Archives for March 2006

April Fools Watch

Adotas mentions new AdSense unit sizes of 1×1 pixel and 2560×1920 pixels. What about people with bigger screens than that though?

How the heck did the Sydney Morning Herald find out about Google’s quantum-based spam filtering?

Philipp notices Google’s new room search prototype.

Ask introduces RhymeRank, which lets you find related queries that rhyme with your original query. It may only work in English, but that’s okay: it’s in gamma release.

Here’s my favorite though. MSN allows anyone to make up their own fake search results. I oblige. But the best part? I tried to customize the jokes in Firefox and got an error message: “xml could not be sent: Permission denied.” Meta-humor, or just incompatibility? Either way, it’s funny. Wait, I tried it in IE and it didn’t work either:

MSN April Fools

Oh well, it’s still funny. What’s the best April Fools Joke you’ve seen or done?

Update: Slashdot decided to go with a fresh new pink color scheme and ponies:

Slashdot: Pink with Ponies

Yahoo! bought all of Web 2.0! The whole shebang! I’ve done a panel at the Web 2.0 conference; does this mean that Yahoo! has also acquired . . . me?!

And Google rolls out a new product on the first day of Q2: Google Romance. I’m glad we’re applying the power of our search technology to finding that special someone. Looks like the upload has already crashed under the strain, but I was able to download the FAQ page. Here’s a couple questions:

10. What do you mean when you say Google Romance is a beta product?
What do you mean when you ask us what we mean when we say Google Romance is a beta product? It is what is it, okay? It’s new, it’s probably still buggy, which is to say that yes, by using this product now you conceivably are setting yourself up for a disastrous outcome – but on the other hand, you might also be on the verge of thrilling to an experience that will transform your very existence and only could have come about because you took this step, right here, right now. You’re online; take a chance. We may never pass this way again. Carpe diem. The world could, like, end tomorrow, you know? Gather ye rosebuds while —

11. Okay, okay, I’ll try it.
Great, babe, great.

It’s a shame I’m happily married; this looks like an interesting product. Go ahead and take the tour.

Update: Looks like there’s aliens in Google Earth and a dog on the Whitehouse lawn.

Via Philipp, there’s a ton of news. There’s the new Google Browser. Only 1.68M! Also, Google apparently acquired textfiles.com for “somewhere in the neighborhood of A Dozen Fat Sacks of Mad Cash.”. Nice. And finally, you can track zombies with Google Maps; read how on deathhacker.

If you enjoyed Guitar Hero, it looks like a sequel is coming out: Cowbell Hero! And ibiblio has proposed a <BLING> tag.

Looks like the Wikipedia entry for April Fools 2006 is doing a much better job of tracking breaking April 1st news; I’d just go there.

DOJ sent subpoenas to 34 companies

InformationWeek did a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and discovered that the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 different companies:

The full list of companies subpoenaed by the Department of Justice includes: 711Net (Mayberry USA), American Family Online, AOL, ATT, Authentium, Bell South, Cable Vision, Charter Communications, Comcast Cable Company, Computer Associates, ContentWatch, Cox Communications, EarthLink, Google, Internet4Families, LookSmart, McAfee, MSN, Qwest, RuleSpace, S4F (Advance Internet Management), SafeBrowse, SBC Communications, Secure Computing Corp., Security Software Systems, SoftForYou, Solid Oak Software, Surf Control, Symantec, Time Warner, Tucows (Mayberry USA), United Online, Verizon, and Yahoo.

I did a declaration in this case, so I won’t comment. Read the article for more details.

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