Last weekend was a good time from a cultural standpoint. I recommend both of the plays I saw:

Seattle Children’s Theater: Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like

ACT Theater:  The Clean House (Read the Seattle Times Review)

I’ve recently discovered Vernor Vinge and have enjoyed several of his books: Rainbows End, the Hugo award winning A Fire upon the Deep, and A Deepness in the Sky; notable from the standpoint of well thought out imagination and “first person” descriptions of non-human societies. 

Last time the Mariners had a home game, I was stuck for more than an hour in traffic trying to get on to I90, which I could have avoided had I left work 20 minutes earlier. 

To help avoid this situation, Joe Goldberg has put up a very handy schedule of Mariners home games that you can import into Outlook.

[In case any Michael Affronti or other Microsoft Outlook program managers are listening:  the process for importing a calendar from the web into Outlook is way too complicated. There is a real possibility of Microsoft losing business as people migrate to web calendars that make this process simpler. Particularly in the area of social online calendars Microsoft seems to be losing out in a big way.

I realize there are security considerations about a more seamless process for importing appointments from the web, but one of the key features of a modern OS ought to be as a layer that securely connects local apps with the internet– put users in control but don’t burden us with unnecessary details.]

1-800-GOOG-411 is a very cool Google service, currently in Google Labs, that provides free voice 411 using high quality voice recognition and speech synthesis.  To use it, just dial that number from any phone and say the city. state and business you’re looking for.  

Here’s a sample voice session from DownloadSquad:

1-800-GOOG-411 joins 1-800-FREE-411 from Jingle Networks and Tellme’s mobile 411 app. 

1-800-FREE-411 already controls six percent of the US mobile directory market.  Tellme’s application allow users to search using their voice and interact with the results on their phone’s screen; Tellme was recently acquired by Microsoft.

All of these applications are signs of the coming collapse of the walled garden that carriers have traditionally enacted around voice and data services, spurred by advances in mobile phone platforms and the reduced cost of VOIP and voice recognition applications. 

The aggressive positions being staked out by Google and Microsoft in the mobile data services space will undoubtedly disrupt the carriers’ business models. 

That’s great news for customers’ wallets– carriers formerly used their virtual monopoly over the customer to charge $1.25 for directory assistance. 

It’s also great news for innovation and the growth of a mobile services ecosystem. Carriers have the potential to offer tremendously valuable mobile services to their users, and tremendously valuable data to advertisers, but have lacked the technical firepower to effectively do either. In the end, for the more enlightened carriers, the disruption caused by open mobile platforms and data services will work to their benefit as well.

George Bush is once again at the top of the Google search results for failure, ironically enough because of the administrations attempts on whitehouse.gov to point the finger at Congress for failure in Iraq.

Searchengineland.com describes how the administration went wrong: 

Remember how Google introduced a link bomb fix in January that, among other things, finally got US President George W. Bush out of first page of results for searches on miserable failure and failure at Google? Bush is back, at least for failure, and the White House has only itself to blame.

What happened? The White House used the word “failure” on Bush’s page, which resulted in the page becoming relevant for the query again. If the White House was smart, they’d have realized it can never ever ever ever use the words “miserable” or “failure” or both of them together without risking showing up in Google’s top results for searches on those words.

… Google’s never explained how its link bomb fix works. However, it’s widely assumed that Google looks for an unusually high number of links using certain words pointing at a page that doesn’t use those words. If lots of people link to a particular page at the White House site using the word “failure” in the anchor text — but the White House page itself doesn’t use that word — Google guesses there’s a link bomb happening and defuses it.

The same site has an amusing article on how Bush inadvertertantly or intentionally condemned all future presidents to the “miserable failure bomb”:

The Bush Administration almost certainly tried to alter Google results itself through a change it made to the White House web site in September 2006. It redirected the Bush bio page to a general page about all US presidents. As I wrote, that move would likely have condemned future US presidents to also be ranked for the term:

Why the change? My money is on the Bush Administration finally getting someone smart about search engines in to “solve” the miserable failure problem. The new page is a common page that potentially may be used by all US Presidents, rather than one specifically about George W. Bush. All those links making the old page come up will now make the overall page for ALL US Presidents rank well for that term.

SEO is becoming part of popular and political culture.

I’m pleased to announce the beta release of the Jobster Blog Buddy, a little project whipped up by myself and the very talented Tony Wright.

The Blog Buddy is a Flash widget that can be embedded in any web site to display the Jobster profiles of recent visitors.  (We respect users’ privacy, users are shown on the Blog Buddy only if they opt in.)  The idea is to help blog authors and their readers learn more about each other. 

One unique feature of the blog buddy is its interactivity, allowing readers to expand the card for a user and learn more about that user without having to navigate away from the site. This is both faster for the user and better for the site owner. 

As you mouse over the card of a visitor, the card expands to display more information about that user, including any job openings they’re hiring for and their Super Star tags.  (See the screenshots below or check out a live demo.

Normal	Expanded

The Blog Buddy is still in beta, but I encourage you to give it a try if you have a blog or want your profile to be visible on blogs you visit. 

One caveat: The Blog Buddy is working well with IE7 and Firefox, but for reasons that aren’t yet understand it’s not working with IE6.

If you added the Blog Buddy to your site before Thursday, April 5, please replace the code on your site with the latest version from Jobster for improved IE7 compatability.

Technical notes: Technically, the Blog Buddy is interesting because it combines a REST web service with a flash widget which consumes the data from the service.  (Here is a sample XML feed from the service.)

If anyone wanted to build a variant of the Blog Buddy which used HTML instead of Flash, or even to create a mashup that combined the data with other web services, it would be easy to do so.

This was my first experience working in Flash and Actionscript, and I found it be a generally positive experience relative to Ajax development, though not without challenges, especially around Internet Explorer and the required EOLAS workarounds. I’ll write more about that later. 

Google’s TiSP is, of course, just an April Fool’s joke. I did enjoy Google’s edgier-than-usual humor around the fine line between relevant advertising and invasion of privacy.

To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward.

Is Google TiSP safe and reliable?
Google TiSP ensures reliable throughput through the power of fiber, which has been proven through extensive research to effectively facilitate consistent data flow with minimal latency. And you can rest assured that under no circumstances will the TiSP system ever expose your privates.

Consider the iPod.  The simple hierarchical drilldown UI popularized by the iPod is well suited to the small screens and limited input options on mobile devices.

If you wanted to create an open platform for building network powered applications based on this style of UI, what would be the best markup language to use?

One possibility would be to redefine the interpretations of subsets of XHTML– perhaps nested lists with the appropriate CSS attribute could be displayed using a drilldown UI, for example.

Another, perhaps better option is to use OPML, which already has a lot of the right semantics and is considerably more constrained that XHTML.  A link node could link to another OPML document, a traditional XHTML document, or perhaps to application specific behaviors that run on the client device.

In the case of Beyond411, things like yellow page category menus and categorized plugins could be expressed very naturally as OPML hierarchical menus.