all the necessary caveats apply about the
quality of reporting on random studies, but i can’t help linking to
the
bbc’s

fascinating report on what’s going on when you
sense
ghosts

or otherwise get a good case of the
howling
fantods

. ignoring the very real possibility of methodological funniness, it appears that regular
people can reliably detect “spookiness” in places that are claimed
to be “spooky”, even if they don’t know that they are supposed to
be in a “spooky” place:

“The results were striking: participants did record a
higher number of unusual experiences in the most classically
haunted places of Hampton Court, areas such as the Georgian rooms
and the Haunted Gallery.”

“”Hauntings exist, in the sense that places exist where people
reliably have unusual experiences,” Dr Richard Wiseman told BBC
News Online. “The existence of ghosts is a way of explaining these
experiences.””

the scientists posit that there aren’t really
any ghosts, but rather that there some subtle perceptual cues that
get consistantly interpreted as spooky. i’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that these cues
are less obvious than standing in a dimly lit, cobwebbed crypt with
organ music wafting in. it’d be interesting to see if they could
reduce the perceptual cues to their constituent parts, so that you
could more reliably manipulate the general level of “spookiness”.
until then, as one commenter aptly states, ” To the believer no
proof is required, to the sceptic, no proof is sufficient.”

phil skillfully wields his rhetorical sword and asserts that i’m missing the blogclog point. olivier thinks i’m off target as well. before i fully paint myself into a corner, i want to make it clear that i’m not advocating removing blogs links from the general index, but rather i think it might be useful to remove or modify the display of the text of blogs from main page search results. fwiw, via olivier’s post, i discovered that nick denton had already contemplated and dismissed this idea.

anyway, both olivier and phil make good points and phil is particularly adept at using my own example to weaken my argument:

“However, someone else (if they are at least half-bright), searching for that phrase because they have a broken window crank on their Galaxie, could go to Eric’s weblog, track down the entry, see the magic words “i’m fortunate to have the original shop manual”, track down his email address, and ask him if he’d be willing to trade copies of a few pages for some extra parts. That’s quite a bit more useful than the other results, offering to sell one car with a missing window, a Galaxie, and yet another car with a particular crankshaft.”

olivier generalizes the point and highlights a particular “mode” of searching in which blogs are extremely helpful:

“Well, Google has figured out that blogs are useful pre-surfing resources full of links and context. They don’t necessarily think that your weblog is the best end destination for your query, but it’s probably a good lead to find an actual page or site to answer it. Blogs and their brethren are good at digging the best of the web (where else do you find the kind of stuff there’s on Boing Boing, Memepool or Muxway?) If your blog entry is just one degree of separation from a page that will fulfill a web query, that in itself is valuable.”

of course, the weakness of making this argument is that it’s dependent on the quality and appropriateness of blogs posts that you are “presifting” through. phil understands this, and it’s why he’s feeling a little bad about not doing his duty to provide any useful information after finding himself as the authoritative resource for “http error 500”. it’s a debatable point that as the number of active bloggers increase that the signal in the presifting will remain high. even more importantly – and i have nothing but anectode to support this claim – i don’t think that most people want to engage in or “get” this presifting search behavior. it’s confusing to them. and anything that is confusing to most users is A Bad Thing for google. evidence of the confusion can be found in andrew brown getting questions about car repair in his blog. and phil ulrich getting comments from pissed off “random searchers”, demanding to know, “WHERE IS THE INFO ABOUT (X)? I GOT HERE THRU GOOGLE NOW WHERE IS IT?”.

to my naive eye, this means something is broken and it’s potentially more important to google than placating advertisers. obviously i could be making something out of nothing and artfully taking a few anectdotes out of context, but i suspect that these are early warning signs. maybe google can tweak the algorithm to just devalue blogs, which doesn’t feel like The Right Thing To Do. or maybe they could just take blogs text out the general mix [ but not stop milking the pagerank value ] and put them in a separate tab. or maybe they could differentiate the results in a way that is similar to the way they display “traditional” news items when you use a search term that picks up news stories on the general search page. this feels natural to me. maybe jason can put together a smooth mockup.

or maybe i’m full of crap.

“the blog clog myth”

makes some interesting points about the

the blog clog problem

and does a good job of pointing out the fallacy in the analogy
between the blogosphere and usenet:

“The “precedent” quoted, when Google bought the Usenet
archives of Deja.com and “removed the groups from the main index”,
is a red herring. Google has not removed newsgroups from the main
Google index – you’ll find web-based archives of newsgroups on
there today. It simply built a far better, specialised search for
the groups elsewhere after it acquired the Deja.com
archive.”

good point, but it doesn’t address this issue
that blogs are clogging the results of searches in a way that
web-based archives of usenet postings never did. when i search for

“galaxie 500 window crank”

i don’t want to find me as the number one hit. i don’t think
anyone else does either. and here’s the main point – it’s a
disservice to the people who are doing the searching.

it might be fun for my ego, but most people – the vast
preponderance of people –
don’t care about weblogs

[ even if they might reap the benefits of finding what they are
looking for through the wonders of pagerank ]. most people would
consider
google

to be a better service if i, and a relatively small number of other
people, didn’t get in the way of the information they really want.
i might soften my stance that blogs should be removed from the main
index by default, but to maintain that
google

is a better service by biasing results towards information that
most users aren’t interested [ repeat after me, “most users aren’t
bloggers” ] in, isn’t in keeping with
google’s

historic stance as being obsessively focused on users. me dons abestos duds

“Broadband Growth Seen Slowing” versus “Connections to Broadband Increase 50%”.

i’ve been taking a closer look at drupal with an eye towards using it as a foundation for a variety of facefive services. it has really come a long way since the last time i played around with it. and the fact that it has ldap support makes my life infinitely easier [ fingers crossed since i haven’t tried the module yet ]. [ update: dang. it looks like the ldap module only authenticates against and existing ldap server, it doesn’t actually provision new users to the resource. i guess i don’t get our of doing no work 🙂 ] it takes a little bit of energy to get into the drupal lingo, but it certainly is looking like it’s worth the effort.

i wish there was a module to ease integration with making payments via something like trustcommerce.

recently, in an move that might make lesser men feel less manly, my wife and sister-in-law went out and bought a stihl 250 chainsaw to share between us for those times when nothing but a chainsaw will do the job. however, reading the owner’s manual freaked me out sufficiently that i required a tutorial from a brother-in-law who is much better trained in operating equipment that can kill or maim you. today was the first day that i got to walk around and decimate unsuspecting limbs and “trash trees” on our property. it was fun. i got a mean hankerin’ to take down the fifty foot maple in the backyard, but i’ll probably hold off.

i love the smell of chainsaw fumes in the morning. it smells like victory.

disproving the thesis that they only produce crap, some enterprising students at the mit media lab have produced the you’re in control [ urine control ] system which has sensors that detect a the stream of urine, enabling one to play interactive games. throw in the ability to play multiplayer games in bathrooms around the world and you’ve got yourself an instant hit.