So I downloaded the Digg Firefox Toolbar a few days ago, and I’m pretty impressed. Every 15 minutes or so, the next hot story will pop up in the corner of my screen - it’s definitely a good way to keep on top of Digg without visiting the website several times an hour.

An added bonus of the toolbar is that, while visiting websites, you can see at-a-glance how many diggs a particular URL has.

This got me thinking - now that’s is so easy to see how many diggs a page has, are there any pages out there that people digg just for the heck of it? The answer: an unequivocal Yes. So here are some of the pages I’ve found that get dugg a lot for very little reason at all.

• Target.com: 11 Diggs, 4 comments - Comparatively, not that many. But seriously now, who would Digg Target.com???
• Best Buy: 268 Diggs, 2 comments - See above. But apparently Best Buy is better than Target.
• Google.com: 493 Diggs, 118 comments - Now I can understand why a bunch of geeks that have nothing better to do then Digg pages and already visit Google 200 times a day would Digg Google.com. But still.
• Amazon.com: 1777 Diggs, 653 comments - The sheer number of Diggs disturbs me. How much news can Amazon.com’s homepage really generate?
• My Gmail Inbox: 59 Diggs, 37 comments - no comment.

As you probably know by now, ex-Google employee Anna Patterson + husband Tom Costello and some guy named Russel Power launched a new search engine this morning. It’s called “Cuil” (pronounced “Cool”) from the old Irish word for knowledge - leave it to a search engine to come up with a name that’s only interesting because they say so (and gosh darnit, we believe them).

A big selling point for Cuil is it’s large index: 120 billion pages, according to their homepage; a number they also claim makes it the biggest search index in the world. Some people refute that with Google’s recent claim at 1 trillion web pages crawled. Yet it’s worth noting that Google doesn’t actually index each of those trillion web pages, as Michael Arrington recently pointed out. Apparently, Google’s true index size is only about 40 billion, since it doesn’t bother indexing pages with duplicate info. Unfortunately, statistics are often misleading, as a quick search for this blog shows:

Somehow, I doubt there are 9,373,214 pages that mention my full url (when it looks like the only page of this blog they actually have indexed is, well, the index).

And the shove-it-Google’s-face sales pitch is that is doesn’t provide results based on popularity (as Google’s PageRank setup dictates), but rather on relevance. Yet I think a simple search for “cuil.com” illustrates the basic problem with that philosophy: no computer algorithm for relevancy will ever be as accurate as actual people. That’s what Google did right.

I’ll give it a few weeks to for things to settle out, then check back and see if the results are any more relevant. It’s a good concept, and I am rooting for them.

Admittedly however, there are some things that are catching my eye with Cuil. As much as I may love being able to go back in time and see all the embarrassing Google searches I made on August 24th, 2007 (for example), having all of that information saved is a little unnerving. Cuil doesn’t save any user history.

It also uses the same predictive typing technology Firefox has in it’s search bar - a reason I still use Firefox’s QuickSearch, even if I’m already on Google’s homepage:

Unfortunately, about 40% of my page requests result in some sort of non-fatal server error, but that’s probably just first-day jitters. I’d wait until the rabid tech bloggers have stopped overloading their servers before putting it to a real test yourself.

P.S. - Looks like the entire search engine is actually offline for the moment while they add more capacity.

P.P.S. - They’re back, check it out!

So I tried headed over to The Pirate Bay a little while ago [not intending to do do anything illegal, of course...], but noticed something odd: it’s down.

In all seriousness, I don’t frequent the site, so I don’t know how reliable the servers normally are, but this seems to be on a slightly larger scale than a simple server outage. Down for everyone or just me? seems to think it doesn’t exist:

Now the question everyone seems to be asking is whether this has anything to do with The Pirate Bay’s recent hosting of a torrent for The Dark Knight, a movie of which I’m sure Hollywood is a bit more protective than usual, given it’s highly impressive box office stats. Though I’m not sure why this event in particular would suddenly trigger an effective legal strike against the site, when there has already been a steady stream of legal threats from the MPAA etc. over the years.

So, what do you guys think is going on? ISP block? DoS? Servers down? Who cares?

Update: Annnnnnd they’re back. Looks like they got the servers back online sometime early this morning, but as the 300-400 hits that post got shows, not before the entire internet community spontaneously combusted.

Do any of you remember the joy you felt when you turned on the television to watch your favorite show, and discovered that this week’s episode happened to be a musical episode? One of those special episodes in which the writers decided to throw every common-sense limitation in the writing, throw in as many television-industry inside jokes as they could, and (of course), make the characters break into song every few minutes?

Meet the short, internet-based series that doesn’t just have one shark-jumping episode - but is entirely based off that sweet, wonderful concept: Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog was written during the WGA strike earlier this year by the Joss Whedon (who created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, apparently), and it is glorious. It’s the story of an evil “mastermind” trying to get into the League of Evil, while (naturally) trying to get the girl. Oh, and it’s all told as though the show were an entry in Dr. Horrible’s Video Blog. With singing.

There will be three, 16-minute episodes released online this week, but only this week, so check it out sooner rather than later at DrHorrible.com.

I’m sitting in the Downtown Mudhouse right now, facing the desktop they have set up there, and having far too good a time. What do most people do when they get on a computer at an internet cafe? One of two things. They either A) Check their email, or B) Check Facebook. But the good folks over at Mudhouse can’t have people on Facebook, taking up the computer for hours…

Now some (such as the Charlottesville City School’s tech department) deal with this problem by simply blocking the offending site. But whoever is in charge of that desktop at the Mudhouse has too developed a sense off humor for that. You see, if you try to visit Facebook on that particular computer, you are redirected to the websites of various non-profit organizations, such as Computers4Kids, or some Linux webpages.

And I must say, it’s far too amusing, watching someone sit down at that computer, set on checking their Facebook profile. Strawberry-Banana smoothie in one hand, the mouse in the other, they open up Firefox. They start tapping on the keyboard. Enter.

Cue: Head-tilt.

The still-unsuspecting individual then hits the back button. They type the address in again. Click.

Cue: Hands flying up in the air, resting on their head.
Cue: Contortion of face, first of surprise, then of anger. You can almost hear the curses they utter at the computer in their mind.

And this is how I spend my Wednesday afternoon… I’m not creepy…