Day: May 21, 2002

Justin Hall: an information hustler (scroll down to entry for 5/9 for the article). I don’t always remember to point to Justin because his site doesn’t do RSS and none of his articles have permalinks. But he was the protoblogger back in 1996, writing honestly about his life and the stuff he was doing and the people he loved.

And this story brings out all that’s warm and real about Justin:

A friend at Deloitte & Touche asked me to talk with these kids about my career as a freelance writer. And so I stood up in front of them and shared – “I’m homeless, in debt, and my clothes smell because I live out of a beater car.” And they looked at me confused and a loud little girl with long thin braids in a bright pink parka down in front during the second section said, “Why should we listen to you then?” and I said, “because I do what I want and I love my life.”

28 May 2002: Updated with new Justin permalink!!!
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Dave points to new services from Google: Glossary, Sets, Voice Search, Keyboard Shortcuts. Cool tech. This is what differentiates Google from other past search engine failures. By now, if it were another Yahoo or AltaVista, Google would have launched six auction portals and a weather page instead of thinking of ways to make the user’s search experience more productive.

That said, I’m trying to understand where the hell they’re going and failing. I can certainly see how Glossary will be useful, but it’s slower than the main Google search. Sets? I can’t think of a practical application offhand, but if someone’s interested in the part of traditional Google searching that provides related links, Sets could be a good way to focus the results of such a query. Voice Search? Busy signal. Might be cool if it gave the results over the phone rather than making you have a browser. Keyboard shortcuts? Very cool, but I have the funny feeling that I’ve just used ten years of browser and markup development to recreate the Lynx experience on a Google search results page.
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