Head Tale

I don't do a lot of link dump posts but I've had a few things sitting open in tabs for the past couple weeks that had the potential to be full-fledged posts…except now, the baby has all but wrecked my ability to write anything for an extended length of time so this is what you get…

Facebook Facelift
– in addition to Facebook's recent re-design which is getting mixed reviews (I tend to like how it streamlined things for the most part but it didn't address some of the core problems with the site that I've blogged about elsewhere – search my blog for “Facebook” and you'll find a couple entries on the topic), Facebook is beginning to enter into partnerships with third-party sites to allow widgets of various types to be integrated into the site.  The article I link to mentions that MySpace is way bigger than Facebook but that Facebook is growing more rapidly so I suspect this will only accelerate that.

Even Virtual People In The First World Are Energy Hogs
– avatars in the online game, Second Life, apparently have as big of carbon footprint as people living in Brazil.  Jesus. 

reCaptcha
– here's a cool idea.  You know how you have to type a few random letters when you leave a comment on this (and many other) sites as a spam guard?  Somebody's come up with a way to have those characters represent parts of public domain books so that everytime one of these “captcha”'s is entered, it helps digitize these books. 

“[We]
estimated that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day. Assuming
that each CAPTCHA takes 10 seconds to solve, this is over 160,000 human
hours per day (that's about 19 years). Harnessing even a fraction of this time for reading books will greatly help efforts in digitalizing books.”

Google Introduces Universal Search
Between the Google toolbar, Firefox's Google Search Extension and various other options and plug-ins to give me direct access to it, I rarely go to the Google home page anymore (even if I try to, I get redirected to the Google Canada home page.)  So I had to hear about their biggest redesign in their history via the media before I saw it with my own eyes.  Universal search is an attempt to combine all their various search options (Internet, news, photos, blogs, books. etc.) into one interface.  I still don't like how it won't “pass” a search string if it's not in the main menu at the top (you can switch to a search for “Jason Hammond” in Images but not in Books if that makes sense.)  But it's a good start and puts Google that much farther ahead of everybody else in the search wars.