So far, Google Wave looks intriguing - it certainly has potential. It reminds me of forums with tree structures - i.e. forums where replies to a specific post are added below that post instead of at the end of the thread. But its superior editing features allow Google to be far more flexible, and make it possible to successively make a particular Wave (discussion/document) more streamlined and coherent.

To my mind, the main drawback of Google Wave is that it becomes both slow and unwieldy once it grows beyond a certain size - let's say 150 individual posts (or "blips"). It takes a long time for the entire Wave to load, and at some points when I tried to add new text I watched the words appear at a rate of one letter per 5 seconds. Hopefully they will add more servers to the system in the future to make it run more smoothly.

I think Google Wave is ideal for relatively short and focused brainstorming sessions involving multiple participants - especially since everybody always has access to the document later on and can edit it as time progresses.

Oh, and speaking of which - I have created a Wave of my own which is dedicated to the discussion of Urbis. If you have your own Google Wave account and are interested in gaming, check it out!

Now I have to figure out what to do with it...

I've recently discovered Google Insight and am using it for all sorts of pointless trend analysis attempts - to see what's hot, and what isn't.

And apparently, LiveJournal is not so hot any more. Searches for it have declined by more than half since its peak in January 2005. This suggests that the community of LiveJournal users isn't really growing (with the possible exception of Russian Spambots), and that interest is slowly waning.

Blogging itself seems fairly stable at the moment, so there must be other trends filling up the void caused by the reduction of LiveJournal.Twitter, possibly - but what else is out there?

I just found out about Google Insight, which tracks the number of searches for specific terms over time. This might help us track the general state of various RPG lines.

Here are various trends I found for the period on display (starting with 2004):

Call of Cthulhu: About the same, with the exception of a peak in April 2006 (coinciding with the "Dark Corners of the Earth" computer game). The search term is also very popular in Russia, for some reason.
D&D: Down by half
Exalted: Up by 25%
GURPS: Down to a third
RIFTS: Down by half
Savage Worlds: Up by 50%
Shadowrun: Down by half
World of Darkness: Slightly lower than it started, but now about constant

So it does seem that the gaming industry and community is no longer as large as it used to be. But what else can be learned from this tool? Tell me about your favorite armchair analysis using Google Insight!

I was walking down the street, and two cars with the Google logo were driving past with giant camera arrays on top of them.

I smiled and waved.

Interesting article:

Is Google making us stupid?

The article isn't as polemic as the title sounds - instead, I found it to be a rather thoughtful essay on how the ways through which we receive and process information shapes our very way of thinking.

Here is my suggestion for dealing with the currently extremely uncooperative attitude of Burma regarding the international relief efforts:

Google, or another corporation which has access to up-to-date satellite images of Burma, should publish a high-resolution map of Burma before and after the disaster so that all the world can see whether the Burmese government actually does anything - and update it periodically so that day-to-day comparisons will be possible.

This might help shame the Burmese government into action and permitting foreign relief workers into the country. And since it wouldn't be done by a government agency, the Burmese government wouldn't be able to use it as an excuse to shut out the US government and their relief efforts.


If you support this idea, please post it into your own Journal, blogs, forums or anywhere else more people might see it and pass it on. The time is running out for tens of thousands of Burmese people, and the sooner an organization with the technical ability to do this pulls this off, the better.

- Jürgen Hubert

I've been browsing through the latest tutorials at DeviantArt for a week or so and adding links to them to the Art Tutorials Wiki - and notified the authors of the tutorials of this by placing appropriate comments on the relevant DeviantArt page.

So far, I haven't been able to attract any additional contributors to the wiki. However, I've been making a different kind of progress:

When you search for "art tutorials" on Google, the Art Tutorials Wiki comes up as #10... out of 239,000.

It's not so surprising that the PageRank of the wiki has risen drastically - after all, I've been essentially doing the same thing manually that many spambots do automatically by placing lots of links to my site on other pages. The difference is that my linkage actually is seen mostly as welcome information (after all, most people don't object being linked to), and thus isn't removed agressively as it is normally the case with spam. But I'm still surprised it has risen that far.

Now I need to see to it that the wiki rises to #1 at Google... and then maybe I can think of placing some text ads at the wiki as well. :D

Here is an interesting short article about the sheer amount of information Google has on pretty much all of us.

Personally, I am glad that I didn't switch to Gmail...