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Today is a particularly special day in the blogosphere, as two sites that supply great links to their readers are marking ten year anniversaries. Gerard Vlemming’s site, the Presurfer first began publishing on September 24, 2000. On the same day, Everlasting Blort was founded. Both sites still update, bringing you the newest, strangest, and quite interesting links from all over the web.
The Presurfer International Headquarters is closed for today. I’m having a party right now! It’s not a big party because there’s just me. But I’m wearing a funny little hat and there are meatballs. Because today marks the 10th anniversary of The Presurfer.
The Presurfer began 10 years ago and has evolved from a personal link page to what it is today. Is that really something to celebrate? Yes, I think it is. According to The Internet Archive the lifespan of the average web site is 44 to 75 days. The Presurfer has been here for 3,650 days.
Happy “blogiversary” to both sites from your friends at Neatorama! Link
(Image generated at Image Chef)
So someone leaves a phone on a bar, someone else picks it up and plays with it, and the next thing you know Gizmodo is taking it apart and declaring that this disguised iPhone is a test model of the not-yet-released iPhone 4G. The blog then outlined all the phone’s new features. Apple is taking the accidental leak very seriously.
In a blog post on Monday detailing how it obtained the phone, Gizmodo said it was left by an iPhone software engineer at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a German specialty store and beer garden in Redwood City.
The person who found the phone peddled it to Gizmodo, which bought it for $5,000, Nick Denton, chief executive of Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, said by instant message.
His company’s sites have had a longstanding practice of paying for scoops, and the windfall was tangible. Traffic spiked on Monday, and at midday more than one million visitors stopped by the site in one hour to see pictures of the coveted gadget.
By late in the day, reports began to surface on the Internet that Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, had called Gizmodo to get the device back. Mr. Denton declined to comment, saying any conversation between Mr. Jobs and Gizmodo would most likely have been off the record.
From the Upcoming 
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According to this infographic, there are 133,000,000 blogs on the internet, which makes me kind of proud to work for four of the top 1000 blogs. The biggest part of the blogging community update their sites 3-4 times a week, and spend 1 to 3 hours a week doing it. Looking through these statistics, it appears that I am a weird blogger, indeed. Link -via the Presurfer
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A lot of Twitter users are impersonating celebrities, using the social networking service to send bogus tweets on behalf of someone else. That is against the site’s policies, and a ostensibly a crime. Now, for the first time, Britain’s High Court is setting precedent by ordering one anonymous perpetrator to cease and desist. They simply sent him a tweet.
Andre Walker at Griffin Law said the anonymous Tweeter targeted by the writ will get a message from the High Court the next time they open their online account.
“Whoever they are, they will be told to stop posting, to remove previous posts and to identify themselves to the High Court via a web link form,” he said.
Since its debut a little over a week ago, I've been playing with Wolfram|Alpha. For those of you who don't know, it is an ambitious project by Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame).
Wolfram Alpha (I know, technically, it's Wolfram|Alpha, but I don't want to type in that vertical bar all the time) is not a search engine, in a sense that it returns webpages as query results like Google does - rather, it is a "computational knowledge engine." You and I may simply call it an "answer engine," ask it a question and it'll come up with the (usually right on the money) answer.
What is butter? Wolfie knows - it'll display the average nutrition facts. Ask it to convert $1 to British pounds, or the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who starred in Casablanca? How is the weather in New York on May 26, 1987? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Impressive, eh?
Now, Stephen is a very smart guy. Indeed, he wrote his first paper on particle physics at the tender age of 16, received a PhD from Caltech at 20, and became a professor there at 21. And to be fair, Wolfram Alpha is very young and heavily geared towards computations. Furthermore, the scope of what the engine "knows" in terms of content is limited to areas covered by trusted sources like reference libraries fed to it by its programmers.
But currently, there's one large gaping hole missing from Wolfram Alpha: it is blind to blogs. Sure it knows about the meaning of life, and it has its own blog, but it knows nothing - nada, zip, zilch - about the blogosphere.
Technorati? Maybe you meant technology instead. According to Wolfie, Gizmodo = komodo (the island, the language, or the movie - but strangely not the animal); Techcrunch = Techuchulco (a city in Mexico). Boing Boing = Boina (a volcano).
Ask it about Neatorama and Wolfie thinks that you mean Panorama (which I learned is actually a city in Greece, that, at the time of my query, has a warm 73°F weather with relative humidity of 50%, wind of 7 mph and few clouds).
At least this blog fared better than Lifehacker, which got "lumpsucker" instead.
Heck, ask what is a blog?, and it'll think you're asking about logarithms:
Still, overall, I think Wolfram Alpha is a brilliant first step towards (dare I say it) an artificial intelligence - a universal computer a la Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The Last Question. And I'm sure the hardworking people over at Wolfram Research will rectify this oversight soon.
But whatever you do, don't get Wolfie mad. This is what you'll get.
If you don't stop, it'll probably shove you out the pod bay door ...
