Listics

Do it yourself (DIY) is the watchword for the IT Garage, but based on Doc’s post this morning, it looks like Do It Together (DIT) works just fine over in those parts too.  (Thanks to Alan Herrell for the Kim Polese link).

The Philadelphia Freedom Watch citation has disappeared from the Google blog search results for "pudding-thighs" and for "pudding thighs."  The good news is that though Mary Shaw’s post is no longer referenced, the original Morford column has found it’s way into the database.

I’m missing something here.  What’s a blog?  Why would I search it?  Well, whatever… here’s a test: 

Search string on blog search:   "pudding thighs"

Result:  The Letter B.

Search string on normal search:  "pudding thighs"

Result:  Thirty-three hits, including The Letter B (a blog name inspired by the Sesame Street tune "Letter be," which in turn of course derived from the Beatles tune "Let It Be," but you knew that).

Most recent hit in this blogger’s surfage:  Mark Morford.  This hit was missing from both the blog search and the normal search above.  Here it is in context…

Just listen. Isn’t that Dick Cheney, lying awake at night as the leeches
drain his soul, muttering his woes to a well-narcotized Lynne? "Dammit, Lynney,
what went wrong? We’ve got the House locked up and the Senate locked up and we
can cram through any law or any referendum or toxic Patriot Act we like with
next-to-zero outcry and no discussion on the floor …"

We’re successfully stuffing the lower courts with hundreds of homophobic
neoconservative misogynist appointees and now we even own the Supreme Court –
the Supreme Court, pudding-thighs! — and even the increasingly impotent
California governor is more in our back pocket than we imagined. We’ve had the
whole goddamn country under our thumb for five years, squirming like a stuck rat
as we make out like robber barons.

What a run we’ve had! We’ve threatened major media into numb compliance and
we run the FCC the way a pimp runs a cheap hooker and we’ve got a loudmouth
right-wing pundit manning nearly every ideological outpost in every corner of
the media globe while millions of stupefied ‘Murkins still believe Fox News is a
genuine source of integrity and honesty. Look at us go!

Okay.  Your going to tell me that the Morford usage is a hyphenate, and of course you are correct.  But Google ignores hyphens in literal search strings, doesn’t it?  Let’s run the test again:

Search string on normal search:  "pudding-thighs"

Result:  Thirty-three hits including The Letter B, but nut not including Morford.

uh-oh… surprise lurking around the next bend as our fearless search scientist prepares to unveil the results of the blog search for the literal string including the hyphen:

Search string on blog search:   "pudding-thighs"

Results:  The Letter B AND Philadelphia Freedom Watch.

But this is a timing thing.  Blog search indexed the second blog while we were posting.  But Google has yet to index Morford in the original.  Yet, Google could have indexed Morford’s column while we were running our ill-bred experiment.   Let’s try one more time.  No, the results jump around a little, everything from 31 to 44 hits depending on our choice to include similar results, but no Morford column.  Just to be sure, our labs ran a final test.  The search was for "pudding-thighs" (the literal string occuring in Morford’s column, Dick Cheney’s endearment to his main snore), combined with Morford.  This yielded a null result, and so our experimental results are confirmed.  To wit, one can find "pudding-thighs" in equal measure to "pudding thighs" in a normal Google search, but "pudding thighs" seemed distinct from "pudding-thighs" when using the new Google blog search at first, because the experimenter fell thorugh his ass in noticing the distinction in the first place.  Later he tried to cover it up, but our quality assurance group caught on to his intentional misrepresentation of the data and we have since fired his ass… yes, the same one he fell through. 

(UPDATE:  Since the original Morford usage appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on-line edition, SFGate, this morning I thought to check a Google News search, but no luck.  The indexing o fteh primary material seems to be following ever so slowly behind the blog indexing.  Readers are advised to check back through-out the day for updates on just when the original column will be accessible through the "pudding-thighs" search term on a normal Google search).

It pays to listen to the market.  I grabbed a cool Samsung YH-925 back in March because it had as much storage (20GB) as an iPod and it was way less expensive.  It was also a pain in the patoot, which might explain why I’m the only one who owns one.  It wasn’t an easy unit.  It was so difficult that when the iPod I bought to replace it (30GB) arrived I pulled a major avoidance ‘tude, stashed the iPod on a shelf and didn’t get it out until this weekend.

Well, here it is… Jerry Garcia Band playing in my li’l earbuds, simple user interface on the laptop and the device.  Now I have to figure out how to get the big vinyl disks to fit in the coffee cup holder thingie.

I guess I’m a convert, much as it pained me to buy anything Apple.

Here are a few of the bells that rang for me this week…

GNU Radio Project….  this keeps popping up.  I’ve exchanged emails with Eric Blossom sufficient to determine that he’s not the Eric Blossom who was doing the voice recognition work with Bob Frost and company at Bank of America back in the day.  Now, a few years later, Sascha Meinrath  of CUWIN is touting it.  Through Sascha I learned of WiFi Dog as well as the importance of opening up the Hardware Access Layer (HAL) on the few proprietary chipsets that are the foundation for all our wireless LAN connectivity.

Someone also was yakking about the Global IP Alliance. 

The Global IP Alliance is
committed to fulfilling the promise of IP-based communications by
promoting a pragmatic and light handed public policy environment based
on self governance and public-private partnerships to address social
issues in the use of IP enabled communications. The Global IP Alliance
members [want to] develop a framework for global public policy…

Does call termination with a SIP URI make sense to you?  Then you’ll get PhoneGnome.  Is it Asterix lite for those of us who don’t need/can’t afford a PBXish solution?

danah boyd brings us a discussion of "Glocalization" in the context of Web 2.0.  Danah says,

…there is a global influence that is altered by local
culture and re-inserted into the global in a constant cycle. Think of
it as a complex tango with information constantly flowing between the
global and the local, altered at each junction.

During the boom, there was a rush to get everything and everyone
online. It was about creating a global village. Yet, packing everyone
into the town square is utter chaos. People have different needs,
different goals. People manipulate given structures to meet their
desires. We are faced with a digital environment that has collective
values. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in search. For example, is
there a best result to the query "breasts"? It’s all about context,
right? I might be looking for information on cancer, what are you
looking for?

To this I’d like to add the concept of the info-shed.  I’ll use Luxembourg and wholIy contrived data as an example.  I suspect — but cannot prove today — that most of the bits originating in Luxembourg stay in Luxembourg.  And that the searches, the retrievals to Luxembourg have a uniquely Lux-ish quality.   Luxembourg is an info-basin within its own info-shed.  There is probably a larger info-shed that is the EU, and the Brits may help fill a transatlantic basin, their traffic combined with Canada and the US.  Both of these examples reflect a pernicious assumption about language as a dominant force on the info-shed and I have only started to unwrap the concept.  I could be way wrong, in which case it will be back to slamming the post moderns and other productive activities for me.  More on this later…

David Isenberg notes on his site, isen.com that he will be a Berkman Fellow starting this month.  Isenberg is the author of the 1997 paper "The Rise of the Stupid Network" and co-author of "The Paradox of the Best Network" with fellow Berkman Fellow, David Weinberger.  Congratulations David!

…and yes, "fellow Berkman Fellow" is a fun phrase to write.