Weekend fun: So your wife thinks you're addicted to the Internet? Do you turn on your computer before preparing your dinner when you get home? Try some of the steps below to recover from the Internet addiction:

1) I will have a cup of coffee in the morning and read my newspaper like I used to, before the Internet.
2) I will eat breakfast with a knife and fork and not with one hand typing.
3) I will get dressed before noon.
4) I will make an attempt to clean the house, wash clothes, and plan dinner before even thinking of the Internet.
5) ...

If you're still reading this in this great sunny day, read the complete 12 easy "Internet Addiction Recovery" steps cuz I think you're really addicted to the Internet!

Have a great weekend!

As I mentioned in my previous article on Google's sophisticated news service, Yahoo! guys are not very happy about the enhancements their web search provider made to its news portal. Now, it's time for them to strike back.

I was looking for a new high-speed internet service provider for the past two weeks and couldn't find any good ones in the heart of silicon valley, while I used to get a great service from AT&T before I move here from Berkeley. I read on the news last week that Yahoo! launched its high speed Internet access along with the local phone company, SBC, but I didn't think it's that serious. It was a couple of nights ago when I saw the advertisements all over the Yahoo! mail (even in the body of e-mails), and also on almost everywhere you go on their different web services. Watching TV that night, I saw their new Internet service commercials during the most popular TV shows breaks. Now, this is something serious and they're actively putting their money and effort into.

That is not all Yahoo! fellows are busy with these days. CNET reports: Yahoo turns on TV promotions. Yahoo on Tuesday said the UPN TV network is promoting two new shows ("The Twilight Zone" and "Haunted.") on its Web portal. This is UPN's first major advertising purchase on Yahoo. Advertising revenue on Yahoo has continually declined since the Internet bubble burst (19% less advertising revenue).

Is that all? No! They are now offering RSS feeds for their finance information! You thought Google would be the first one? Now, this is the first time a major portal has endorsed the RSS format for web services. Look at this:

http://rss.finance.yahoo.com/rss/get?ticker=YHOO

Pretty impressive, isn't it? They used to have a simple text page which we used for our research experience in my previous company when you passed a parameter to their stock pages (add d=t&o=t to http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=YHOO&d=t&o=t and see the effect). Then they launched the Comma Seperated Value format called through this method (you can specify the format) which we also used for the research purposes:

http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=YHOO&f=nst1l1c1c2

And now, XML! Pretty amazing, isn't it?

By the way, speaking of Google, Happy 4th birthday you guys! Best of luck!

This one is one of my favorites! You can make your own Bush speech using the words rearranged in the order of your choice and listen to that when you're done... Pretty funny!

This is what I made:

Ladies and Gentlemen! My country is great so that Saddam Hussein will be destroyed and shared by all violent ambitions. Our principles are comprehensive unlike Afghanistan and beyond we created! We've accomplished much persistant proverty to kill deceitful dictators including my own by not innocent lives. Above all, the United States government must never again conflict in further further destruction. America stands commited to just peace, justice and freedom of the world.

The world's leading search engine, Google has released a new and more sophisticated Beta version of their search service.

Google News, run entirely by algorithms that continuously grabs and select stories from 4000 news sites, generating a categorized selection of the news every 15 minutes. The algorithm (which still needs a lot of enhancement IMHO), extracts the keywords from the headlines and full story and detects the similarity of the news on different sources and puts the all together represented by a single headline but different smaller headlines chosen by the smart algorithm which analyzes the words in the story and decides on the importance of them.

The new look of Google News is pretty similar to its older sibling, Yahoo! News with some tweaks to make the stories simpler and easier to follow. Yahoo!, the major customer and shareholder of Google is definitly not gonna like the new service, since the simple design attracts more visitors to Google than Yahoo! which provides the same service. Yahoo! recently replaced the Google logo on the search pages with a little box reading "search technology provided by Google".

Marissa Mayer, a google product manager claims that the implementation is fully compliant with copyright law. They don't generate any news, and they mention the source, why should it be against the copyright law?

I loved it (and I was shocked!) when I saw the lead story today which was totally a negative spin on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech about Iraq. And guess who the source was? The official Iranian news agency [IRNA]. The news service launched by Google is a new and fair selection of the news sources and can attract a lot of attention from the liberal parties because of the equal look at the stories.

I think Google news is gonna be browsed by the Internet crowd as one of the primary sites to visit every morning. It's simple, efficient and does not show any advertisement or unrelated items as opposed to its rivals who show ads, stock quotes and weather forecasts. Google said it plans to see what kind of demand the site generates before it considers possible ways to make money from it.

Google has said repeatedly that it does not want to be a full-service portal, and it does not offer many features, like e-mail and personal home pages, that portals do. But it has expanded its offerings in shopping and some other areas that are important to portals.

One hundred years ago (1902):

1. Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
2. A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
3. The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
4. The average wage in the US was 22 cents an hour.
5. The population of Las Vegas, Nevada was 30.

Have a great rest of the weekend!

I have always been thinking how much netizens are influenced by the smiley faces and how boring e-mails and instant messages would be without the emotional feelings transferred through them.

Twenty years ago (Sept 19, 1982), Scott Fahlman who is known for his work with neural networks, typed :-) in an online message. "This is my little gift to the world, for better or worse.", says Dr. Fahlman.

It was 7 years ago when I first started using the little smilies in my e-mail messages and newsgroup submissions along with the admonition to "read it sideways." and it's been pretty hard to avoid using them (even in formal e-mails, or even worse, in snail mail).

See my collection of smiley faces and emoticons including the new reference for Yahoo! messenger users. ;-)

Full story from Reuters

What are their business plans? This is the question everybody asks when talking about the Santa Clara based search engine, Google. Google is kind of a young search engine as opposed to its rivals who are at least a couple of years older but it has such an amazing popularity among the web surfers that surprises every webmaster. But can the company leverage its popularity to reap long-term profits?

We have all seen a lot of most popular dot-coms gone bankrupt during the past years while they had a large number of visitors. What do you need to prove the [revenue=k*popularity] equation? A good marketing team is all you need.

Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of worldwide sales and field operations at Google, told the E-Commerce Times that the company's growth has coincided with the recognition that measurable results are key to attracting advertising dollars online.

Google is getting its revenue from Yahoo!, targeted text ads and selling search appliances but is that all what they can get? Their smart move I personally liked was releasing the beta version of the API through which you can search their billions of web documents in a second and get the result back. Sergi Brin, co-founder and president of technology at Google believes that by releasing the API, they let millions of brightest engineers around the world develop and innovate for Google. Yes, this is true but what's Google really getting out of this?

Google hasn't limited anyone use the search functions, spell checking and many more capalities through the API. Not even sending the AD or other commercial information and you don't have to mention that the search results are provided by Google on your web site. So, is this another point of failure for the dot-com engineers who do not have enough marketing experience?

I believe this could be a great take off point for them by charging the newly launched search engines who use Google API after they get popular and let them deal with the people who want to sell the ads. This way, they will get their revenue without dealing with small businesses, have their popular search engine and get a lot of brilliant ideas from the sharp API fans. In addition to that, they will have total control of in what order display they search results which can be the key to future negotiations.

"Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too."
-Greg, age 8

"Once I'm done with kindergarten, I'm going to find me a wife!"
-Tom, age 5

"If falling in love is anything like learning how to spell, I don't want to do it. It takes too long."
-Leo, age 7

How Can You Tell If Two Adults Eating Dinner At A Restaurant Are In Love?
"See if the man has lipstick on his face."
-Sandra, age 7

"Don't forget your wife's name... That will mess up the love."
-Roger, age 8

Read more answers from kids about love..

Got an alert today! Quickly checked it, guess what, Lucent Technologies is down by 20% at a dollar twenty cent after forecasting their 9th straight loss (more than 20% less revenue than the third-quarter). It's unbelievable. How would even think of Lucent even being under 20 dollars three years ago and now it stays at one dollar today on Friday the 13th?! The same for Sun Microsystems guys who experience financial problems as well as majority of other companies in high-tech industry. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if Sun or Lucent declare bancrupty next week! Lucent, the troubled network equipment manufacturer is planning to cut 5000 jobs by the end of this year and Sun shares fall almost to 6-year low a little higher than 3 dollars a share.

Is the economy gonna be worse? Many well-known analysts predicted last August that the slow economy would start to recover by the middle of this year. Despite the fact that the statement was made before last September's attacks which helped the market collapse, there barely has been any sign of recovery so far. What happens now is that people sell their stock to avoid losing more money seeing the terrible situation and it makes the market lose value, then more people sell and so on... The sad fact which I'm now used to see and also contributes to this slowness of the economy, is the huge number of business lands in Silicon Valley used to be owned by former dot-commers which are now unoccupied and ready to be leased. Let's keep our fingers crossed and pray for a take off!

Went to the San Francisco Giants game today againts Arizone Diamondbacks! A great baseball match in a perfect weather. More than 41'000 people came to the pacbell park today to watch the Giants cream D'Backs!Barry Bonds hit another home run again, and Russ finished the game with his famous pitches!

See some Exclusive pictures. Go Giants!

Coldplay (plus Ash) were in Berkeley tonight performing at the greek theater. Great concert, thanks to Pablo, Molly and Tekno for the company! I would like to quote myself here:

Good Margarita, pretty chicks, smoking and great music are four fundamental elements of life. That's all you need. (And a high-speed Internet connection).

Greek theatre was packed of the Coldplay fans coming from all over the bay area to listen to their perfect music. If you are in Las Vegas, San Diego or Los Angeles, don't miss their next performances.

Busy weekend ahead, as Molly Blackford said tonight:

I can't believe it's only Friday!

Picture from Coldplay.com

If a barber makes a mistake, It's a new style...
If a driver makes a mistake, It's an accident...
If a doctor makes a mistake, It's an operation...
If an engineer makes a mistake, It's a new venture...
If parents makes a mistake, It's a new generation...
If a politician makes a mistake, It's a new law...
If a scientist makes a mistake, It's a new invention...
If a tailor makes a mistake, It's a new fashion...
If a teacher makes a mistake , It's a new theory...
If our boss makes a mistake, It's our mistake...
If an employee makes a mistake, It's a "MISTAKE"!!!

From: http://www.anvari.org/fun/Job/Mistake.html

Chinese Google fans report on SlashDot:

First it was www.google.com that went down, then the country specific versions, now the wwwN.google.com types. IP addresses work for viewing, but a get/post doesn't work, so no searching. From what I can see, the firewall is just dropping packets on those ports at the 80,443 addresses. You can ping google, and see what open ports are on, but a raw GET on port 80 or 443 does nothing.

Will Google strike back? Or Chinese people have to use google.yahoo.com to do their searches?!! Human rights activists say more than 30,000 people are employed in China to keep an eye on websites, chat rooms and private e-mail messages.

Full story from BBC