big brother up and running?

According to this new york times article, it is. There's a big difference between a system that runs and one that actually works...

why blogging is good for you (and TV is not)

An excellent essay Adam Curry wrote at the beginning of the year, with a pointer inside to The Zen TV experiment from Adbusters, something I've been doing for a while but had never "formalized". Always a sobering experience.

tv in the US

A Salon article looking back at TV in 2002:

Sure, TV in 2001 got all serious and stuff. This year we reconnected with what's really important: Hard bodies in hot tubs, public humiliation and more "Law & Order" spinoffs.

is hotbot back?

Before google my favorite search engine was hotbot. Over time, as Google became better at delivering targeted results, I switched over (as most of us did, I guess!). Today I thought about checking it out again (as I was mulling about the changes to come in the search space with Yahoo's purchase of Inktomi) . And a nice surprise: Hotbot has become a sort of uber-search engine done right, unifying FAST, Google, Inktomi and Teoma. Radio buttons at the top let you select which engine to choose for the search, and after you get the results, switching over to the result set of a different search engine is just a one-click affair. A really, really cool way of providing multiple results without mixing everything up (like some meta-search engines do). And it has another feature called "web filters" which give you more control over the search. Who knows... I might start to use Hotbot again...

the knife under the tree

A New York Times op-ed:

As The Washington Post reported yesterday, people are trading up on cosmetic presents. Instead of a massage, manicure, facial or spa weekend, Santa's sleigh is brimming with gift certificates for the knife, the needle, the laser and the vacuum pump.