Friday, November 7, 2003

Net Art

A very interesting Java applet is the Net Art Idea Line, collecting links from a variety of subjects. Such as the Secret Lives of Numbers (number usage patters on the Web) or Anemone (“using the process of organic information design to visualize the changing structure of a web site”).

“The Idea Line displays a timeline of net artworks, arranged in a fan of luminous threads. Each thread corresponds to a particular kind of artwork or type of technology. The brightness of each thread varies with the number of artworks that it contains in each year, so you can watch the ebb and flow of different lines of thought over time.”
– Artport/ Whitney Museum

Net Art by Philipp Lenssen

Google Japan

Norio Murakami, president of Google Japan Inc., gets interviewed. Japan Today writes:

“It’s a far cry from two years ago when Google first set up shop in Japan as a one-man office. Today, there are around 30 staff as the Internet search engine company continues to grow and consolidate its place in the Japanese market.

Heading the operation is Norio Murakami, an amiable, laid-back guy from Oita Prefecture. Murakami has been in the information industry one way or another since graduating from Kyoto University in resource engineering. He spent seven years with Hitachi, then 17 years at Digital Japan, including five years in Boston, before moving on to companies such as Infomix, Northern Telecom and Docent. He joined Google on April 1 this year.”
– Chris Betros, The Searchers (Japan Today), November 7, 2003

Google Japan by Philipp Lenssen

New Google Deskbar

There’s a new download from Google Inc.: the Google Deskbar (currently in Beta). After installation it will sit in your Windows taskbar waiting for input. When you do a search, a mini window will open (that’s the default option).

You can also change the Google Deskbar options so that results will be opened in a browser instead of the mini view. You can also change the short-cut to the search – the default is Ctrl + Alt + G*. And you can highlight a term from within any application, press the short-cut, hit Return, and it will open the search results.

The Deskbar looks like a great new Google tool and I will see how useful it is in everyday searching! The only sub-optimal thing I found so far is that the last search can’t seem to be automatically erased from the input box.

*On German keyboards, a nice and mostly unused short-cut is Strg+Y (the Ctrl+Z on US-keyboards).

New Google Deskbar by Philipp Lenssen

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