S Anand

Remember the US site that lets people auction their votes? Now they’ve moved it to Bulgaria, out of the US jurisdiction. The Internet is truly borderless!

Biz, AOLiza and other chatbots are programs that lurk chat space. Have a look at their conversations, especially this one with a guy who was jilted. It’s bewildering, and yet…

AdReady has a neat idea: pop up advertisements near the mouse pointer, when the mouse is sitting idle. Cool. But I don’t want anything popping up when I’m reading! Besides, since this is an easy idea to copy, I doubt they should have it as their USP.

In 1900, David Hilbert outlined 23 unsolved problems in mathematics. Many of these have been solved today, with the notable exception of the Riemann Hypothesis. Today, if we solve any of these, we get $1 million.

I’ve always liked devices attached to the Internet. Web cameras are a hot favourite. Earthcam is a portal for web cameras. Google has more webcam directories.

Wanted Joseph Bosco, for the crime of ogling at girls in Sweden and not even writing to me about it. Better do so quickly before someone searches for your name and finds it on my site!

A guy called Baumgartner at the RPI set up a site that lets people auction their votes. Users of Gnutella (and Napster) are free-riding. People are faking videos real-time. Author’s reviews are forged. Life in the 21st century doesn’t look promising 😉

The Economist has an article on The failure of new media — about how the Internet’s a disappointment. In fact they have lots of articles on the Internet.

Amazon.com moved retailers to the web, and disintermediated retail inventory. SimonSays.com is a publisher (Simon & Schuster) on the Web. Stephen King‘s an author on the Web. You can buy his book from him directly, and online. He’s releasing The Plant in installments. Each installment will be about a dollar. That’s pretty cheap for an online book, but then, he only has server storage and tracking costs and all that. He says he’ll stop writing the next part if people don’t pay enough. Payment rate is over 75% so far. This is an experiment to watch.

AstaLaVista is an ‘underground search engine’. I’d been there before, and since its survived this long, it must be good.