lovehatethings - When popular culture gets you down, get your rant on and proclaim your lovehate for everything, no matter how guilty the pleasure is.
About Me

When culture gets overinflated, yet refuses to pop, I want to be there with the needle. Enlightened cynics of the world unite! Express your love or hatred of things from the sacred to the mundane.

By the way, there's a good chance any podcast you listen to may have language not suitable for children. If you don't want to take a chance on hearing the occasional f-bomb, don't listen.

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thinglets: A Crowdsourced Vision of Breakfast

         
Click here to download:
thinglets-a-crowdsourced-vision-of-breakfast-tkogcGuspnDBClgEiGbe.zip (3282 KB)
Some parameters of what the web sees as breakfast. Brought to you by Google, Flickr, Bing/Yahoo, Sxc.hu, and Picasa.

Filed under  //  bing   breakfast   flickr   google   picasa   picture   sxc  
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thinglets: Searching for "Pictures" - The 19% Rule

Was just noodling around doing some research for a presentation next week and decided to get a bit deconstructionist by searching Google Images for the word "pictures". I'd have to say the first page results were more expected than surprising, but did probably represent a pretty accurate representation of web image searches:

3 thumbnails of a sexual nature

11 thumbnails of animals (many with captionz)

4 thumbnails of pics that are just kinda cool

2 thumbnails of pics that are weird shit

1 thumbnail of a webpage graphic to denote other pictures

So, out of 21 pics, I'd probably only have any use for the 4 that are kinda cool. That's less than 19%, and this value has become my new non-scientific de facto standard of how many images on the web have any real merit whatsoever.

Filed under  //  google   images   search  
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Podcast 124 - What's With Buzz? Tell Me What's Happenin'!

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Some ruminating on the Bowl that is Super, the Buzz that is Google, the Olymps that are Ick, and what's Better than Better.

Filed under  //  2010   buzz   canada   google   olympic   sports   superbowl   vancouver  
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lovehate: Google Buzz... Now With Twice The Caffeine!

Is it just me or has Google really come up short in calling its latest endeavour "Buzz"?

Sounding more like something you'd mix with Vodka at a party than a segue into microblogging, Google has not only pursued an exercise in redundancy by ripping off the brand of a years' old Yahoo service, but they've reminded me of the evil sound my clock radio makes every morning.

Is it just me, or does someone wish that Google would just prefix "G" onto everything ala Apple's "I" moniker. We could call it Gstatus or Gstate. Isn't that infinitely cooler? The question by your update window could ask "What kind of Gstate are you in?" Instead, I'm expected to revisit Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice by answering "What's the Buzz, tell me what's a-happening?"

You know, I don't throw the word "stupid" around too often, mostly because it's an unimaginative insult that begs for a more creative insult. And so, in considering the best descriptor for Google Buzz, I considered the words uninspired, doltish, inane, puerile, or witless. And the reason I settled on stupid, is because I figured it appropriate to just follow your model and go with the first crass idea that came to head: stupid.

Come on Google. You're more creative than that. I love your products and your flair for the dramatic with brands like: "Gmail, Maps, Videos, News, Books, Docs, Reader... hang on a sec! Other than Wave, Buzz is about the most creative name you've come up with for one of your web services. If this evidence is an indication of what we're to see in the future, can we expect animals, cars, or countries next?

At least I can hope you won't name a service after feminine hygiene product. I mean, I don't know what Google Douche will do to freshen the web, but I imagine it may put some people off.

Filed under  //  brand   buzz   google   microblogging   social networking   twitter  
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thinglets: Google Image Search Traffic Light

Just because...

     
Click here to download:
thinglets_Google_Image_Search_.zip (1169 KB)

Filed under  //  color   google   image  
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Podcast 121 - Bringing a Nerf to a Gun Fight

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On the evolution of Nerf from balls to ballastics, the new face of Google search terms in China, and the second half of Film-A-Month Faves for 2010.

Filed under  //  china   google   movies2010   nerf  
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lovehate: 10 Search Results No Longer Number One On Google.cn

With Google deciding to uncensor itself in China, perhaps some of the most popular search terms will no longer default to innocuous web ephemera:

Search term...

"Tiananmen Square" no longer yields a recipe for the Chinese answer to Nanaimo Bars.

"Dalai Lama" no longer results in a science journal about a cloned experiment on mini-camels.

"Free Tibet" no longer comes up as an incentive offer for an online casino.

"Capitalism" doesn't produce a top result about the ancient belief in SHOUTING IN EMAILS AND CHAT WINDOWS!!!!!

"Forced Relocation" no longer shows judo throws.

"Indentured Servitude" doesn't speak of the longevity of false teeth.

"Censorship" doesn't result in a large boat full of thermometers.

"State Secrets" doesn't point you to the number three soap opera in the country.

"Bloody Coup" no longer points you to a viral video of a pigeon being strangled.

"Overthrow" does not point to a US football playbook on how a quarterback should pass against the wind.

Filed under  //  censorship   china   google   seo  
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lovehate: Social Search and the Law of Diminishing Discovery

Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Serendipity.

While I've posted on a similar topic before, I found last week's announcements regarding Google's social search and Bing's full pipe search of Twitter and Facebook APIs cool, yet, at the same time, also a bit disconcerting.

In as much as one the greatest downfalls of early search algorithms was the assault of flotsam that was returned with every query, it is precisely an aspect of that muddled result that I fear losing. A great characteristic of the early graphic web was serendipity. 

We're talking Web 1.0 here. It was a time before the great permeation of referral engines and aggregators, when a reader had to scour through fathoms of muck and mire NOT to find something good, but often just to find something of interest. If it was good, that was an added bonus.

There were regular occurrences of finding fantastic useful and interesting stuff, that enabled you to expand your horizons and knowledge, which had nothing to do with your original search term. Such is one of the great benefits of raw research; you don't only hope to find what you're looking for, you hope to find a whole bunch of other bizarre, eclectic, and brilliant knowledge as well. Click this webpage randomizer link five times and tell me that, by the end, you haven't learned something.

When Social Network algorithms become integrated into your average Google or Bing query, your results will be throttled tighter than they ever have before. And I'll be the first to acknowledge that's probably what most people want. We love the idea of not having to wade through the morass of Web 1.0 where it sometimes took hours to find what we wanted. We lust after authority-based aggregation and recommendations that will point us in the right direction so that the content-drenched world of Web 2.0 won't swallow us whole.

There is a little part of me, however, that enjoyed the search and the discovery that went along with it. There is a piece of my brain that expanded by being forced to make connections in wondering why, when I queried one term, would I get a result that included this specific link. Don't we all have a small part of our brain that yearns for the open road, not caring where we're going or how we get there; productivity be damned! Don't we wish that upon being asked "where you goin'", we could just say "not here"?

One of the things I love doing is going to a site like StumbleUpon and doing random "stumbles". But, even then, they aren't completely random. They are a subset of the users of service, who, by themselves, are a generally pretty savvy group of web users. It is still fun nonetheless.

The search tools are necessary. There are plenty of times that I need to really find something, and swimming around in the trillions of bits and bytes of information trying to find one piece would be useless and foolhardy. It's the evolving pattern that is beginning to scare me a bit. The pattern dictates that as information multiplies, search results become more focused.

When static web pages ruled, results were more widely varied, partially due to the fact that web communities were less automatic and SEO was above the head of the average Geocities or Lycos user.

When social networks emerged and blogging ballooned, subjective content resulted an exponential explosion that threatened to muddy up you average search, but, conveniently enough, technology allowed the results to get even better. SEO, easy tagging, and a more educated internet-savvy content creator was being bred, and we found what we needed easier.

As "social search" and like-minded approaches start to filter into user habits, every search will now pass through yet another filter, distilling the purest result to the end user. This is great for answers. This is a boon to productivity. This is what everyone wants when they search for something. This is what I want when I search for something. But has serendipity died online? Does filtering a search through ever-increasingly effective algorithms which factor in popularity, and adding a filter of authority based on a list of people I have on Facebook or Twitter allow me to expand my horizons or does it effectively quash them.

If you walked into a bookstore and in the first room there was only one shelf with "Books You Will Like", would you be tempted to forage beyond the curtain at the back of store to see what's being hidden?

Maybe it's just the adventurer in me, but sometimes I like the open road, even with the occasional undercooked Stuckey's chicken and glaring billboards for adult stores and firework warehouses.

Filed under  //  bing   facebook   google   internet   social network   social networking   social search   twitter   web  
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thinglets: Sesame Search Engines

via youtube.com

Here's my Sesame Street search engine analogy:

Bing = 8
Yahoo = 4
Ask = 2
Google = 9

Yeah, I know the metaphor doesn't totally hold up, but it gives a new perspective on the happy-go-lucky Ernie and the creepy pusher trying to make the sale.

Filed under  //  bing   ernie   google   microsoft   pitch   sales   search engine   sesame street   yahoo  
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Podcast 98 - There's No Place Like Chrome

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Some belated thoughts on the Chrome OS and some final thoughts on the belated Michael Jackson, or, more accurately, his memorial awards show.

Filed under  //  chrome   cloud computing   crass   google   jacko   memorial   michael jackson   microsoft   mj   OS   staples center   windows   windows xp  
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