Google Blog Search

Google now have a blog search engine - it returns a very short list of blogs which I can't believe are all that it has in it's vaults, as well as individual post mentioning your search terms. It's still in beta, so I guess we can look for improvements.
Google Blog Search

Getting your blog noticed

I've been spending a lot of time trying to make my blogs more sticky and more noticable lately. Have become obsessed by Google ratings which I've been tracking on Digital Point's Keyword Tracker. BlogPulse have an interesting app that analyses searches for specific keywords, and back links and creates graphs so you can see trends. Not sure of the technology behind it. Have just added my three blogs. It actually takes hours of plugging away to make sure that any particular website is visible on the web.

Stumbled Upon

I just stumbled upon Stumble Upon which is a kind of social networking site. I have my own profile there which includes a kind of auto-blog (I'm enjoying coining new blog words!). As I stumble upon a new website I rate it good or bad, and Stumble Upon keeps track of my preferences. Social Networking is one way to deal with the enormous amount of information available on the internet. The logic is that people like me will like stuff like me. I can find people who like the same sort of stuff as me by joining social networking sites and making my preferences known.

Note that Stumble Upon requires you to download and install their tool bar in order to participate.

Virtual Economy Bleeds Over into Real Life

Spent the weekend at my brother's house. He's a very keen MMOG* player and I got quite interested in his hobby. EVE, which my brother plays, is a small game with only 70,000 players. World of Warcraft which is probably the largest game has about 1.5 million players!

The really interesting thing is that the currency used in his game, ISK, is starting to be traded in real life. People with a lot of ISK are auctioning it on Ebay for instance. The thing is that money makes the online world go around, and earning it is a bit of a drag, especially at the beginning. So if you have real money, why not get a headstart by buying some ISK? Seems like standard capitalism. But ISK is only useable in a virtual computer game world. Apparently all this currency speculation is causing inflation in the game economy. The going rate for 100 million ISK seems to be about US$20. Playing the game costs �12 per month which is also about US$20. As I write this there are 282 ebay items listed under EVE Online ISK. Chris tells me that it is so profitable that there are places in China where people constantly play EVE in ISk factories creating virtual cash to auction online

I notice that things like character accounts, space-ships (essential for the game), and other equipment are also for sale. My brother's speciality is trading - the game has it's own Ebay equivalent and through careful speculation it is possible to be very successful in virtual terms.

EVE has it's own player magazine, and contributors are paid in ISK! See this article for instance: Clickable Culture - Virtual Cash Buys 'EVE' Magazine-Ads, Pays Writers

Julian Dibbelhas investigated this type of thing and reckons one could make a tidy income trading imaginary goods from online games (Ultima Online in this case). His blog entries are a follow up to a Wired MagazineThe Unreal Estate Boom from 2003 - so this is not a new phenomena by any means. Dibbell points out that some serious money is from these virtual worlds - larger than the GNPs of some fairly substantial countries (Bulgaria for instance).

Another blog discusses the phenomena and speculates that Ebay might become the "duct tape" between the real and virtual economies. In a comment added to this blog entry there is a note that it may be possible to have EVE Online Ebay, just as you have Ebay for whatever country you are in. This adds a whole new dimension to online communities don't you think? I mean, Paypal, might be pretty cool, but what happens when amazon starts accepting ISK as legal tender?

Online gaming has gotten very personal these days. Voice over IP allows person to person, and conference calls to be built into the game. Players meet up in real life. Apparently one friend murdered another in real life when he was betrayed in a game! I'm sure that Philip K. Dick would have loved this blurring of the distinctions between real and virtual! I was writing about the cellphone and community in my other blog only a few days ago. Suddenly I feel very very out of date! I'm thinking of another friend who I hardly see these days because he spends his non-work waking hours playing a MMOG. Is that kind of community really more satisfying than a real one?

* Massively Multiplayer Online Game

Buddhist meta-blog

This is cool. I was thinking of a meta-blog* for Buddhist blogs, and of course it already exists. Blogmandu

*a meta-blog is a blog that only blogs other blogs.

Buddhist Bloggers

Will at thinkbuddha.org has posted a nice little piece about the blangha - the online community of Buddhist bloggers.

SETI vs intelligent design

Last week I wrote a kind of off-the-cuff reposte of the idea of intelligent design (ID) on my other blog. My position being, essentially, that even if you accept some sort of design hypothesis there is not a lot of evidence of intelligence in the design of the universe. I've just coined this the Stupid Design (SD) hypothesis. The Panda's Thumb has a lot more on this subject, and in particular is relating it to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Apparently one of the ways that the ID people might seek to 'prove' ID is to look for "intelligently caused signals - God's radio presumably? As Frank Zappa was heard to remark - and I've seen a video of the interview where he does - "hydrogen is said to be the building block of the universe because it is the most common element. However I think stupidity is the most common element in the universe." I think the ID people supports FZ's hypothesis and therefore my own SDH. I do love a good TLA. Tip of the hat to Danny Yee for alerting me to this one.

New Stuff

The observant amongst you (and I use this term loosely - 'you' that is) will have noticed a lot of new gimicky things added to the sidebar to try and generate a bit more traffic, and to link my blogs and other websites into a self-referential network. It's all very well being a blogger and an author, but one needs an audience, and so I'm going in search of one. Mainly through The Jayarava Rave - this is an example of shameless self quoting in order to fool Google that I'm more popular than I really am. But it's not all just hype, because I think the essays on that site are good. I've been trawling for FWBO News... if I start writing comments on my own blogs, someone please stop me! Reminds me I haven't put the paypal donate money button on any of these sites yet...

Calvin and Hobbes

Long article about Bill Watterson the cartoonist who created Calvin and Hobbes (IMHO the finest comic strip of all time!) Washington Post

Hey Pema he lives in Cleveland!

• Official C&H site


• directory for all things Calvin and Hobbes


• Wikipedia have a pretty good article as well

IVR Cheat Sheet

Paul English is actually an American. He has compiled a list of ways to get around automated phone answering systems, or interactive voice response (IVR) systems. In other words he tells you what to do if you want to beat the system and talk directly to a human being right away. Yeah! IVR Cheat Sheet

Bricolage is passe already

Damn! Wouldn't you know it. I thought about moving this blog to a new url to reflect the new title, but bricolage.blogspot.com is taken. Don't bother looking, it's crap. Then I had a hunt around and bricolage, despite being my new word of the day, is already old hat in the polyhedrical world of the internet. I don't even rate in the Google top ten for "polyhedrical". Although I am still the only Jayarava, and Mahaabaala is still unique. Which is something I suppose.

While I've been off sick with a lousy cold I've been adding my blogs (is three blogs too many?) to lots of directories and stuff to try to get noticed - story of my life but you don't want to know that. Still it's good to have a few interesting little bits and pieces. I'd never have time to do this unless I was too sick to think about more important things.

FWBO News is almost in the top ten for Googling "FWBO" and I'd like to get it a bit higher to edge out some of those 'other' sites that I'm not even going to mention. I'm starting to think that it may be worth getting FWBO People it's own url because it doesn't appear on the radar yet. Although a search for "FWBO People" does find it, it ain't #1. Could it be that Google is prejudiced against Yahoo's Geocities? Wouldn't surprise me.

Oh... btw if you had any fun at all on this site, please consider clicking on an ad or two so that I get some money. Thanks.

Jackson's gorilla 'true to life'

Haven't blogged the Herald much recently but this is a nice story about taking the director of the Bronx Zoo to see King Kong. The dear fellow is very complimentary about Jackson's gorilla and his recreation of 1930's NYC. NZ Herald
Jackson for Prime Minister!

The Forgiveness Project

This was a story in the Indepedent yesterday that caught my eye. Without wanting to get dewy eyed and sentimental, I think this is what I'm working on in my life. Forgiving all the bullying and violence; and seeking forgiveness for when I turned the tables and became a tormentor. The Forgiveness Project

Unfortunately the Independent have decided to make this article one that you can only see by paying for it. So not much point in linking to them. However The Forgiveness Project site is good.

Jayarava Raving

I decided to have another blog called The Jayarava Rave. What?! Another blog? Isn't one enough. No, apparently it is not. On this page I will collect bits and pieces of stuff, hence: Bricolage. Over on the other blog I'm going to put rants and raves which I write from time to time anyway. These will, like the Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy, often be apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate, but hey, this is the Internet yeah? I'm going to have a third site www.jayarava.org (don't look it ain't there yet) for my really serious writing, stuff that has been published for instance. At present my artwork is going to stay on mahaabaala.me.uk unless I get sick of having so many websites. The good thing is that if I interlink all of them it will help them rate better on Google.