GOOGLE is upset at one result of its fame and has ordered the media to stop using its name as a verb. “To google” — to search online — entered the vernacular as the search engine’s popularity exploded. This summer, the Oxford English Dictionary recognised the term.
Google has fired off legal letters giving strict rules on using its trademark, recently valued at $12.4 billion (£6.6 billion). “We want to be sure that when people talk about ‘Googling’, they mean searching on Google,” it said.
Boingboing.net reported that bloggers were having fun with the rules, suggesting: “Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie.”
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Easier step for mankind
EBay, the online auction house, has become a major source of Moon rocks for scientists facing a shortage of samples, Wired.com reported.
Randy Korotev, a lunar geochemist at Washington University, St Louis, said: “In a sense, I don’t mind. I think these finders are doing a wonderful thing for the scientific community. It’s far cheaper than going to space and bringing the rocks back.”
Back to nature
“Most people see Viagra ads and Nigerian scams as simply more e-mail to delete,” news.com reported. “Alex Dragulescu sees art.”
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Among the Romanian-born computer artist’s creations is a program that draws “spam plants” — images derived from complex equations that analyse junk mail.
His next project is software that will “write” experimental graphical novels based on “text culled from thousands of likeminded blogs across the Net”, news.com added. The Blogbot has already created a first graphical novel, What I Did Last Summer, which draws on writings about the war in Iraq from soldier bloggers. But Mr Dragulescu’s first muse remains spam. “Spam is a random piece of literature, it has unseen effects, it changes all the time,” he said.
Literary tastes
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Amazon now sells groceries online and the site allows users to review them — as they have done with books for years. It seems there remains room for literary licence.
“This opaque, snowy-white demon-semen has severely scarred my tender oesophagus. It burns with the fiery passion of a thousand bovine suns.
Power crazies
In the footsteps of postsecret, the website where users send confessions, comes postcardmanifesto, where you can send your latest “if I ruled the world” rant.
Pledges range from “People who say, I’m not racist, but ...’ to be forced to admit they are racist” to “Dutch Trance to be used as background music for all state funerals” and “the surname Johnstone to be replaced with Funkdog”.
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