qeek.net journal

Tafiti is a new, beautiful search site built on the Microsoft Silverlight platform, using the Live Search engine.

While it’s very pleasing to the eye, it’s definitely not as useful as other popular search sites like Google or Yahoo. It runs slow and, well, the Live Search engine isn’t as good as its competitors are. But, as an experiment, the site does very well. It’s a nice example of what can be done with Silverlight, which aims to compete with Adobe Flash.

Suprnova.org, a legendary BitTorrent website, which has been previously closed because of heavy pressure from the copyright lobby, now returns with a new message: “You are the past and the forgotten, we are the Internet and the future”.

At the moment, Suprnova is in the public beta stage, which means that some minor problems or bugs may be discovered. The site seems to be working fine though, and has a nice new design inspired by the good old Suprnova.

Not surprisingly, the community is very excited about Supernova’s relaunch: the story on Digg has been dugg by almost 5,000 people, with several other related stories making the homepage. Interesting thing is that Kevin Rose is the one who submitted the original story, which officially makes him a pirate ;)

Collis and Cyan Ta’eed of FreelanceSwitch and FlashDen, as well as Leo Babauta - the author of a successful productivity blog Zen Habits - are behind the new initiative called the “Blog Action Day”.

The point is to make the blogging community discuss the same issue on the same day. October 15th has been chosen to be the first “blog action day” with environment being picked up as the first topic.

I’m not very enthusiastic about the idea, but the fact is that many influential blogs, like GigaOm, Lifehacker or Web Worker Daily, as well as many others, will take part in the initiative.

For more information, read the Leo Babauta’s post submitted to The Action Blog.

Spock, the new people search engine, which claims to already have over 100 million people indexed in its databases, has been opened to public a few days ago.

Spock lets you find informations about a specific person by just typing his or her name, e-mail or location, and filter the results by age, gender or by availablity of a picture. Data is gathered automatically by an algorithm and may come from many services, like online encyclopedias or social networking websites.

The interesting thing is that you can also search people by tags - type in “digg” to get Digg employees and users, or “linux kernel hacker” to find scary guys with long beards ;-).

Even though I couldn’t find any data about myself (I guess I’d have to go by my real name more often), I think Spock is a very good attempt on developing a people search engine. Obviously it’s a handy tool, but it’s actually pretty fun to play with at the same time.

Will it become the Google of people search?

The New York Times reporter Brad Stone reveals the mystery: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is written by Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes.

The diary, a parody of popular CEO blogs started in August 2006, soon gained huge readership and media attention. Even Bill Gates, and the real Steve Jobs admitted they read the blog.

The big part of the fun though has been the fact that the author remained unknown. Lyons hoped he could keep the secret until October, when his book “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody.” will be published.

The blog will now be moved to the Forbes’ website. It’s hard to tell if it will draw the same attention as before. Probably not. The fun has been spoiled.