You must watch this Flash Video. It is the story of Media until year 2014. It contains facts such as “Google Grid”, “Googlezon” (google+amazon) and “nytimes gone offline”.
What happens to the news? And what is Epic?
Watch it, it is only 8 minutes but it is a jump in (one of the possible) futures.
Google creates a new functionality almost every week. This time we have http://scholar.google.com/ on which you can search for “scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research”. [Found via an email sent by Valdis Krebs on SocNet mailinglist].
While the evil company launches its search engine (no link – no pagerank), i finally decided to make the switch to Yahoo! search engine. If you use firefox (you should!), it is as easy as changing the icon in the top-right box (mycroft).
[This blog is 1st results if you search for Paolo, in Yahoo! but of course this is not the only reason I switched ;-) I like to promote some diversity in the search engine arena as well]
100 electrodes implanted directly into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic man allows him to control computer directly and hence play videogames and check email. Read the article in Nature . I would be interested in reading the explanation of the man on how he learnt to control the computer and how he feels in controlling it. The similar questions are: “how have you learnt to move your finger?” and “how do you feel when you move a finger?”. It is something it is difficult (or impossible?) to explain, it just seems natural. I may guess it is the same for the man and his brain control on the computer. Unluckly the article does not analyze this. (found via BoingBoing)
Google print, Google SMS, Google helps China censorships.
The Google Italian version is now offering: maps (just search for an Italian city, such as Bologna), trains timetables (just search for two Italian cities, such as bologna roma), UPS packets monitoring (just enter an UPS code, such as 1Z1234567891234567). [found via Pandemia]
For the train timetable, Google.it doesn’t use the Italian Trenitalia but the German reiseauskunft. Well, I guess they are more reliable (both as train service and Internet site).
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I was searching in google for “Beth, T., Borcherding, M., Klein, B.: Valuation of trust in open networks.” and I got this result page: the link of the homepage (in green) is displayed not correctly.
It is so strange to receive something not perfect from google. Could it be a bug? Or maybe it is a feature? I tried some other queries and it seems that “B B.” is treated as some sort of bolding directive or so.
Yahoo dumps Google search technology. You can decide by yourself if Yahoo! is better than Google by comparing search results on this double-search-page (found via OlandeseVolante).
With Mixmaster it is possible to combine the content of a site with the layout of a different site.
I produced some funny mix by mapping the content of my site on Boingboing.net layout and on Smartmobs.com layout and on Cnn.com layout and on New York Times layout and on News.google.it layout and on Slashdot.org layout and on
Simplebits.com layout and on Deanforamerica.com layout and on Cesca layout.
The content of governo.it (empty propaganda) on my layout is instead pretty disturbing!
Since I was out of the blogosphere during the past 20 days, I have many things to blog about.
The first is that I’ve been in Chiapas (Mexico) for new year holidays. New year’s eve in a Zapatista village (La Garrucha). I’ll blog about what this revolution means for me and the world later. For now I just publish the link to photos.
The sign in the photos reads: “esta usted en territorio zapatista en rebeldia aqui manda el pueblo y el gobierno obedece” meaning “You are in Zapatista lands in rebellion, here the people rule and the government obeys”
I was listening this morning the radio program Democracy Now while a guy made a very clever point. He said that Murdoch owns televisions all over the world (for example, Fox in US) and that he also owns a satellite channel in China. But, how can Murdoch buy television channels in every country? At the cost of oversimplifying, the model is the following: “I, Murdoch, offer you to privatize the government propaganda and you, govern, offer me a monopoly in Broadcasting.”
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