Technology Review (a magazine published by MIT) recently asked various thought leaders what the Web might be in ten years. Below is one of the most creative responses but all the interviews are quite intriguing.

Jonathan Abrams
Founder of Socializr and Friendster; San Francisco, CA

“In five to ten years, we will all have chips in our brains. When you look at someone’s face on the street, your Google Brain software will automatically call up every embarrassing photo of them from ancient websites such as Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace; list all mutual friends; and remind you of the person’s annotated bio. As a response to the perceived slowness and verbosity of antiquated services like Twitter, people will send everyone they know nanobursts of information about anything they might do or think before they actually do or think it. Every website, blog, and social-networking profile will include an aggregated feed from every other website, blog, and social-networking service, resulting in an exponential and infinite length of repeated content on every possible site, overloading our brain chips and causing frequent nosebleeds and occasional cerebral hemorrhage.”

Source: The Future of The Web, Technology Review 7/2008

Mint.com released an interesting charting tool since my initial write-up on their online money management services. It’s titled “SpendSpace” and helps you stay “below the average”.

• Now you can track spending online and compare your spending on all the categories you spend on, such as Coffee Shops, Movies, Clothes, Groceries, to the average spending of people in over 30 US cities, all 50 states, or the entire US national average.

Here’s an example:

Pretty cool stuff… and it’s still a work in progress…

After reading this article on Toyota’s Robotics division…. it seemed like a good idea to check in on some of the latest robotics engineering… here’s what turned up:

The Violinist…

YouTube  - Robot Playing the Violin

The Trumpeter…

YouTube  - Robot Playing the Trumpet

Dancing Robots…

YouTube  - Japanese Robot Dance

A Real Live Transformer…

YouTube  - Transformer Robot

The Cyclist…

YouTube  - Robot Riding a Bicycle

Terminator…

YouTube  - The Terminator

The Humanoid…

YouTube  - The Humanoid Robot

Related: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/robots.html

Google Trends allows you to compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. You can type in up to five topics and determine how often they’ve been searched on Google. Although this tool has been out for a while I’ve never really given it the attention it deserves…

1. Presidential Candidates
If Google searches are effective at projecting the next president it looks like we are headed towards another texan Commander in Chief… although this one was actually born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

2. Newspapers, Blogs, Magazines
Blogs are taking over the world. It looks as though searches for blogs have surpassed newspaper searches (in volume) for the first time in history. Good bye traditional media.

3. Food and Exercise
Wow. We love food.

4. Fishing and Hunting
Apparently the Ice Fishermen aren’t pulling their weight. And people are less likely to shoot animals in the summer time (which can be attributed to regulated hunting seasons).

5. Turkey and Diet
Lots of Turkey for Thanksgiving, a little less for Christmas, and a whole bunch of New Year’s Resolutions to lose those extra holiday pounds (that typically last about 1.5 months)

6. Girl Scout Cookies
Girl Scouts of America must have some severe cash flow issues during Q2, Q3 and Q4. Maybe they need to start distributing to grocery stores to supplement their door to door sales?

7. Rain and Depression
Rain rain go away come again another day… seriously… you are driving people crazy!

After implementing the Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress on May 24th I started monitoring the number of pages Google was indexing for this site.

This plugin will create a google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Currently homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported.

To calculate the number of pages indexed by Google a simple site:danielpeterjackson.com search was conducted on 5 different occasions during the last 15 days.

Example Search:

Here are the results…

Day 0: (Baseline = 69 pages indexed)

Day 2: (73 pages indexed)

Day 3: (84 pages indexed)

Day 15: (119 pages indexed and some new blue formatting)

With exactly 50 more pages indexed and only 12 new pages created during the 15 days… it appears we are moving in the right direction although counting the total number of pages indexed is a fairly basic metric to measure the effectiveness of this plugin.

You can view the actual Google Sitemap XML here: http://www.danielpeterjackson.com/sitemap.xml