Thursday 30 July 2009

Microhoo

It's happened.

On the the other hand, why not call its Microsoft and be done with the 'hoo' bit?

Could be a win for advertisers though. Not everybody agrees that its a bad deal, at least for their own situation.

Heres a view from the searchers perspective.

And what about the issue of competition?

Previous postings: on, off, on, off.

UPDATE: an excellent blog posting by Jason Calacanis which has much to commend it. The bottom line, don't surrender (or commit suicide) - innovate!

Monday 27 July 2009

Blog comments

Norm has some interesting points to make about Blog comments. I broadly agree with the views expressed, and its not dissimilar to to my view, although I do allow comments, but moderate them. This hasn't been a problem for me so far as the number of comments for this blog has been very low.

Spotify goes mobile

Here.

Monday Blues Cure

From the Album/Film 'A Hard Day's night':





Search 'the beatles Things We Said Today', 2nd hit down on youtube.

Flight of the Valkyrie's (erm Librarians)

Good Lord:





(h/t: Metro)



I love the smell of books in the morning, its smells like ... [answer on a postcard please]. Here's another example of the use of this music:



Friday 24 July 2009

Shock Resignation at City University

Here and Here. Here's a result of a search for Gerswin's 'Summertime':






First hit on youtube using 'summertime gershwin'.

Monday 13 July 2009

Monday Blues Cure

Saw a BBC programme on 'The Andrew Sisters', and wondered what was on youtube. I found this 'Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B'. Enjoy:





Here's another version by 'The Puppini sisters', also on the program.



Thursday 9 July 2009

Non-English Video Search

Found a couple of sites which provide non-english language video search, RuTube and YouKu, both obviously 'inspired' by YouTube (which I tend to use rather a lot).

More details of RuTube and YouKu are available.

Can't enter Russian or Chinese queries, so I tried some English ones.

I tried queries 'putin' and 'manchester united'. The former yielded this rather amusing video called 'Putin on the Ritz' further down the hitlist. Found lots of relevant stuff for the latter.

I tried queries 'Uighur' and 'manchester united' on YouKu, found more interesting stuff on the latter, music videos mostly on the former - the area being something of a sensitive subject at the moment.

Bottom line - English queries seem to work quite well on these systems, and its clear that the services have thought about cross language issues to some extent.

Awful Library Books

A new blog on books which don't look like good reads. This one in particular ......



(h/t: Norm)

High Frequency Trading

This is rather new to me - we're talking milliseconds here. This does not seem to have a long term future, just thing of the havoc created if they let loose intelligent agents on the problem.



(h/t: Tim Miller)

Monday 6 July 2009

Le Man 24 Hours 2009 (Part 2)

In a previous post, I suggested that "be a long time looking at this post if I had video for the full 24 hours!". Well I was wrong to a certain extent - I found that someone has actually posted videos in parts for all 24 hours of the race. Search was 'le man 2009 first hour part 1', after browsing youtube a couple of days ago.



It starts here:





Don't try and view it all at once!

Monday Blues Cure

Here's a result from 'xtc sargent rock' search on youtube: