Here you can search google with the addition of a random word – selected from a useful category e.g. “great ideas” or jargon or cities etc. It shifts results to a new focus, which can be serendipitous. And I’m a big fan of chaos. 
I definately want one of these! View the video all about it: http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
http://www.computersight.com/Computers/10-Absolutely-Useless-Gadgets.382173
Includes USB pole dancer & Wi-Fi detector T-shirt
Europeana, the European digital library, museum and archive, is a 2-year project that began in July 2007 that now has produced a prototype website giving users direct access to some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers.
These have been selected from that which is already digitised and available in Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.
The intention is that by 2010 the Europeana portal will give everybody direct access to well over 6 million digital sounds, pictures, books, archival records and films
On 9 December 1968 hi-tech visionary Douglas Engelbart first used one to demonstrate novel ways of working with computers.
The first mouse that Dr Engelbart used in the demo at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) was made of wood and had one button.
Much of the technology shown off in the demo inspired the creation of the hardware and software now widely used.
Read on (with vids): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7768481.stm
To celebrate its 10th birthday, Google has released a version of the search engine as it was in January 2001, allowing users to search the internet as it was then.
“We wanted to offer users a chance to search an older index as a way of looking back at web history, and the January 2001 Google index is the earliest we could generate,” said a spokesman.
Although less than a decade old, it is an almost unrecognisable web landscape: a search for YouTube takes you to a site about medical feeding tubes, Wikipedia was still in its infant stages, and Facebook was still a networking site reserved solely for geeks at Harvard University.
The site works in the same way as regular Google searches, only this version returns your search in order of the popularity of that term back in 2001.
It lets you view the old pages where possible.
While the current Prime Minister had been a Queensland member of Parliament for three years by this stage, the top search result returned for his name goes to the resume of another man called Kevin Rudd from Knoxville, Tennessee.
The member for Griffith’s page features none of the slick bells and whistles of kevin07.com, but is instead a monochromatic page featuring an image of the young Rudd, blond haired and pink-cheeked.
But some names and events that are ubiquitous today have no web presence at all, such as the NSW Premier, Nathan Rees, and the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.
A search for the “Iraq War” returns results about that country’s conflict with Iran in the 1980s, when the US still backed the Iraqis.
Google itself was different then too, and that was not just the garish font.
Back then the company, with the unofficial motto “Don’t be evil”, was a rising star of the web boom.
This was before Google Earth led to concerns about privacy, and the restricted version it launched in China prompted accusations of censorship.
The annual Knovel University Challenge has been extended until 1 December 2008..
You now have until 1 December 2008 to submit your answers and contact information (full name, university name, email address) via the contest widget available at http://info.knovel.com/challenge/
All entries with a total of at least 3 correct answers will be placed into a random drawing for one of (2) Nintendo Wiis, (3) iPod Nanos and (6) iTunes Gift Cards.
The drawing will take place on 1 December 2008. All winners must present correct answers to 3 quiz questions.
All universities, domestic and international, are eligible to participate and win. For entries to be valid, and to qualify for prizes, students must use Knovel to answer the questions.
The winners will be contacted by Knovel Corporation via email.
A fascinating photo essay of a mobile phone recycling centre at Technology Review.
Should you be yearning to know all about a day in the life of a librarian you can now play the game!
Wiley Interscience publishers have made some variations on classic strategy games … so there’s
Ms Stackman (Move around inside a library, guiding patrons and collecting misshelved books)
Stack Attack (Slide book stacks to sort similar titles before the shelves fill up)
well really …
A way to visualise searches on Google & Facebook: http://www.touchgraph.com/
I’m not a visual person so find this a bit scary but it’s also a bit intriguing … maybe better able to map the results of a search.
