant on having them at our fingertips that we fail to commit them to memory.  As a result, our memory suffers. 

    With the constant barrage of entertainment and information, we have become a generation of feeble-minded couch-potatoes with attention-deficit problems.  We record shows on our TiVo so we can skip the commercials.  We watch one show while we record another.  We surf the internet with three or four browsers open at the same time.  We use three-way and conference calling so that we can talk to everyone we know at the same time.  We multi-task at work.  We multi-task at home.  We multi-task for fun. 

  This weekend, turn off your cell phone and try to enjoy doing one thing at a time.  And when you’re done, sit down with a phone book and memorize some phone numbers you need to know.  Start with your mom.

-From Pulse
  March 3, 2005

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