Dan Olsen’s Weblog

I was reading through my feed subscriptions and found that President Bush mentioned bloggers. He says that bloggers can help show the good going on in Iraq as opposed to the negative stories the media shows us.

A video of the President’s question and answer session in West Virginia where he mentions blogs can be found here.

Google sure has a come a long way, check out their 1998 webpage saved and archived on the web time machine, also check out the webpages of other engines such as Yahoo, MSN, and Excite around the time.

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For anyone who follows Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog you will see that he has made it possible to login to his blog using InfoCard. His blog runs WordPress which is written by PHP. You can find his announcement post here. Although the InfoCard hasn’t been active for very long the first attacker has already appeared in his subscribers list. Kim mentions how this first attack is not a bad thing.

I’ve been following the InfoCard technology with some communication with Kim Cameron and Mike Jones. I didn’t think I would be that interested in Identity when I started working for Phil Windley. However, as I’ve watched InfoCard and by attending the Internet Identity Workshop last October I have found that I have a bigger interest in identity than I thought. Speaking of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), this is where I will put in a plug for IIW 2006 Part A. Don’t forget to go and register today!

I was having problems with Windows Media Player on my Mac so I went to reinstall it. I soon found out that Microsoft will know longer update Windows Media Player for Mac. Instead they provide Flip4Mac which allows you to play Windows Media files inside of Quicktime. I have yet to try it out but I hope it is nicer than the clunky Windows Media Player 9 I’ve had to put up with on my Mac.

It has been announced that Google has acquired Writely. For all those people who have been wondering whether or not Google was ever going to come out with a Web Office Suite, the answer is now known. Writely has been the best online web suite that I have looked at. I am excited to see where Google is able to take this.

Today Peter Norvig from Google came and spoke to the Computer Science department here at Brigham Young University. I was glad I was able to attend because he turned out to be a very entertaining speaker. His talk was entitled “AI in the Middle: Mediating Between Author and Reader”. He focused on using artificial intelligence in order to disambiguate written text to provide improved search and question answering.

One of the examples he talked about in terms of knowledge was having Google know that water flows downhill. The reason he gave this example was to show that not all knowledge is important or search worthy. The search term “water flows downhill” contains less than 0.0002% of indexed web pages. This example brought up the point that time should not be wasted trying to acquire all knowledge but to stick to acquiring the knowledge that provides the most results.

Peter Norvig will be the keynote speaker tomorrow at the 6th Annual Family History Technology Workshop at Brigham Young University. He will be talking about “The Future of Search”. Anyone who has an opportunity to hear him speak, I highly recommend doing so.