Sick, sick, sick

I think I have a decent immune system, but I'm pretty sure my body can sense it's Thanksgiving and just collapses every year around this time. Fortunately--well, kind of--my boyfriend is sick too, so we have been sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves the last few days.

During that time, he came across Google's Flu Trends, this nifty little site that shows you how your state compares with others at any given time throughout the year. And if you check it out, you'll notice that the entire country is at "low" risk right now, but we're riiiiight about to hit the national spike in flu sickness - whoo-hoo!

Thanks, TJS!

Grand Old convention

As predicted last week, I am already sick of politics and we're still two months away from the election. But, I did briefly wrote about the Dem National Convention last week, so it's only fair the Republicans get a mention on my very powerful political blog.

The news this week is all about McCain selecting Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska, as his running mate. This woman has been the presumptive vice presidential candidate for approximately four days and we've learned all about her children, her grandchildren (just kidding), her abilities with a power rifle and her love of mooseburgers.

A Google search for 'sarah palin' turns up more than 4 million hits and about 48,500 news hits. I bet last week it would have been about 9,000.

The GOP convention was basically postponed due to Hurricane Gustav's devastation this weekend, but it's well underway now in St. Paul, Minn. Click here for a list of speakers and schedules.

And now I'm pretty sure I'm done talking about this election until November, but I'm certainly not opposed to reading people's thoughts on Sarah Palin...and the fact that someone whose only experience with foreign policy is shipping her son off to Iraq could potentially be the president of our country if McCain croaks in office. Frightening thought. But hey, she's hot, right?

Fun with Google!

You might not think this sounds fun, but Google's got anaddicting "game" for you to try... one that sucked me in for a good hour last night.

The Google Image Labeler pairs you with another user to match labels in an attempt to earn points.

Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will:

• View the same set of images.
• Provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see.
• Receive points when your label matches your partner's label. The number of points will depend on how specific your label is.
• See more images until time runs out.

It's basically a photo/word association game that you play with someone you've never met.

The points mean nothing and the whole point of the activity is the betterment of Google's image search feature (tricky, tricky Google), but it's a fun way to kill time and learn that people all over the world think as simplistically as you do.

Give a try; you'll be addicted in no time!

Thanks, TJS!

'Cuil' as the other side of Google

So some ex-Google employees launched an alternative search engine yesterday, touting it as bigger and better than powerhouse Google, but from my experience, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Cuil --pronounced "cool"-- drills into the actual content of a page, displaying results in more of a magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links, according to one of its developers. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request. [click here to learn more about Cuil]

One big advantage Cuil developers are pushing is privacy, which Google tends to ignore these days. Does anyone else think it's creepy that as soon as you send a Gmail message with the word "love" in it, you get 20 ad links on the page for "Who has a crush on you" and the like?

As far as Cuil goes, the name is fun (My co-workers and I certainly had fun telling each other to "cuil it" yesterday in the newsroom when one of us had an inquiry that would normally beg a Google search), and the look of the site is pretty sleek...but Cuil doesn't really cut it in my book.

Try entering your name, your hometown or even the name of this site and you'll see just how inferior Cuil is to Google --or Yahoo! for that matter. Most of the results don't even match, and what does come up is not very relevant. In fact, try searching for "Cuil" on Google and you'll learn infinitely more than if you enter "Cuil" into the actual Cuil search.

This is the first time a new search engine has been developed by former Google employees, but it doesn't appear as though Cuil will be giving Google a run for its money anytime soon. I mean, "googling" is synonymous with Web searching now, is it not?

This is one class I need to take

An article from Time.com caught my eye, and my peaked interest might be getting some inventive Parsons student an A.

The 15 students from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City are enrolled in a class called Internet Famous [click here to visit the blog], an experimental course in which the students utilize online strategies for distributing and promoting their art in our Google/MySpace/Digg/Facebook/blog-erific modern age.

Jamie Wilkinson teaches how to use headlines, keywords and tags to attract the attention of search engines, and how to use social networks to seek out the audience that will be most receptive to their content.

The students are then graded by a matrix, based on the amount of fame they receive. Wilkinson has three computers that scour the Internet, caught in a constant loop of what he terms "scraping" — constantly going through search engines, blogs, networking sites, video hubs and other sources for what's hot, what's new, and where his students stand, according to the article.

And this Time.com article certainly must have skyrocketed their hits--I tried to get on the Internet Famous Class Web site and I had the little Mac color swirly/hourglass cursor for like, five minutes. There must be thousands of people on this site at any given time!

I love this idea. It's pure genius. And my blog would probably get taken to school by these kids.