Fireglo

Whatever Happened to Cuil?

Fireglo — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:48:44 +0000

Cuil (pronounced cool) was tipped to be Google’s predecessor when it was launched in 2008. Unfortunately, it never really took off and is currently ranked as 11,449th most visited site on the internet and 9,842th in the US according to Alexa. One of Cuil’s supposed advantages over Google was it’s protection of user’s privacy and classic search techniques (as opposed to PageRank) but the human element of Google searches (results based on popularity) won the battle. Perhaps, Cuil may have succeeded if they predicted the popularity of live search or social search instead of competing with the powerhouse that is Google. The diagram below (taken from Alexa) shows Cuil hits since it’s launch. As you can see, it’s popularity waned after it’s initial press coverage in 2008. The reason it received so much press coverage was due to the founders of the search engine being ex Google employees and also the amount of investment raised ($33 million.)

I scoured the internet to try to find some articles to compile a Cuil timeline but unfortunately, there’s not enough to compile a significant chunk of text. However, it recently got a good deal of press attention from MercuryNews.com:

Cuil, is trying yet another alternative to the standard Internet search, experimenting with a service it calls Cpedia, where a keyword search generates a machine-written text article similar to an encyclopedia entry. The results can be disappointing — a recent search for “Stanford University” produced a text obituary for a former faculty member — but Cuil says it will persevere.

Other sources suggest the Cpedia service is dodgy and a quick search for ‘Michael Jackson’ brings forward the following WTF result page:

Review – Human Centipede (First Sequence)

Fireglo — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:44:45 +0000

There has been lots of discourse online about this film and is set to be the film noone wants to see in 2010. The storyline depicts the story of a crazed surgeon who makes a centipede out of three confinees. At first, you think… well this isn’t so bad but then you realize he wants to join them from mouth to anus and this is relatively tolerable but then…… someone needs to take a poo and it results in an epic OMGWTF!

I would definitely watch this if you are a fan of horror films. If you like the SAW films and survived 2girls1cup, watch it.

Some naughty people have put the whole film online but those who want to see it in the cinema, you can settle for the trailer here.

Aardvark: The ultimate social search tool?

Fireglo — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:24:50 +0000

There has been much chat about who is going to dominate search in the next few years. Facebook want you to touch your social graph and Google have been experimenting with their traditional offering by adding Tweets to topical search queries amongst other things. Some searches are easy like “cinema times in Dublin” or “times newspaper” but what about searches that require a little bit of a human touch?

How many times have you looked online for a restaurant or a hotel and found half the people liking it and the other half hating it?

But what about if you asked a friend if he had eaten at a certain restaurant or hotel before? If he answers either way i.e. positively or negatively, the information retrieval operation is complete and the job is done. What about if you were buying a golfing DVD for your dad and you knew nothing about golf but you had an expert who could answer straight away, a trusted network? God, I sound like a salesman.

Anyway, Aardvark is an amazing platform that I have been raving about since the end of 2009 and I thought it was even better when I heard Google had taken it over. You should definitely try it out.

The Madonna Glee Episode

Fireglo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:35:39 +0000

For those who didn’t see it , it was good. As much as I am indifferent by Madonna I think this episode had some good laughs and I found myself feeling guilty due to it :)

The change of Vogue lyrics to suit the episode was marketing genius :)

This Week I Have Been Mostly Listening To…

Fireglo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:29:09 +0000

There are two songs which I have been listening to this week which I think are absolutely amazing. The first is Constant Knot by City & Colour which has the most amazing sing-along bit ever. It’d be tough for anyone with ears not to like this one.

The second one is a song by The Avett Brothers titled Backwards With Time which has the most amazing lyric which I believe is a universal truth :)

For all I know there’s more I don’t
Oh the little I have learned
For every year of knowledge gained
Is a negative year I’ve earned

5 Things You Didn’t Know About ePub – iPad Book Format

Fireglo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:35:03 +0000

Taken from Apple.com

Apple’s iPad launched on 3rd April is certainly the cage rattler of the technology year.

There is much discussion about the device becoming a replacement for paper as we know it but what about it becoming a replacement for digital formats such as .doc and .pdf? All we know for the moment is that reading content on the iPad is restricted to the iBookstore, or is it? So what is the ePub format?

Taken from hxa.name

‘Epub’ is a standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum. It is an arrangement of several other standards. There are three parts, addressing: content, package metadata, and archive. It is powerful, straightforward, and non-proprietary.

This means that you’re not restricted to the iBookstore for content i.e. if you have an .epub file on your desktop, you can drag and drop into iTunes and sync it to your iPad. However, if you buy a book from the iBookstore, you can only play it on your iPad and there is no sharing between different iPads or Kindles i.e. normal DRM restrictions apply.

1. There are over 20,000 FREE books up on Project Gutenberg in ePub format with rumors circulating that they will be directly accessible from the iBookstore soon. There is a plethora of content on PG if you like legacy literature. Also, check out this Google Books article where they announce over a million books in ePub format free (See Treasure Island on Google Books for demo.)

2. There are programs that automatically convert pdf, doc etc. to ePub. The one I have been using is Calibre which has been reliable for me but others seem to have some trouble with it. It’s well worth a try given it’s open source and it’s super user friendly for converting existing docs and pdfs to epub and drag into iTunes. It will come in particulary handy if you choose to visit the sites mentioned in point number 3.

3. The music, Tv and film industry have been having drama for years about uploaded pirated content on the internet. Could the publishing industry jump on this bandwagon (not that they haven’t in the past but not on such a large scale as music/movie industry.) Check out document file sharing websites such as issuu.com and scribd.com with thousands of pdfs but do all the up-loaders have permission from respective copyright holders, I wonder?

4. Although ePub is “non-proprietary” the files can have DRM attached to them which means they can only be used by one user on one device as is in the case of the iBookstore. Open eh? Check out this interesting article.

5. If you have knowledge of xhtml, xml and web languages you can easily open up an ePub file and have a poke inside it. All it is really is a packaged group of HTML pages and images. I have been using Oxygen XML editor to have a look inside. Amazing tool to see how ePubs are constructed.

Band Of Horses cover George Harrison

Fireglo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:30:26 +0000

I recently came across a cover Band of Horses did of George Harrison’s “Your Love is Forever” on Hype Machine. Lucky punters can find a copy of it on Captain Obvious’ blog. This gem is taken from George Harrison’s self titled album which I didn’t think anyone listened to but me! It brings me back to my teenage years.