The interview was going swimmingly until I met up with one interviewer who was apparently anti-military. Using the Google "Do No Evil" mantra as a pretense, he asked me how many people I’d killed when I served. When I explained to him that I was MI, he then asked if I could estimate how many people were killed because of the intelligence I’d gathered. The implication was I was either an evil, efficient killer or an incompetent one - a real no-win situation.
Apropos of nothing, really - - it just reminded me of a great moment from from Benicio Del Toro’s job interview scene in The Way of The Gun which I wanted to share:
Jason asked for a translation of this French story via his Del.icio.us feed, and I had a few minutes to kill before my flight, so figured I’d take a crack at it. It’s been approximately 1 million years since I last opened a French textbook; consider yourself warned… ;-)
Could Mahalo mark the return of the web directories?
by Sebastien Delahaye
Friday June 1, 2007
“We’re here to help.” It’s the slogan of Mahalo, a search engine just launched in Alpha version. Created by Jason Calacanis, founder and ex-chairman of Weblogs Inc (which publishes many blogs, including Engadget, the most popular blog in the world), Mahalo does not play in the same league as Google. Where the American giant uses complex algorithms to provide relevant results, Mahalo provides a hand-picked selection of sites with accompanying notes. To produce these results, Calacanis employs 40 people as “guides” who traverse the Web in the search of relevant information on precise subjects.
For the moment, Mahalo contains 4000 pages of results, only in English, on subjects as various as scientology, Nicolas Sarkozy and the founder of the company. For requests which don’t have results pages yet, Mahalo provides Google’s results. In the long term, Calacanis wants Mahalo to provide results pages for the 10,000 most popular search phrases on the Web. This goal also enables us to guess at Mahalo’s true objective: to appear in the first page of Google results for those same requests, in order to make the company profitable. Seen in this light, Mahalo seems to be taking particular aim at the space currently occupied by the Wikipédia encyclopedia on Google.
In addition, Mahalo, proclaimed the “the world’s first human-powered search engine”, also closely resembles the DMOZ directory. On DMOZ, the role of the paid Mahalo “guides” is held by volunteer “experts.” Created in 1998, DMOZ today provides results for 700,000 subjects and in nearly 80 languages. Also worth noting is that DMOZ, whose contents are freely reusable, is published by AOL, a company for which Jason Calacanis worked until last November.
From NetworkWorld: You might be digitizing books on the Web without knowing it thanks to this stealthy anti-spam technology
You know those pesky but necessary CAPTCHA boxes whose squiggly letters and digits you need to retype to make use of certain parts of sites such as Yahoo, Wikipedia and PayPal?
A computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon is looking to replace many of those boxes with anti-spam boxes of his own for the purpose of helping to digitize and make searchable the text from books and other printed materials. To boot, the system could help companies better secure their Web sites.
Why does Google Apps for my domain, which I pay for, have fewer features (and screwier authentication) than the free version?
Today’s annoyance - Google docs publish to blog feature apparently doesn’t exist at all in Google Apps… grrr.
And on a related note, it would be very cool if G added a "watch this page" feature to Google Docs. I really want to use it more aggressively, but creating another bin that I need to check for updates is a non-starter.
Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.
Who besides Jobs gets away with selling vaporware to this extent anymore?
I personally don’t think I’ll be buying a phone that lacks any tactile feedback. (Similarly, I won’t buy another portable MP3 player that doesn’t allow me to change my own batteries… )
This has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I normally write about here except that I thought M might enjoy it. Great photos from a sandcastle contest in British Columbia.
