Wigblog: Things Internet and Otherwise by Richard Wiggins

Michigan State event: "Relics of the Big Bank"

2011-10-02T00:10:00.001-04:00

I saw this event title on the MSU events calendar: "Relics of the Big Bank" Hmm, sounds like it might be interesting, in light of the recent banking and financial crisis. Maybe it also covers historical context, such as previous bank failures, in the Great Depression and in previous financial panics. Actually it's about the Big Bang, not the Big Bank. It's MSU's Physics-Astronomy department,

"Google Junior" - How Long Before Google Smites this?

2011-09-26T18:21:00.000-04:00

Ran into this site advertised on Facebook today. It's a Google ripoff in every way: cops the classic Google look, uses Google Custom Search. And it doesn't appear to achieve its goal of being child proof. (Then again, I once heard that a packaging prof at Michigan State tested child proof packaging, and found that off all age groups, children were best at opening child proof packaging.)

When My Mom Was Certain Skylab Would Fall to Earth and Hit Me

2011-09-23T15:19:00.003-04:00

My friend Don Richter pinged me today about how my mother feared that America's first space station would smite me. My dad was a NASA engineer. He did important work testing the Saturn V rocket, but I think the proudest part of his career was working with others on the design of Skylab, the first space station. He got to work with astronauts, including Alan Bean, who was the 4th man on the

Google results include live PGA tournament results

2011-08-14T17:48:00.006-04:00

While watching the PGA Championship I wanted to find the official PGA Web site. So of course I Googled it. To my surprise, the Google results included a live report of the top of the leaderboard. Google for years has tried to offer the top links from popular Web sites - but those were static links. This is live data. It reflected the results broadcast live by CBS. Within seconds, Google

Google goes commercial on their home page

2011-08-03T04:32:00.000-04:00

Google famously won the portal wars by keeping it simple on their home page. Today Google is selling wares directly from the google.com home page. Amazing.

New rule: if you're a fancy NYC Internet marketing group, check spelling on your promos

2011-07-14T00:10:00.001-04:00

These folks have hosted high-falutin' events in NYC since the heyday of the dot coms in the 90s. Now they come to us is a famous NYC reference, an ode to the Seinfeld "Master of His Domain" episode. And the subject is important: the extension of TLDs, or Top Level Domains, which I think is a serious issue. The ICANN plan is foolhardy and dangerous. But back to our NYC friends. They misspell

Google Chrome computer ad renders improperly ... In Google Chrome

2011-05-21T16:04:00.000-04:00

Carl Page, Larry's father, presaged Google long before its inception

2011-03-21T17:10:00.001-04:00

Watched a surprisingly accurate 2004 documentary about Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page today on Biography. They got all the essential facts right. They emphasized that as Stanford grad students Larry and Sergey had to scrimp on hardware and develop superior algorithms. While telling this story to a friend I recounted how Larry's dad, MSU computer science prof Carl Page, gave a

Is it a URL, or is it an app? This is the decision point.

2010-12-16T09:05:00.000-05:00

It matters.

Screen shots show hidden hilarity in The Onion's hilarious MacBook Wheel video

2010-12-05T15:12:00.000-05:00

This video came out many moons ago but it still cracks me up every time I see it. It does such a great job of spoofing trade shows, Apple fanatics, and Apple itself. But there are split-seconds of embedded humor as well. You have to watch this video multiple times, and use the Pause button frequently, to realize how exquisite it is. http://www.theonion.com/video/

HP admits in lawsuit settlement: they lie about ink levels

2010-11-17T09:54:00.003-05:00

Hewlett-Packard is as storied a name as Ford or GE: the archetypal two guys in a garage. Yet in recent years, not so storied. Carly Fiorina damn near ruined the company with the Compaq merger. And Mark Hurd brought scandal. So today it was no surprise that HP sent me a note offering to settle for 6 bucks or so for ripping me off on ink levels. You see, HP makes one third of its revenue on ink

Steve Jobs the devil? Bill Gates a saint?

2010-11-15T13:59:00.000-05:00

Who'd have ever thought we'd reach a point in history where Steve Jobs would prove to be evil, and Bill Gates to be saintly? I've been using an iPad as my only computer for a few months now. It is like being in prison. It has a real operating system, like a Mac, but Steve buried the file system. I can't plug my digital camera, or other USB devices, into it. The apps I can download are vetted

Sales of motherboards down; CNBC reporter draws very wrong conclusion

2010-06-10T08:58:00.000-04:00

CNBC reporter draws incredibly stupid conclusion on a report that motherboard sales are down 10%. Erin Burnett holds up a smartphone and declares on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that every computer has a motherboard, therefore this means sales of all computer devices are going down. INCREDIBLE! The report was obviously about motherboards as a commodity used to build PCs. Motherboards for PCs, made

"Lorem Ipsum" article on AOL reports Chrysler design competition

2010-04-16T11:15:00.000-04:00

"Lorem Ipsum" is placeholder Latin text used to budget space for an article to be published. It's been used in print publishing for decades, and the practice has made its way onto the Web. Unfortunately, sometimes people publish the Lorem text instead of the actual article. This could be because a writer or editor pushes the wrong button before the article is ready, or maybe a content

At Staples you can't find the aisle with staples!

2010-03-06T23:50:00.004-05:00

So I was looking to buy a new stapler at, as it happens, the local Staples. I much prefer them to the really big box stores such as Best Buy -- less crowded, and the salespeople in the computer section seem more knowledgeable. I went wandering the main aisles looking for which row might have staplers.. Finally I checked out an aisle labeled "Tape and Fasteners"... See the word "Staples" or "

The MakerBot: A Three-Dimensional Printer

2010-03-05T08:43:00.000-05:00

Cool video demonstration of a 3-D printer:

Clever tech guy foils neighbors stealing his Wi-Fi signal

2010-02-26T18:05:00.001-05:00

This is awesome! A tech person discovered that his neighbors were stealing his Wi-Fi signal. So he decided to thwart them by fiddling with their Internet experience. For instance, he turns images in Web pages upside-down. Take a look at an example: Click screen shot for full-size image. He uses software magic to turn all images in Web pages upside-down. He also redirects links to http://

"Intranet Focus" article mangles Internet history

2010-01-10T22:12:00.002-05:00

Twice today I've run across this query on Twitter: Just blogged on the first use of the term 'intranet'. Probably dates back to 1992, but who first used it? Do you know? http://bit.ly/8ePBrj The compressed URL expands to http://www.intranetfocus.com/blog/entry.php?entry=75 which mangles the history of the Internet. If you were a professor and your student turned in a work with this many glaring

Political campaigns. Take heed: 2010 E Michigan Ave vacancy

2009-12-18T15:06:00.002-05:00

Need HQ for a campaign in Michigan? Space available @ 2010 E Michigan Avenue. The storefront may not look exciting but the street address could be. Hint: the street name and number are perfect for campaigns for election in the year 2010. Whether it's a state legislative race, a Congressional race, or other, what address could be better suited for a Michigan campaign office in the year MMX?

Name a sign Staples needs...

2009-12-17T16:53:00.003-05:00

Staples! 20 For the aisle w staplers & staples... "Fasteners"??? C'mon, why the euphemism?

Directv: poor wages!

2009-12-17T15:51:00.000-05:00

Store at mall offers very low wages

Discover the new Kenneth Cole backpack with special "File" feature

2009-12-09T20:56:00.012-05:00

I spied a nifty Kenneth Cole computer-friendly backpack at the local Staples, so I went online to see if they offered a decent price. Locating the same item at J and R, the NYC discounter, I double checked its features to be sure they were the same. The text bragged that the backpack sports a "File Folder" -- cool -- but why was "File" hyperlinked?_________________________________________Usually

About time

2009-10-05T22:15:00.001-04:00

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.-- Henry Van Dyke

When William Safire quoted me on e-mail etiquette

2009-09-28T01:12:00.003-04:00

William Safire died today. I'm bummed. I've been wanting to write him about how frequently subject / verb agreement is no longer honored. I hear it most often on NPR -- probably because I listen to a lot of NPR. You'll hear things like:Each of the experts we talked to say xxxxxx.The subject "each" would agree with "says". But people tend to match the noun closest to the verb. When President Obama

Two Google failures in 2 days - Gmail loses contacts

2009-09-24T12:04:00.004-04:00

Google probably has on payroll the strongest contingent of computer science brainpower on the planet. Google has created an incredible services base, with a global, self-healing file system. If you use Gmail, you don't know if you're connected to a server in the US or in China. You don't know where your mail resides. And you don't care. It just works.So it was a surprise to see a red warning

Google's sorrowful look when a Web page doesn't load

2009-09-23T11:51:00.003-04:00

Lately I'm mostly using Google's browser known as Chrome. Today when traversing one of my favorite sites, Spartantailgate.com, Chrome froze. Eventually Chrome woke up and presented a wonderfully plaintive explanation:

Google News highlights 3 Ted Kennedys

2009-08-27T15:53:00.005-04:00

I know, I know, I'm obsessed with how Google News algorithms sometimes do goofy things. This time the robot finds 3 Teddy Kennedys: So let's think about how the Google News algorithm might have done better. If it somehow knew that "Ted Kennedy" and "Edward Kennedy" and "Edward M. Kennedy" were the same person, it could collapse those entries into one. A conventional approach would be for Google

AT&T "You Will" ads from 1993: prescient, mostly

2009-08-21T09:07:00.008-04:00

One of my favorite themes is Yesterday's Tomorrows. What did we predict about the future way back when?1993 was the year that the Web came to life, but most of the world didn't notice. It wasn't until fall that NCSA Mosaic came out for Mac and Windows. Envisioning a world of the Web was pretty damn forward looking. These ads, which sound like they are narrated by Tom Selleck, were remarkable

When Mother Nature strikes, it's impressive

2009-08-10T15:46:00.006-04:00

This past weekend brought tremendous thunderclaps to town. The next day I was riding my bike and was surprised to see this crossing my path:Click photo for full-size imageNote the charring of the first log. I think that log was struck with a direct lightning blow, and on the way down it took the other tree with it.Several joggers came by the scene and all were impressed.This tree is only 100

Swedish lesbians suck sperm banks dry

2009-07-24T11:51:00.007-04:00

The Register covers IT stories from a cynical -- even caustic -- perspective. You can count on them to put down major players in IT as they cover tech news. As you might imagine, Microsoft is never treated gently. Today, though, they found a story they couldn't resist, allowing them to parody lesbians, sperm banks, and the Swedish all in one delicious headline.Click for full-size screen shotYou

Walter Cronkite departs 40 years after Apollo 11

2009-07-18T00:31:00.004-04:00

Mark Twain said:I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together."John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, at times rivals but in

Cool tool for comparing Bing versus Google

2009-07-10T08:44:00.007-04:00

Microsoft haters deride Redmond's much-advertised new search engine, Bing, as Because It's Not Google. One foolish commentator did a simple search, found that Bing provided 1/10 the claimed number of matches, and derided Bing as deficient. Circa 1996 I interviewed the creator of the Lycos search engine, Dr. Michael Mauldin. At the beginning, Lycos offered users the choice between a "small catalog

Viral marketing, historical marker style

2009-06-14T22:32:00.006-04:00

I'm a huge fan of Jackson Browne. One of his most famous songs is "Take It Easy" which the Eagles covered and made more famous. I've always liked Jackson's version better.And one of the famous sets of lines is:Well, Im a standing on a corner in Winslow, ArizonaAnd such a fine sight to seeIt's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed FordSlowin' down to take a look at meCome on, baby, don't say maybeI gotta

Gmail protects you from possibly salacious images -- from you

2009-05-07T11:55:00.005-04:00

Someone I haven't talked to in 25 years just found me on Twitter, which I found both interesting and kinda weird.So I forwarded the note to a friend, and was amazed when Gmail warned me: Always display images from richard.wiggins@gmail.comBut I am richard.wiggins@gmail.com!!!Yup, that's right: Gmail is protecting me from images that I sent myself.Hmmm.... I suppose I can see the logic.

Hilarious spoof of new Star Trek movie by The Onion

2009-05-07T01:48:00.002-04:00

The Onion does it again: they offer a fake news segment mocking Paramount for making a Star Trek movie that is actually fun and entertaining.Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'Watch it carefully a few times looking at details in the B roll.

Google takes holiday logo to ultimate extreme: code!

2009-04-27T01:25:00.005-04:00

Google has always had a lot of fun with holidays. Their graphic artists do a great job of adorning the normal Google logo with special treatments, such as adding iconic Irish symbols on St. Patrick's Day.But today they've taken it beyond anything you'd have imagined:Yup, that's right, you don't even see the word Google... Wait a minute, yes you do: spelled out in Morse code!This is actually

Google.org enables world map tracking swine flu

2009-04-26T17:36:00.007-04:00

Someone has put up a world map (using Google Maps, of course) that depicts with push pins areas of illness or death, reported or confirmed. Click on a push pin to get details about that incident. See the Google H1N1 Swine Flu Map.It's not totally clear how official or authentic the information is. So far, it seems to match what's reported in the news, and at CDC.gov. But I couldn't find an

ABCnews.com televises death of Bea Arthur

2009-04-26T16:07:00.008-04:00

Writing for the Web has its own special rules, most importantly that you must be concise. Writing headlines for the Web can be even trickier. I was a little surprised to find that ABC News televised the death of Bea Arthur. But it said so right on the screen: "Watch: Bea Arthur Dies..." Sounds kind of creepy!Update, 4/27/2009Amazingly, the topic of today's Alertbox by Jakob Nielsen is how hard it

Maureen Dowd: Coy about Twitter

2009-04-22T19:04:00.004-04:00

Maureen Dowd's column in The New York Times today offers a coy interview with the founders of Twitter. In a face-to-face interview, she asked Biz Stone and Evan Williams to limit their answers to 140 characters -- the same as Twitter.They ended up breaking that limit, but not by much.At the end of the interview, Dowd asked:ME: I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have

In the news: Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana

2009-04-14T10:12:00.006-04:00

The number one movie right now is Hannah Montana. I was amused when Google News listed as important people in the news Hannah Montana and the young actress who portrays her, Miley Cyrus, at the same time. She also shares Google News billing with Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, and Jesus Christ. Pretty impressive company!

A sign of desperation? Microsoft advertises on Google

2009-04-01T10:59:00.009-04:00

A fellow named James White posted a thoughtful, detailed item about the proper ways to handle "state" on the Web: how session variables or database drops are the right way to go, and JavaSript countdowns are not.For some reason his post fired up the Google ad machine like nothing you've ever seen. That was surprising enough, but I was astonished to see a Google Adwords ad for: Internet Explorer 8

ChcagoTribune.com shows how national can capture local

2009-03-08T12:45:00.009-04:00

One of the ironies of this age of 24 hour news sources and RSS feeds is that you may read about a US Airways plane ditching on the Hudson on the online site of a newspaper in Ireland. A human or a robot at the Irish newspaper picked up the story from a traditional wire service, perhaps. So I shouldn't have been surprised to receive this news alert in my mail this morning:Oral histories part of

Planets are using CCD cameras to spy on us?

2009-03-06T10:18:00.006-05:00

Yup, I always suspected this. Small planets are using CCD cameras to spy on us. NASA's Kepler mission will strive to find these planets. We've got to locate these evil planets, and deal with this threat.

Today's Google News identifies a new celebrity: Mac Pro

2009-03-04T09:15:00.007-05:00

Google News offers a section called "In the News" which tries to capture people who are prominently, well, in the news. The Google newsbot obviously uses an algorithm to ferret out propoer nouns in recent news articles. And it's obvious the algorithm thinks it's a person if it sees lots of references of two words with capital letters: Rush Limbaugh, Barack Obama, Britney Spears -- and their

Google Earth outs our horrible lawn circa 2005

2009-02-14T18:28:00.005-05:00

Coverage of the airplane tragedy near Buffalo NY included imagery from Google Earth and from the street view of Google Maps, making me wonder if they had discernible views of my own house. So I checked and found a satellite view of my house on Google Earth. When I zoomed in, I had to laugh. The satellite image of my neighborhood showed a verdant area -- except for my own lawn. We installed a

Google News makes news out of Windows 7 non-story

2009-01-30T07:48:00.010-05:00

Google News reports prominently that a university isn't supporting Windows 7. The headline screams Windows 7 Beta Flunks Out Of Georgetown.This of course is not news. No IT organization supports beta software; they can't, because the definition of a beta product is that the vendor itself doesn't support it. Windows 7 is the next version of Microsoft Windows, an attempt to patch the many design

Jobs working less than 40 hours

2009-01-21T10:40:00.005-05:00

Interesting juxtaposition of headlines in Google News just now.... Yesterday's inaugural address mentioned people who are voluntarily working less than full time jobs so that colleagues can stay employed; meanwhile, compensation experts are taking Steve Jobs to task for standing for re-election to Disney's board. They argue that if he can't work full time for Apple, he can't fulfill his duty as

The unnoticed Presidential transition

2009-01-20T12:04:00.001-05:00

Newsmap makes Google News a lovely headline cloud

2008-05-07T16:23:00.001-04:00

After 9/11 Google turned its home page into a sort of a portal with information about the disaster, how to donate relief, etc. I chronicled the evolution of their home page in an article for First Monday in October 2001, The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine. I predicted that Google would get into the news business, but they'd do it with robotic crawlers and indexers, not

Julian Bond, national media, get the Michigan primary story wrong

2008-02-24T16:15:00.004-05:00

Over and over again, the national media get the facts wrong about the Democratic Presidential primary held on January 15.Over and over again, the press reports that Hillary Clinton was the only candidate on the ballot. Blatantly false and misleading.Over and over again, Julian Bond, a man I've admired since I was a teenager, speaks of "disenfranchisement" if the delegates are not retroactively

Measuring Obama's popularity

2008-01-29T00:14:00.001-05:00

One measure of a Web site's popularity might be how it melts down when you visit it. Web sites tend to fail in strange and mysterious ways when overloaded. If you visit the official Web site for Barack Obama right now, you see a very artful photo of Barack and his family. If you click through, you see this:Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Host 'web10.colo' is blocked

Civilized Wi-Fi in public spaces, versus Caesar's Palace

2007-12-06T02:25:00.000-05:00

In November I gave a talk on Web search analytics in Barcelona, and this week, in Las Vegas. In Barcelona we were at a hotel called the AB Skipper. Their approach was totally civilized. Free Wi-Fi (and Ethernet) in all the rooms, and free Wi-Fi throughout the hotel. The conference was at Caesar's Palace. They charged $13.99 per 24 hours of Wi-Fi. They offered no free Wi-Fi in public spaces or

Yes, Mr. Dvorak, Windows can't count, but Mac can't either

2007-10-28T03:35:00.000-04:00

John Dvorak recently wrote about how poor Windows is at multitasking. For instance, you're writing a Word document while in the background copying a huge file, but your keystrokes don't get priority. He also complained that Windows is goofy about calculating how long it wil take for that file copy to complete. Windows seems unable to make a reasonable calculation. Its first guess as to time is

Extremely targeted marketing by Orbitz

2007-10-21T15:52:00.000-04:00

Last week I purchased tickets for a trip to Barcelona. I researched fares using Northwest.com, Orbitz, and other providers. Today, days later, I was looking up information about, of all things, the Superman comic saga, and the banner ad at About.com remembers my recent searches:Hmm, they used to say "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you." I have not done any

Dear Jane letter to the iPhone

2007-07-28T15:05:00.000-04:00

Hilarious stuff. More than one reviewer wants to love his lovely iPhone, but it just isn't going to work out. I kid my friend and colleague Trevor that he's driving a Ferrari on a dirt road.Don't get me wrong; I think the iPhone is an absolutely amazing piece of engineering. In 2007 it is 100 times more than the Newton, and it makes my beat-up Treo 650 a dinosaur. But listen to two iPhone

Twin heartbeats: watching a multi-core processor at work

2007-07-01T10:25:00.000-04:00

Recently I started using a Lenovo (nee IBM) Z61t laptop, replacing my late lamented X40. The new computer sports a dual core Intel processor. This means it sort of has two CPUs.It's fun to watch the two processors vie for work to do when a single-threaded task is at hand. I do a lot of work crunching search logs, and when you exceed about 32,000 rows in an Excel spreadsheet, things begin to bog

Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing book digitizing machine

2007-06-06T20:30:00.000-04:00

Last week I saw the incarnation of an amazing book digitizing machine, something that my friend Mark Grebner and I dreamed of circa 1999. This by no means is not to say that others did not imagine such a thing before us; of course they did. But it was exhiliarating to see the actualization of something so important.Every year in June I join my wife at her professional association meeting, the

Surgical masks when you fly?

2007-06-03T10:52:00.000-04:00

Saw an unusual sight on my first flight since the idiot lawyer from Atlanta flew to and from Europe despite his TB infection: a guy in front of me wore a surgical mask the entire trip:It could be he has a pre-existing condition, but my guess is this fellow feared risk of TB. That, of course, would be innumeracy: the odds that someone as selfish and stupid as Andrew Speaker are next to you on

Mid 90s view of the future Web: cable modems, and the insights of John Naisbitt

2007-05-25T22:14:00.000-04:00

It was the mid 1990s. The awesome possibilites of a future broadband Internet were before us. We introduced the Web to a famous futurist, and reported the dreams of how cable modems and content deals would transform the world.In October 1995 my friend John Liskey arranged for Chuck Severance and me to interview some impressive folks at the Midwest Cable Show in Indianapolis. We interviewed the

The peril of thinking that Gmail (Beta) is in production

2007-05-11T20:31:00.000-04:00

For the last few hours, I've been unable to access my Gmail account. Error 502, whatever that is. I'm on deadline to finish an article, and some essential quotes are locked in my inaccessible Gmail Inbox. Right up there on the Gmail logo, it says "Beta". They gave me fair warning. But I treat it as production, my total e-mail solution, a service I can trust. My bad. How many people think of Gmail

Logistics conundrum: how do you evacuate a zoo?

2007-05-09T13:08:00.000-04:00

IT folks spend a lot of time doing disaster planning, thinking through various scenarios, writing plans, and testing those plans. At my Day Job at Michigan State, my colleagues just installed some MSU servers at Penn State so that MSU can have a Web presence even if lots of technology in East Lansing gets wiped out.Right now a fire in Griffith Park has the zookeepers worried. It's not

Facebook polemic: Flash as pamphleteer medium

2007-05-06T10:54:00.000-04:00

Bill Moyers compares today's bloggers to the pamphleteers of the American Revolution. I think you could describe what I call the Flash polemic the same way. The style involves a professional-sounding, measured narration over words and images moving about the screen. Here's an example:It's not just a polemic; it's a conspiracy theory involving the CIA, BBN, and DARPA.I'm not sure I buy the

Slideshare.net - YouTube for PowerPoint presentations

2007-04-25T22:22:00.000-04:00

Last week I spoke at a conference called Computers In Libraries, otherwise known as CIL, produced by Jane Dysart and Information Today (infotoday.com).A number of people asked for a link to my slides, which Lou Rosenfeld and I prepared for a talk we presented a month ago for the Information Architecture Summit (IA Summit) in Las Vegas. Lou and I are writing a book on Web search analytics.Lou

Those crazy domains they create

2007-04-15T22:48:00.000-04:00

Ever since 1995 or so, major corporations have aligned in odd ways and created silly domain names. MSNBC is probably the most famous conflation, but ABC / Disney still does goofy things with Go.com.It's not just domain names. Corporate America also makes up stupid URLs, obviously drawn by committee. Consider:'So let's parse this. NBC of course is the famous TV network. It could've been worse;

Has Rewind on your PVR spoiled you too?

2007-04-14T11:31:00.000-04:00

We've had TiVo-like rewind functionality in our house for a year or so. If you miss something, you hit Rewind, becase the set-top cable box is constantly recording.This has spoiled me horribly. Now I find that when I'm listening to radio in car or office, I want to be able to hit Rewind and listen again.When I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago during March Madness, I wanted the TV in my hotel room

There is no news in Detroit

2007-04-11T18:22:00.000-04:00

Next Monday I'm going to do an interview with WDET, the major NPR station in Detroit. I was checking to see if they archive their interviews, so I went to the News section of their Web site and clicked on "Interviews." This is what I saw:Click for full-size imageYup, "Currently there is no news." I assume that this really means that WDET hasn't done any interviews lately (or today) but I had to

CNN broadcasts compelling content but misses the BBC Best Bets idea

2007-04-06T10:41:00.001-04:00

In the early days of the Web I attended a computer conference in Atlanta. I met a young CNN producer and talked about the Web to him. I ended up at CNN headquarters showing color prints of screen shots explaining the nascent Web, including images of the MSU weather pages, brainchild of Charles Henrich.This morning CNN leads with video of a tearful five year old lad racing to hug his dad, back

Free for the asking: the over-the-range microwave that thinks it's a Web browser

2007-03-17T12:43:00.000-04:00

We are replacing a Sears Kenmore Elite over-the-range microwave oven / vent. It is perfectly functional and high-wattage but it has a cosmetic flaw.The main problem is that it is circa 1997, and it thinks it is a Web browser. I am not making this up. The controls include Back, Home, and Favorites buttons, and a rotating knob that serves the mouse function. It was designed by Whirlpool in the

Oh, now I get it. Spring Break conference at Ohio U

2007-03-17T06:59:00.000-04:00

Received spam from someone at Ohio University advertising a Web conference I never heard of that's taking place next Thursday. The text included this:I thought: How strange to use the dishonored Break tag in an online missive.Then I got it: it's a pun. Ohio U must be on spring break, and they must do a Web conference each year at that time.A couple of modest proposals for the conference

Promises, promises: since 19XX

2007-03-08T07:09:00.000-05:00

Surfing Google News I encountered the Web site for a place called Promises, located in Malibu, the current domicile of a newly shorn Britney Spears.I skimmed their purple prose describing the great gated community they purport to be. I chuckled when I learned that they've been in business since 19XX: Click for full size screen shotYup, you read it right:When Promises opened in 19XX, we realized

The Complete New Yorker Portable Hard Drive

2007-03-04T19:36:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker offers DVDs with past content -- articles, ads, and most importantly cartoons. Their latest ad really caught my eye: they're also selling this content on a small portable USB hard drive. For $200 you get an 80 gig hard drive with everything ever published in the New Yorker pre-installed.It's not a totally new idea to sell content on portable media. Way back when Verbatim might have

Google News favors foreign sources over local

2007-03-03T07:47:00.000-05:00

My dad served in the Signal Corps in World War II. He landed in Normandy on D-Day. He never told anyone exactly what happened that day, but he was awarded the Silver Star for what he and his men did. Sometimes very important stories are lost to history. We will never know.Ever since I predicted the creation of Google News I've watched carefully to see how it performs.One of the serious

Amazing images of Saturn, courtesy of NASA

2007-03-02T03:58:00.000-05:00

I remember as a boy loving a great little color picture book about space by Herbert Zim. I suppose space attracted my attention more than the average lad because my dad was a NASA engineer. NASA has released images from the Casini spacecraft showing Saturn from different views. Way cool stuff. NASA even offers a movie showing the rings and a moon in orbit. Awesome stuff.

Hybrids are so quiet they could kill the blind

2007-02-24T11:58:00.000-05:00

OK, that was a bit of an exaggeration. Well, maybe not so much. Read on.The Lansing, Michigan area bus provider is the Capital Area Transportation Authority, or CATA. My friend Mark Grebner worked for years to integrate the Lansing and Michigan State University bus systems. He succeeded beyond his dreams. CATA buses ramble through the campus at an amazing rate. They carry students from all

Cool invention fixes wow and flutter in analog recordings

2007-02-20T18:40:00.000-05:00

Heard a really great All Things Considered story last night about technology that can remove "wow and flutter" from old analog recordings. It works with reel to reel tape, phonograph records, and even a soundtrack on film. They played some examples that showed how remarkably well it worked. Stuff that was unlistenable sounded pretty good.Imagine what this can do for old audio of all kinds --

Kleenex selects a most unfortunate tagline

2007-02-19T08:12:00.000-05:00

Kleenex has created a Web site that will let you customize your tissue package. You can have a photo of your snivelling child, your drooling dog, or a slimy slug.Jakob Nielsen says that every Web site needs an explanatory tagline so first-time visitors will quickly understand what the site is all about. You've got to wonder if the marketing folks at Kimberly-Clark appreciated the irony of the

Tom Izzo and Marquis Gray have a serious moment

2007-02-18T06:02:00.000-05:00

My old friend John Liskey was kind enough to take me and a couple of his other friends to the Michigan State versus Iowa game on Saturday. His seats are close enough for great views of Tom Izzo as he confronts his players. It's a great spot to see the veins on the coach's face pop out.I'm pretty sure this scene is after Marquis Gray made a dunk and then gestured that he had slit Iowa's throat.

Hilarious video for help desk people: introducing the book

2007-02-16T18:22:00.000-05:00

Anyone who's ever worked on a help desk will love this video, which now has over a million viewings:

Global warming, local freezing

2007-02-04T07:01:00.000-05:00

Trafficking in domain names finally nets me a few dollars

2007-02-03T11:58:00.000-05:00

Over the years I've registered a number of Internet domains hoping to cash in. One of the first was: northwestsucks.comI never expected Northwest Airlines to go bankrupt and its stock to fall to 50 cents a share. I thought they might offer me a couple thousand dollars or some frequent flier miles so they could take over the domain. Think about it; you can buy a round trip coach ticket, or

A one-way conversation with Congressman Mike Rogers

2007-01-23T22:40:00.000-05:00

Congressman Mike Rogers, in whose district I live, sent out a political mailing just before the State of the Union address. I questioned the timing and the content of his message, so I hit Reply and typed him my thoughts. This robotic reply came back:Dear Friend:Thank you for your electronic message. I appreciate you contacting my office.This mailbox is for outgoing mail only and is unattended.

A can of spam with no spam

2007-01-23T12:41:00.000-05:00

Today I've received several spam messages of this form:%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLERSubject: %SUBJECTSender: "%FROM_NAME" <%FROM_EMAIL>Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/htmlDate: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME%MESSAGE_BODYThis is pretty funny; they forgot to insert the actual spam into the template. You'd hope that anti-spam detectors would catch on to this pretty easily.

Colbert explains progress since 1984 breakup of Bell System

2007-01-23T07:52:00.000-05:00

Stephen Colbert does a hilarious take on Cingular Wireless changing its name to AT&T: A Cingularly sad but true tale.

Apple announces iPhone; Cisco sues; no one notices that neither owns the domain name

2007-01-10T18:57:00.000-05:00

Today Steve Jobs announced in famous fashion the iPhone, a very sleek device that appears to be a very cool cell phone, an OK music player that carries music, though much less than we'd expect, and a pretty good video player.This thing looks way cool. Without understanding the details fully, I think I want one, and I think several million others will too.But Jobs didn't announce that he'd reached

Amazon sells second edition ahead of third

2007-01-02T22:54:00.000-05:00

Today I met with my friend and co-author Lou Rosenfeld. He mentioned that the third edition of the best-selling book he and Peter Morville wrote, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, is in bookstores and seems to be doing well.So while sitting there at anAnn Arbor coffee shop with dueling laptops (his a Mac, mine a Thinkpad, natch) I went to Amazon to check the sales rank. To my

"Heart and Soul" - cool NPR story on origin of the piano duet

2006-12-31T21:29:00.000-05:00

I remember kids at church and at family parties playing this piano duet. Turns out it's a simple but infectious love song from the 1930's. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6703987The Bouncy Joy of 'Heart and Soul'by Sara Fishko Bea Wain was the first to record "Heart and Soul," which became a No. 1 hit in 1939.All Things Considered, December 31, 2006 · It's holiday season, and

I've reached Gmail's 2.7 gig quota

2006-12-23T12:49:00.000-05:00

When Google launched Gmail on April Fool's Day in 2004, folks couldn't believe they were giving every user a quota of 1 gigabyte. They doubled the quota a year later, and thereafter the quota grows automatically every day.Soon thereafter when a Google PR person gave me a then-coveted invitation, I made Gmail my primary e-mail service for all things work and otherwise. I've let mail accumulate,

Google turns a business school into a blog

2006-12-14T08:32:00.000-05:00

Google offers a blog search feature. Today it picked up a news item from the home page of the Broad Business School at Michigan State University:Click to see full-size screen shotIf you look at the home page for MSU's business school you will see a couple of columns of news, but it doesn't even feature an RSS feed. Wonder what fooled the Googlebot?

Google REALLY wants you to install their toolbar

2006-12-14T08:12:00.000-05:00

I've got the Google Toolbar installed on most of the computers I use. While using a computer that doesn't have it installed, I was surprised to see this: Google, which famously doesn't clutter its home page with extraneous links or ads, shoves a huge pitch for the toolbar right in your face. An in-your-face change to the interface, you might say.

New Wi-Fi record: JFK Airport hot spot serves East Lansing

2006-12-11T22:24:00.000-05:00

Recently while in an East Lansing establishment, the Peanut Barrel, I found an unexpected Wi-Fi access point:Given that Wi-Fi signals normally reach only a few hundred feet, it seemed a little odd that an access point in New York City could serve East Lansing. I mean, I know my Thinkpad has a superior antenna embedded in its little screen, but c'mon!Of course this was some nearby jokester

Three Days of the Condor DVD Offers Very Strange Title Menu

2006-12-11T20:59:00.000-05:00

My wife asked Netflix to send her a movie called "Three Days of the Condor", a film that scared the bejeezus out of me when it came out in the 70s. I remembered it well, with Robert Redford in the lead, and Max von Sydow a chilling bad guy, and Faye Dunaway an, er, unlikely accomplice and lover. So we put the DVD into the player, and up popped this graphical menu that seemed to be more about a

Internet lyrics sources susceptible to misheard rock lyrics

2006-12-09T23:07:00.000-05:00

Over the years many have laughed at how they misheard lyrics to pop songs. For some reason while thinking about Christmas gifts I was thinking of coal and its other form, diamonds. That reminded me of a Jimmy Buffet song I like about diamonds. The top Google link for lyrics let me to this site:I had to laugh when I saw this as the refrain:(Diamond. Diamond. Diamond. Diamond. Diamond)Coal under

Would Richard Wiggins like to rent a condo from Richard Wiggins?

2006-12-09T19:53:00.000-05:00

In a time when spam has doubled in three months and phishing is out of control, you're a little suspicious when you get a commercial solicitation involving your own name. A couple weeks ago I started receiving e-mail from Rentalo.com asking if I'd like to rent my condo in Naples, Florida. It was addressed to Richard Wiggins. Since I don't own a condo there (or anywhere) this seemed odd to me. I

AOL screws up their link to sign up for free account

2006-12-03T10:25:00.000-05:00

Click to see full-size screen shotAmerica Online famously makes it hard to convince a customer support rep to cancel your account. Just now I ran across an AOL ad for their new free service, and tried to convert the $5 a month account I've had for years. The link to convert to the free service is broken:A conspiracy theorist would assume this is deliberate. Anyone who's ever worked with AOL

60 Minutes advertises Yahoo search as finding aid

2006-11-26T21:33:00.000-05:00

For a while now, Pontiac has told people in its TV ads that people should go to Google to search for information on their vehicles. Huh? Not to Pontiac.com? Or GM.com? Tonight, I noticed CBS' "60 Minutes' doing the same sort of thing.The ad said that you could go to Yahoo and search for "60 Minutes" to find out more about tonight's stories.That's right: they didn't say go to 60minutes.com, or

The abysmal architecture of michigan.gov and election results

2006-11-11T15:49:00.000-05:00

Ever since then-Governor Engler outsourced michigan.gov to an IBM datacenter running Vignette in Colorado, I've thought that our great state's Web presence was pressed into a misshapen cookie cutter.Last Tuesday I tried to find out when the polls closed in Michigan. Fox News offered a vote tracking tool that claimed that the latest poll closing in Michigan was 9 pm. As a long time Michigan

Eminent domain, the 2006 election, and me in a statewide commercial

2006-11-06T21:21:00.000-05:00

On the hottest day of 2006, a July day with the heat index well above 100, I participated in a film shoot. This was a political commercial produced by a good friend, one of the leading makers of commercials in Michigan, Doug Monson. For over a year I'd asked Doug to let me tag along on a video shoot. I've dabbled in video production for years and wanted to see a pro do it.Doug upped the ante: he

The Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator

2006-10-27T14:19:00.000-04:00

Now comes one Christopher Soghoian who wants to raise awareness of a major flaw in airport security: TSA visually inspects your boarding pass, but does not use a scanner to verify online that the document is valid.So Chris now offers the Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator, which creates a valid-looking boarding pass that you can print at home. For instance, here's a first class seat I've

Understanding related searches: a colorful approach

2006-10-27T13:23:00.000-04:00

Recently when trying to better understand patterns of searches at Michigan State University I color-coded related search terms and analyzed 13 months of data. Not too surprisingly more people seek football tickets in the fall, bookstores at the beginning of the school year, and information on academic probation after grades are posted.This is a pretty basic approach, one that wouldn't work well

One of those crisp Fall days

2006-10-07T07:12:00.000-04:00

Friday was one of those crisp Fall days that football announcers proclaim "And it's a beautiful day for football!" Sadly the prospects for a happy football feeling in East Lansing on Satuday are not propitious, so here's some Fall color to cheer folks up a bit:More photos of the Red Cedar stroll are at: http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2101059166\There are some photos of the