I was amused, and somewhat perplexed, to read on BuzzMachine yesterday about a bizarre splog—spam blog to the rest of us—which copies text and then converts it to synonyms. Jeff explains: New splog tricks In my ego searches, I just saw a splog that copied text of mine but ran it through ridiculous almost-synonym replacements. … Read more
Increasingly I find that if I enter a search on Google for something that I need explaining to me, the first result is a book. Of course, the book is in Google’s Book Search, but chances are the search is in a page that has been scanned and is available without having to buy the … Read more
I’m amazed by how word processing is still in the dark ages, considering it’s what we spend most of our day doing. Case in point is Microsoft Word 2007, which throws all sorts of weirdness—artefacts, I guess we’d call them—in text. Try scrolling through a longish document—anything over 5,000 words—and you get this kind of … Read more
More stuff from the observant and thought-provoking Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase: drivers protecting their cars in Beijing from urinating canines: As Jan points out, lots of issues arise with this: how confused must dogs get that their choice of territory markers move around? (Or maybe that’s exactly what they want—expanding territory without them having to … Read more
Illustration IHT, by Felipe Galindo I wrote a piece for the IHT on a company of expats bringing wireless broadband to their native Bangladesh. Would love to have gone there to have a look, but budgets aren’t what they were (love the illustration): In Bangladesh, where less than 1 percent of the population has … Read more