Facebook would consider going public in 2012

News that investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian Internet investment firm, will invest a combined $500 million in the social networking site has only whetted the voracious appetite of investors seeking to own a chunk of the wildly popular but privately held company, which now has an implied value of $50 billion.

Facebook board member Peter Thiel has said Facebook would consider going public in 2012, in what would undoubtedly be one of the most anticipated initial public offerings ever in the Silicon Valley.

Fail Blog Rocks

The blog: FailBlog.org is one of the funniest blogs on the Internet with new content daily. The term "Fail" has grown during the Internet age used to describe a screwup, in the 80's a fail would have been called a blooper.

On the FailBlog people upload images and videos of screw ups from all over the world. Usually the images and videos "fails" are self evident, however the poster has the option to post a title of the fail which sometimes helps.

This is an example of a "parking fail".

In this example the image is photo shopped to show what the fail is:

By using arrows the image is able to speak for itself.

Most posts like this one are self evident:

The beauty of the site is most images like the following are not only self evident. If a person actually needed you to explain the joke then you would probably not think it was funny.

A quality of a good fail blog post has with a theatrical set design is that difficulty is appreciated. In set design it was explained that the audience is able to identify sets that are difficult, expensive or labor intensive to produce and will appreciate them more. The same quality holds with fail blog posts, images that are expensive or difficult to produce are also viewed more favorably. There is no validity checks done to ensure that the images are not staged, however if the image is two new cars stacked on each other ruining both cars it is assumed that it is more likely to be real and not staged.

Google Translate: leveraging the world's largest data store

Posted by Christopher Dawson @ 12:02 pm

How many of you use Google’s translation tools? They’re built into Google Docs, Gmail, and the Google translate website. With support for 52 languages, the tools are incredibly powerful in an increasingly flat world.

While only human translators can really capture the nuance and connotation of human speech, Google translate is the premier online tool for fast translations. Google Docs can be quickly translated, mail can be automatically translated, and now Google’s automatic YouTube transcription services can potentially translate video into other languages as well.

[Read More...]

New Google Tool Visualizes Public Data in Animated Charts

Google has just launched Google Public Data Explorer. The new Google Labs tool offers a visual way to look at and analyze large public data sets on a variety of popular search topics.
[Read More]

Google-as-the-Fonz, or: how search upstarts are--obviously!--going to kill Google in the near future

Newsweek ran an article this week that tried to point out the vulnerabilities of Google as a be-all search portal:

If Google has been able to crush its search competition, it's not because it has perfected the art and science of Web searching. Far from it. Google is what the industry calls a "second-generation" search engine. First-generation engines like AltaVista found Web pages containing words that matched the user's search words. Google's innovation was to further rank a Web page by the other pages that link to it, on the somewhat shaky assumption that if a page is much-linked-to, it must be useful. Charles Knight, an analyst who runs the AltSearchEngines Web site, notes there's a plethora of good ideas for what a third-generation engine might bring to the party, and no shortage of companies trying to prove those ideas. "Each has shown they can do some aspect of a search better than Google can," says Knight.

It goes on to describe three of the most talked-about challengers to date: vertical search engines, search refinement aids, and social search. Google, of course, has integrated each of these techniques into its own engine carefully, and has promised to do even more with vertical search to help users find reliable health information. Already, you can search for "cancer" and see prioritized medical results from Google Health, WebMD, and others.



It's worth a read, but to date, the only non-Google search experiences I've had that lead me astray live inside Apple's Safari browser and are, of all things, visual innovations. Try flipping through your personal history for a page you've recently seen in Safari 4--it blows the text-based histories seen in other browsers out of the water. Or the stolen-from-Chrome (I think) feature: screenshots of your top 8 favorite pages fill a new tab, supplanting bookmarking as the useful way to get to favorite site and more about personal information managemen.t

Apple promo 1987