widget = ultra-WIDe-field telescope for GRB Early Timing

I like widgets. But if you want to take a step back from blog bling, and instead think about a perspective that carries a bit more weight (Carl Sagan died ten years ago - 20 DEC 1996), this Tokyo WIDGET (ultra-WIDe-field telescope for GRB Early Timing of optical flashes and unexpected transient sources) does the trick

bookmarks are for oldies

Bookmarks are for old people. I have some regular readers. I can sorta guess their ages. The younger ones revisit my page by using Google to search on "benmiller" or "ben miller" or believe it or not "benmiller.com." Even with incipient Alzheimer's I can remember the www and save a few of my rapidly dwindling (probabilistic) store of seconds of (borderline) lucidity. Youth, so truly wasted on the young. For the young'uns, my referrer log shows variants of:





The oldies use bookmarks, so when they revisit my log shows no referrer:



followup:
* more common across all age groups than I thought according to AOL search data leaked earlier this year discussed in the context of the self-serving nature of the end-of-year lists of popular search terms offered by the rival search engines. [ref]

Google co-op custom search engine

This is an experiment. I uploaded my Google [RSS] Reader OPML to Google Co-op. It seems to do much the same that lijit does for me.



Admittedly, there is a bit of self-referential (how unusual!) circularity here. While I don't think this is a tool to expand my worldview, it is an excellent card catalog for my existing perspective (as determined by my preferred information gatekeepers listed in my OPML). With jonswift (gets all his "news from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Jay Leno monologues"), chemgasm (libertarian doper), fafblog (hysterically erudite), and Brad DeLong ("fair and balanced almost every day") in there, I am assured of great results when trying to identify, say, the stupidest man alive or the link between recreational pharmaceuticals (esp hallucinogens such as LSD) and the rather staid policy wonks at the Cato Institute.

The only problem I can see is that because the OPML is output to a file as opposed to a URL (cf bloglines, newsgator) I will need to go through the process again if I want the search engine to reflect my evolving interests as embedded in my OPML. I've only just discovered by doing a search that Time Magazine resides in my OPML, but because I have it tagged with some sort of priority indicator that means I would not see a post under normal circumstances I've long forgotten it's there. Obviously, having dynamically updating OPML at a URL is a feature that will be offered soon, but I think Google is remiss in not having addressed this already.

reference: Google Operating System