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.

So the big Web 3.0 buzz lately has centered around the Mozilla Labs Concept Series - an attempt by the creators of everyone’s favorite web browser to drum up brainstorming for how Web 3.0 will work. And certainly the most intriguing [read: the concept with the most expensively produced concept video] is Adaptive Path’s Aurora. Although the system resources required for such a concept are still a ways away, the concept itself seems very well thought-out, and definitely possible in the near-future. Worth it to check it out.

I definitely applaud Mozilla’s outreach to the public to design their next concepts. But despite all the pomp and circumstance surrounding their “hear from the little guy” campaign, I’m a little disappointed there isn’t an organized contribution system which allows equal exposure of ideas from those little guys. As it stands, you’re supposed to “use your favorite method of sharing an concept with the world“. Basically, blog about it.

Awesome, but until they actually help the “little guy” showcase their concepts to the world, isn’t Mozilla being a little hypocritical?

This is one that got me smiling: The government of Italy has set up a text messaging service for consumers to check the wholesale prices of various foods on-the-fly. With soaring gas prices, the cost of food has also been on the rise, making consumers a lot more weary of what they’re shelling out for those gallons of milk. Or tomatoes. Or arugula leaves (you get the idea). The idea is that by making information about foot prices easily accessible, consumers will be able to make more educated decisions about where they buy and what they’re paying for their food.

Let’s say Bob’s Vegetable Cart charges 2 Euros for a head of lettuce, but you think that sounds a little high. Well, now our dear Italian friends can simply send a text message “lettuce” and get the wholesale prices sent right to their phone. Presumably if our tech-savvy shopper seems to think he’s getting ripped off by Bob, he can go see if Randy’s Produce Trolley across the street will give him a better deal.

I think the basic concept of educating consumers about how the free market does (and should) work is a great idea, but I ask this: If our shopper is familiar enough with technology to shop via text message, would it not be easier for them to access such a service online at home? Isn’t this a bit like texting your husband to see whether there’s anything he needs picked up at the store, rather than picking up the shopping list he made before you leave the house?

Admittedly, the cell phone culture is probably very different in Europe than it is here in the United States - and I certainly applaud the use of SMS - but it still seems a little silly to me.

Your thoughts?

via BBC

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!

I’ve never really gotten into the whole, movie-watching-on-a-PC idea (mostly because the selection on iTunes - not to mention the price - is useless). With the exception of a few high-budget blockbusters (which, coincidentally, also means prices 40-50% higher), it’s mostly gaudy science fiction, or the equivalent quality of most Lifetime movies.

Yet were I not college-bound in a few-months time, I might actually consider investing in the Roku player from Netflix. It’s relatively cheap at $100 (compared to $200+ for the AppleTV), and requires nothing but an internet connection and a subscription to a Netflix plan. You can’t browse the selection from the device, however - you instead have to create a new “internet queue” from your computer, where you select which titles are available to the device.

I have to say though, they skimped on the style factor here. Plus, I absolutely hate tiny remotes. I lose them…

What do you guys think? Worth it to shell out the $100 bucks if you’ve already got a Netflix account? What about you AppleTV users out there - did you make the right decision in buying it?

via WashingtonPost