8 December 06

Friday Five #5

ChaCha
One of the stranger search engines I’ve seen. You can get help searching by using a ‘Guide’, which is a real person sitting at home, helping you find the best results. Apparently the guides use a database of previous questions to help them answer queries. To me, most results look like the top results from Google. One of Google’s winning features is it’s quickness – ChaCha takes at least 20 seconds to get decent results with a guide. This service would be perfect for the computer-illiterate, but if you can’t use the internet – or more importantly Google – in the first place, how are you ever going to find this site? And if it does become popular, how will it ever cope with all the users?

Zero divided by zero = nullity
Having known lots of maths teachers and lecturers through out my education, I know how loony a lot of them are. This guy, a high school teacher with a PhD, has managed to come up with a mathematical concept for dividing zero. His new ‘number’ is called nullity and according to him solves all sort of problems. He’s obviously wrong (y*x/x as x goes to zero can be any number imaginable) but amazingly he’s still teaching this to Year 10 (ages 14-15) kids. He’s going to be answering questions about his theorem on the BBC on Tuesday too, probably due to all the coverage from internet forums, all of which seem to be deservedly mocking him.

I’m done with Digg
Blog post from Jeff Nolan which explains how his feeling of novelty about Digg and Web 2.0 sites has worn off because he feels “far too much crap [...] is being posted on Digg and I’m just not getting anything out of it anymore”. It seems that other people are feeling like Jeff too from the comments. This is probably a consequence of when sites get too big because more people have different interests so that the front page articles are going to be less focused and less important to the individual user (link via 37s).

Tetley’s splash out on viral
No, not Tetley’s tea, but Tetley’s beer. A ‘viral’ campaign which shows the effects of mixing Tetley’s with Menthos à la all the Diet Coke/Menthos vids on Youtube. The first comment explains the advertising campaign well: “Just because you make a video and stick it on youtube, doesn’t make it a viral”. It’s interesting to see how advertisers struggle to keep up with advertising shifts like internet video. Currently, only the video has 34,000 views on Youtube, a fraction of what would have seen this on television. Are virals really a cost-effective way of promoting a product? I still don’t want to drink Tetley’s any time soon…

Tales of a Designer
Well done to J Phill, who does comment around these parts now and again, for getting onto the uber-popular 9rules. I’ve been reading his blog for a couple of months now and it always has great content. I always felt the 9rules collective were a bit untouchable, like you couldn’t fault them for wrong opinions because they were in 9rules. New additions like J Phill’s site remind me that there are real, normal people behind top quality blogs.

Previously: #4 #3 #2 #1

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