Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on December 24, 2006 by CyberNet.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has decided to move onto another business venture and this time it would directly compete with sites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Jimmy is hoping to create a search engine, called Wikiasari, that will return better results than other search engines that are currently available. Here is what he says will be unique with Wikiasari:

Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.

I think that it sounds pretty cool that people will be able to “rate” the results so that the search engine doesn’t show the spam that we have all come to know and love from sites like Google. That doesn’t happen too frequently with Google (for me) but there are some results that I don’t think belong as close to the top as they are. It would be interesting to see how Wikiasari creates an algorithm to prevent it from being abused by spammers.

The screenshot above is from TechCrunch and is supposedly legitimate, but the first thing that I noticed was that the sponsored results at the top link to Wikipedia which is where most of the revenue from the site will go. The “real” sponsored links on the right side would be the primary source for income on the site.

Lastly, the “tag bar” at the top would probably be extremely useful. That should make finding just the right article a little easier, but how will the tags be determined? I imagine that the tags will be automatically calculated but it would be pretty cool if they found a fair way for users to submit tags. Maybe if a certain number of users enter in the same tags then it will accept it? When users are involved with search results/tags I think there are just too many doors open to spammers. This will be fun to follow though.

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No one said that hobbies were easy to throw away, and it’s pretty clear that the Apple TV still holds a dear piece of Cupertino’s heart. In fact, we’d argue that the box’s streaming abilities now tie into Apple’s overall mission more than ever before, and with iOS 4.2.1 for the iPad (and the accompanying introduction of AirPlay), it’s feeling less like an afterthought and more like a focal point. That said, we’re curious to know if early adopters feel satisfied by their $99 box. Have you found it to function as-advertised? Still fuming over those output and / or color issues? If you were given the keys to the design kingdom, how would you turn the Apple TV into your perfect media streamer? Ditch the iTunes integration? Offer access to more content portals? Paint it pink and line it with LEDs? It only costs $0.02 to play, and the deposit slot’s just below.

How would you change the second-generation Apple TV? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember the guy who said a Droid exploded in his ear while he was using it? Purported Motorola tech says Droids can’t explode like that and that the phone was likely dropped instead.

This article was written on February 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

There are certain features in Google Docs that everybody seems to know about, yet there are others which are hardly known. One such hardly known feature will be helpful for times when you need to revise a document. It’s built right into Google Docs and allows a user to look at two versions of the same document side by side and compare them. Google Docs highlights all of the differences so that it’s super simple to see. To give you an example of how this works, I went to Wikipedia and pulled up the entry for “Steve Jobs.” Wikipedia keeps an archive of changes that have been made, so I pulled up two different versions of the article and copied a paragraph that had been changed. Here’s how it worked for me using Wikipedia:

• First I opened up a new document and pasted one version of the Steve Jobs article. Then I saved it.
• Next I went back to Wikipedia and pulled up an earlier version of the same article and then went back to the original document I had created and pasted the new content over the previous content. Then I saved it.
• Finally, I went to the Revision tab in Google Docs and selected the two different file versions (they list them based upon the time it was changed) and clicked “compare checked.” The results I received are displayed below:

At first glance, it looks like a bunch of gibberish, but it’s actually not. I’ll point out that there were only two minor variations between the two different revisions.  The first was in the first paragraph where it says “Jobs was born in New York…” Notice that starting with New York, a whole paragraph is crossed out? Now look to where it says “San Francisco” highlighted in green. This was the first variation. It reads, “Jobs was born in San Francisco” (not New York). Most of the third paragraph is crossed out because it reads exactly the same as the 2nd paragraph.

Of course the example I gave using Wikipedia isn’t exactly realistic, but it helped demonstrate the feature. Using this comparison tool would be useful if you had two versions of a single document that you wanted to compare and revise.

Source: Digital Inspiration

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We scrutinize and judge ten notable interfaces for Android, iOS, BlackBerry, and more.

Originally posted at Dialed In