les has noticed the blognoise problem and coined the slighly-less-trippingly-off-the-tongue, “google blog clog”. kellan posits that we’re really talking about linguistic convergence, which sounds like a topic worthy of a dissertation:

“My thought is perhaps we’re seeing the effect of Google having a language based interface. I search in English, and therefore I’m much more likely to get English results back. Most of the people I know speak English. On the Net however this doesn’t proscribe the field much. I think perhaps it needs to be broken down beyond that, I don’t just speak English, I speak a vernacular informed by age, class, education, social environment, etc. My word choices are a product of culture. For example Mako and Josiah from the above thread have both had significant impacts on the Linux culture I was raised in. Could even my 3 word query display a language bias?”

great. i’m going to chicago for a few days and i see that they are simulating terror. maybe i should add a few more minutes to the already horrendous drive times.

anyone who has beaten their heads against the css wall might want to go relax in the css zen garden. lots of purty stuff in there, although i haven’t bothered to do any cross-browser testing yet.

wow. i think i know what i’ll be making for a few people for christmas. The NoCat Night Light:

” What if you could house an AP in a package the size of a large lightbulb, and install it in an existing light socket? This seemed like a good idea, but how would you get network access to it without running CAT5 to the socket? Easy: Powerline Ethernet.”

today looks like a fine day to irritate the neighbors by banging on the
galaxie. i think i’ll take a another stab at fixing the window crank and the fan belt. i should probably flush the radiator and change the oil as well, but that seems like far too much effort. hopefully i can get the window fixed, since the inside of the galaxie can get mighty stifling without some airflow. you don’t look nearly as cool cruising around town if you’re red-faced and sweaty. no sir.

[ meta: as if to prove the blognoise point, i just ran into myself while looking for “galaxie 500 window crank” resources. ]

while not really stating anything new, the timing of the latest orlowski piece on google fixing the “blognoise” problem is interesting because i’ve become increasingly aware of the once amusing and soon to aggravating problem:

“”They didn’t foresee a tightly-bound body of wirers,” reckons Stock. “They presumed that technicians at USC would link to the best papers from MIT, to the best local sites from a land trust or a river study – rather than a clique, a small group of people writing about each other constantly. They obviously bump the rankings system in a way for which it wasn’t prepared.””

what’s wierder is that i’ve been finding myself quiet regularly in the top 20 of searches that i’m doing. i hardly think anyone looking for real information is amused. i think they should sequester blogs off into their own little space not unlike they did with usenet. why this would be controversial to anyone is beyond me. this is exactly why technorati is so useful.

with rumors that aol is putting 400 people on developing a blogging tool, one has to wonder if they’re subscribing to the “one per pixel” development methodology:

“I once consulted for a company that had 50 developers working on a simple GUI. This GUI was a flat panel touch screen upon which several dozen dialog boxes could be made to appear. These 50 developers worked on this project for five years or more. That’s 25 man-decades, 2.5 man-centuries! COME ON! Three guys could have done this in three months! My buddies and I used to joke that they had one developer per pixel and that each developer wrote the code for his pixel.”