Back when Google released their Desktop Search beta, I “expressed my dissapointment”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000409.html about their failure to support alternatives to the dominant windows webbrowser. Happily, “they corrected this”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000449.html by the time they released the finished version.

They still don’t have a Mozilla/Firefox version of their toolbar.

Still, I find it notable that they have recently released a Mozilla/Firefox specific feature that should be a big boon to users. They are including markup in their search results that will cause Firefox to prefetch the referenced page so that it will appear quickly/instantly when the user clicks the link.

As a frequent searcher, I’m looking forward to this. I’m already using an extension to add thumbnail previews to search results so I can more quickly zero in on the best candidates.

bq. Google Information for Webmasters

bq. On some searches, Google uses a special link tag supported by Firefox and Mozilla to instruct the browser to download the top search result before the user clicks on the result. When the user clicks on the top result, the destination page will load faster than before. This tag is only inserted when it is likely that the user will click on the first link.

Yub.com, looks like “social networking for brand-whores”:http://www.yub.com.

Clever idea, but it makes me feel icky.

Just for fun, I decided to search the Yub member profiles for people that live withing 20 miles of me. I found 16 people I plan on avoiding if I ever see them at a cocktail party. Though a big portion of them seem like plants since they all seem to have the same handfull of Yub-friends down in Newport Beach, CA.

I went looking at the website for “Lovemarks”:http://www.lovemarks.com/index.php. Lovemarks claims to look at a “future beyond brands” and I went looking at it to see if I could find any anecdotal data about how someone who uses “mystery, sensuality and intimacy” to inspire “loyalty beyond reason” (like “Bookcrossing”:http://www.bookcrossing.com ) turns that into profit.

Given such fluffy language, it was probably a fololish quest so I shouldn’t have been suprised that i found nothing of what i was after on the site. They do have a book to sell, but from the table of contents, I don’t have much hope of finding any of the meat I’m looking for.

If you believe in Lovemarks, then you believe that even in this day and age, that most advertising is just as woolly headed as ever, where half your ad budget is wasted (if only you knew which half).

It’s quite a contrast from the world of pay-for-performance advertising, where Google, and its customers, seem to be doing so well (which is probably why “Google is #14”:http://www.lovemarks.com/lm/read.php?LID=636 on the Lovemark rankings)

Personally, I’m not all that interested in Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy with a corporation, but if that’s your kink…

Not sure how I feel about this. ZoomInfo builds profiles on people based on information found on the Internet and other public sources.

It’s odd what they’ve come up with on me:

ZoomInfo Web Summary: Erik Speckman

It took me a while to appreciate just how amazing it is that scientists have “discovered soft tissue”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/, including possible blood vessiles, in a 70-million year old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil.

This is another one of those things that plays havoc with my sense of time. It is incredible to me that we have preserved flesh soft flesh from millions of years ago, even more so than seeing “100 year old color photographs of the russian empire”:http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/, which was a head-trip when I first saw it, and still sends my head spinning.

Over on “Slapnose”:http://slapnose.com, Anthony wonders “how Inteligent Design proponents will spin this”:http://slapnose.com/archives/2005/03/24/godless_scientists_discover_dinosaur_soft_tissue/. I don’t know, but their fellow-travellers in faith, the creationists, must love it, because in their minds its “more evidence for their young earth hypothesis”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2004-51%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=dinosaur+blood+%22young+earth%22. By their reasoning, there is no way that anything like blood cells (or other soft tissue) could possibly be preserved for millions of years, and that therefore the earth is young and the story of Genesis is the real deal.

Of course, I don’t see why 70 million year old marrow is any harder to believe than say, turning water to wine.

My friend Jeff is venturing out of the womb of Live Journal with his new blog, Rock and Roll McDonald’s, but the question is: does he have anything to say?