Governor Rick Perry & H. Ross Perot open Nanotech Conference, nanoTX ’06
Yesterday morning, Governor Rick Perry and H. Ross Perot each gave opening remarks at the nanoTX nanotechnology conference here in Dallas.
Kelly Kordzik (President of the board of the Texas Nanotechnology Initiative organization), and Rich Templeton (CEO of Texas Instruments) each gave some introductory remarks. Templeton’s talk was interesting, touching on work done by TI, and on how Nanotech is still in its infancy and very much dependent upon government investment/support. Governor Rick Perry spoke for a short while, mainly trying to hype up his support of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund which has enabled a lot of research in the field of nanotech, enabling Texas to be on the leading end of the work, worldwide.
Read on for more details…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/28/2006
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Filed under: Futurism, General, technology future, Futurism, nanotech
To Use Sitemaps, or Not To Use Sitemaps, That’s the Question
It was really great when Google launched its Sitemaps (recently renamed to Webmaster Tools, as part of their Webmaster Central utilities) – when that happened it was a really great indication of a new time where technicians who wished to help make their pages findable would not automatically be considered “evil” and the SEs might provide tools to help technicians disclose their pages directly. Yahoo soon followed with their own tools, named Yahoo! Site Explorer, and surely MSN will bow to peer pressure with their own submission system and tools.
Initially, I thought that there wasn’t significant advantage to me for using these systems, because I’d already developed good methods for providing our page links to the search engines through the natural linking found in our site navigation systems.
Why should I expend yet more time and resources to dynamically produce the link files?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/19/2006
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Filed under: General, Google, Site Structure, Yahoo Google-Sitemaps, google-webmaster-tools, Sitemaps, URL-submission, yahoo-site-explorer
Will Google Keep Minority Report from Happening? Eric Schmidt’s Chat with Danny Sullivan
This morning at the Search Engine Strategies Conference 2006 in San Jose, Danny Sullivan interviewed the Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in the conference’s main keynote session. Others such as the Search Engine Roundtable have reported on most of the content of that session, but one little thing Danny mentioned particularly grabbed my attention. Read on, and I’ll elaborate….
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/09/2006
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Filed under: Conferences, Futurism, General, Google, Security, technology cyberpunk, danny-sullivan, Eric-Schmidt, Google, Philip-K.-Dick, PKD, privacy, SES-Conference
Attending the 2006 Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose?
I’ll be attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose next week. Drop me a line if you’d like to meet me during the conference!
There are a handful of sessions I’m interested in sitting in on, and I’m looking forward to having dinner one night with some of my old friends from college who work in Silicon Valley.
Some of you may be interested to know that Stephan Spencer is scheduled to appear on a panel on Blog & Feed Search SEO, though I’m thinking I’ll have to miss that in order to attend the simultaneous session on Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issue. Sorry, Stephan! 😉
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/02/2006
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, Conferences, General, News danny-sullivan, feedburner, RSS, search-engine-strategies, search-engines, ses
Yahoo update beefs up on authority sites
Aaron Wall posted a blog about how Yahoo!’s recent algorithm update has apparently increased weighting factors for links and authority sites.
Predictibly, a number of folx have complained in the comments added to Yahoo’s “Weather Report” blog about the update. Jeremy Zawodny subsequently posted that their search team was paying close attention to the comments, which is always nice to hear.
Coincidentally, I’d also just recently posted about Google’s apparent use of page text to help identify a site’s overall authoritativeness for particular keywords/themes.
As they say, there’s nothing really new under the sun. I wonder if the search engines are all returning to the trend of authority/hub focus in algorithm development? It’s a strong concept and useful for ranking results, so the methodology for identifying authorities and hubs is likely here to stay.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/20/2006
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Filed under: General, Yahoo Algorithms, Authoritative-Hubs, authorities, Google, search-engine-algorithms, search-engines, SEO, Yahoo
Through the Scanner Darkly
Seems strange, but there are only two degrees of separation between me and the late, famous, science fiction author, Philip K. Dick (“PKD”). If you aren’t familiar, Dick was the author of a number of stories which have since been made into major films such as: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and the recently-released film A Scanner Darkly. I’ve just got two degrees of separation from Philip K. Dick because of my “spare time” work on writing a soon-to-be-published book about two of his friends and protégés, Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock. In the course of writing that book, (A Comprehensive Dual Bibliography of James P. Blaylock & Tim Powers), I asked the authors questions about their old friend, Dick, and I spoke with other friends of his as well. He was apparently a very interesting character — brilliant, and more than a bit mysterious as well. PKD had a few unusual religious visions and appeared to suffer occasionally from paranoia and other schizophrenic bouts.
Last weekend, I got to see the most recent film inspired by a Philip K. Dick story, A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater. The film was really great, telling a futuristic story of an undercover cop who becomes addicted to the drug of choice for his surveillance subjects, and then becomes required to spy on himself in the course of his investigation. The undercover cops all wear these camouflage suits which morph together features from millions of individuals to obscure their identies from others and from each other. The film is astoundingly well-made, and is pretty entertaining overall.
I saw that Nelson Minar, one of Google’s engineers, is also apparently a reader of PKD, and he blogged his impressions about A Scanner Darkly, too. He agrees that it’s good, though I disagree with him: he thinks it won’t appeal to people who haven’t read the book, and I think it will. It strikes too many chords with people, even today, and the actor’s humor in the early parts saves it from being too dry/boring.
Dick’s stories still seem relevant, over twenty years after his death. His stories contrasted realistic characters against a twisted reality where commercialism and technology seem to’ve evolved past a reasonable point. He played around with the nature of reality itself, and his work seemed to segue smoothly into the cyberpunk movement, which I previously posted about.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/18/2006
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Filed under: Futurism, General, Security, technology A-Scanner-Darkly, artificial-intelligence, biometrics, camouflage-suit, cyberpunk, flexible-display-screens, Futurism, James-P.-Blaylock, Minority-Report, nanotech, Philip-K.-Dick, PKD, science-fiction, Susumu-Tachi, Tim-Powers, Turing-tests
Towards a New Cyberpunk Reality
I recently discovered something interesting about my company, Verizon.
Do you remember the old Oliver Stone tv mini-series from the early 90s called “Wild Palms”? It was about a dystopian future of America where a fascist political group has risen to power, headed up by a senator who founded a new philosophy called “Synthiotics” or “New Realism”, which apparently involves the next stage of human evolution and virtual reality (VR).
The Senator, named Anton Kreutzer, owns a company named Mimecom which has developed some sort of advanced VR technology and 3-d display technology which they are about to deploy out to households through a television company, called Channel 3, in a new drama series they’ve named “Church Windows”. They seemed to be using Church Windows as a platform for propagandizing Synthiotic tenets, as well. The Senator is seeking one last piece of technology from Japan, a “Go Chip”, which will essentially give him eternal life, and seal up his political power. The Go Chip is named after the game of Go, an ancient Chinese strategy game that has been used by artificial intelligence researchers as a test case for building systems which can learn and immitate human intelligence (though, they don’t really spell out that AI tie-in during the series).
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| Berlin’s Sony Centre in Potsdamer Platz reflects the global reach of a Japanese corporation. Much cyberpunk action occurs in urbanized, artificial landscapes, and “city lights at night” was one of the genre’s first metaphors for cyberspace (in Gibson’s Neuromancer). |
The Wild Palms series was likely intended to be a very cutting-edge, conceptual story that was inspired in large part by the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. One of the prime “founders” of the cyberpunk movement, the author William Gibson, actually puts in a cameo appearance in the series, as well. Oliver Stone likely intended the story to use semiotic literary devices as well, since many of the plot items and names seemed to be intended to have multiple layers of meanings.
Here’s where fiction begins to turn into reality. MimEcom was the name of an actual ecommerce/hosting/technology firm that was later started up in San Francisco, and considered IPOing in 2000, though the dot-bombs happened, and it halted plans to go public.
Later, MimEcom changed their company name to “Totality”.
In about 2005, Totality was acquired by MCI. MCI was merged into Verizon later on in 2005. The Totality part was folded under the Verizon Business division of the company. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/14/2006
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Filed under: Futurism, General ai, artificial-intelligence, cyberpunk, future, Futurism, Go-Game, Google, MCI, Mimecom, science-fiction, search-engines, search-pets, semiotics, technology, Verizon, virtual-reality, Wild-Palms, William-Gibson
Back from July 4th vacation
You may’ve noticed that I took a few days off from the grind to spend the long July 4th weekend with friends, swimming about the Guadalupe River at a ranch in Hunt, Texas.
If you’re curious about what I look at, you can check out this pic of me on flickr that my friend Suzanne took during our trip.
Now that I’m back and maybe starting to get acclimated in my new position at Verizon, I’m hoping to post here a bit more regularly.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/11/2006
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Filed under: General personal-notes, vacation
If you can’t do good design or good SEO… use witchcraft!
I just read this story on CNN today about how some firms offer to optimize your website through applying principles of vaastu shastra and feng shui to increase usage.
Interesting idea: If you can’t do good engineering for usability, good graphic design, and good SEO to bring traffic to your site, use witchcraft!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/26/2006
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Filed under: General, News, Search Engine Optimization, SEO feng-shui, SEO, usability, vaastu-shastra, website-design, witchcraft
Zawodny’s Cool Diet Tips
I noticed with interest that Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! fame has been posting some of his personal dieting tips on his blog. These are really pretty good tips, IMHO, for all of us in the IT industries who work desk jobs and are constantly fighting the “Battle of the Bulge”, as they say.
I find it interesting that I have generally been following most of these guidelines by coincidence, though I’m not nearly so disciplined (nor anal-retentive) enough to be tracking my weight in spreadsheets and such. I don’t even own a scale!
Even if I don’t track measurements, I’ve never fully devolved into lazy habits, and I’ve kept up with moderate exercise and such since high school. Just a couple of weeks ago, my sister and I participated in a charity 5K run for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure near here in Plano, and I’m fairly pleased to’ve clocked in at a respectable 31 minutes.
Jeremy’s dieting tips seem really pretty good to me — I highly recommend them.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/14/2006
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Filed under: General diet, dieting, losing-weight, weight-loss
