DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The (unofficial) Google weblog published the full text of the Playboy interview that has kinked Google’s IPO. Apparently the entire interview has been appended to the SEC documentation and is therefore public domain.

See also the photos (and some lusty banner ads) in the Playboy site’s free preview of the article.

There’s a decent interview with Craig’s List founder Craig Newmark in yesterday’s Chron, telling the history of what is, in my experience, the best community website in the world. (As a recruiting tool, Craig’s List smokes HotJobs, Monster, Dice, etc.)

It’s really just a living proof of Metcalf’s Law. There’s nothing technically wonderful about craigslist.org; it’s a low-tech bulletin-board / classified ads system, with a UI straight out of 1998. The value is in the reach. Post an ad there, and you’re practically guaranteed a response.

The Chron interview didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, but it’s reassuring somehow to see that the personality of the website matches that of its founder, which I’m sure is entirely by design.

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

Besides being an “artistic experiment,” Wordcount is an intriguing interactive word-popularity research tool, guaranteed to shave seconds off your attention to the mundane matters of the day. (intriguing: rank 10104; attention: rank 715; mundane: rank 12164)

Hmm, it’s also very likely to crash your browser if you type in too many words. Fortunately you’d be smart enough to not be composing something like a blog entry in another browser window at the time, because that would force you to rewrite the thing twice. (idiot: rank 9547)

[Thanks to Bim for the link.]

When we visited Vancouver a few weeks ago, we stayed with a friend who lives one block off of Commercial Drive — a street that contains more culture in any three-block span than any three Midwestern states. I didn’t take any photos, so you’ll have to make do with a thousand words… these are the types of restaurants I jotted down on the back of a business card as we drove past:

Carribean/Jamaican, Greek, Greek & pizza, pita, Mexican, taverna, Italian, deli, Java Express, chocolates, cappucino, gelato, cakes, tandoori, sushi, Salvadoran/Mexican, vegetarian/vegan, donair, taco, bagel, vegetarian Indian, tapas, juice bar.

That’s not a complete index… I couldn’t write fast enough. Literally every storefront represented a different type of cuisine.

Our host called this strip “The Drive,” capitals evident, in a tone of reverence. Within 24 hours I felt the same. We ate Asian/fusion, gelato, Brazilian, and multi-ethnic vegan sandwiches within the span of five meals (and three blocks).

The Drive has its own website: thedrive.net. Although the design is dated, the site’s content provides a model for the way shopping-district websites ought to be: indexed via map (for spatial navigators) and category… with panoramic photos and still photos.

The Drive is anchored at the north end by Womyns Ware, a lesbian sex shop. It appeared as we drove by that the store’s outside walls feature larger-than-life-size murals of enormous naked women (sorry, womyn) dancing with arm-sized “dills.” I am not part of the store’s customer demographic, but I appreciated its very public existence: alternative-lifestyle stores suggest a high degree of local tolerance. Like San Francisco, Vancouver seems to have no closets. Commercial Drive felt a bit like Haight Street, with better food and fewer shoe shops.

I’ve been seeing what appears to be spider traffic from Axmo.com in my server logs… dozens of hits per day to various URLs on my site, with http://axmo.com in the HTTP_REFERER field. These aren’t clickthroughs; the IP is the same in every case (82.164.174.188; it doesn’t resolve). I thought it might be “referer spam,” but there’s just too much traffic. I’ve never seen a referer-spammer this aggressive.

I visited the advertised site and found what appears to be a search engine. Google has raised the bar so high it would take something pretty fantastic to make me bother trying a competing product. At a glance, Axmo didn’t have it.

Then I noticed the “pear-2-pear” typo on the URL submission page, and then this surprising description of the company’s technology:

Axmo is the first SE that makes full use of Microsoft’s new file system WinFS that will be implemented in the new OS, LongHorn.

And I thought, that seems like a really expensive way to build a search engine that can’t scale.

But I was momentarily intrigued, so I tried the search: I typed in a word, clicked the submit button… and got a .NET server error! Classic!

Ironically, the full error message suggested I check my spelling. Hmmm.