Google x 2

     Two Google stories of interest....first, the most intricate Google Home Page logo ever...in honor of what would have been Lucille Ball's 100th Birthday. It's a working TV with multiple channels and an on-off switch. Cool!

     Then there's the story of the cars that produce the maps for Google Earth. I didn't know they are, for all intents, robot driven. The reason that's become a news story is that one was involved in an accident. An accident that happened during the time a human driver was at the wheel. When the robots are driving, the cars have a perfect driving record.

Just Google It...

The unexpected impact of 

.....on what we remember and how we remember it!

Post #2000 on This Blog

     I posted the first item on this blog on 11/23/2007....and this post is #2000.

     I didn't quite know what I was going to do with the blog when I started...the first posts were just some photos.

     The look of it has evolved...the posts tend to be shorter with more pictures (like almost all published and online entities. Look at TIME magazine these days!)

     Several years ago I added the weekly Monday Morning Media Memo...the 150th MMMM will post tomorrow morning, the story of the police stopping an Alabama TV station news vehicle.

    The biggest percentage of visitors come from Alabama, of course, and the U.S.(all 50 States and two U.S.territories), but 113+ countries are represented...even two visits from the Aland Islands, which I had to look up (near Finland).



Thank you for visiting...be it once for a few seconds or multiple times for longer periods!



Tim

MMMM # 123 -- Google's New Media Popularity Machine

     The omnipresent search company came out last week with a tool to search thousands of books over the past century for words or phrases. Boring? Hardly. Addicting, I'd say. Why, for example, was there such a dramatic peak in references to Alabama around 1921? And why no equally huge spike in the 1960's during the Civil Rights Era?

      Try the program yourself, Compare two words---or two names---, and watch their use rise and fall over the decades.

     The data must be taken for what it is...especially in the earlier decades when magazines and newspapers may have been more widely read than books. The Ngram viewer only looks at books. But I'll be amazed if a combination tool searching everything in the world for a phrase won't be far behind.

     Som interesting examples..why has The University of Alabama at Birmingham's star fallen in recent years after dramatic growth? Watch Barack Obama go from absolute zero to top of the charts. And note that a search of Georgia and Alabama sees the two states follow a similar up and down path..indicating that they are treated only in reference to their location in the South rather than as individual entities? Or am I reading too much into it? Also...compare New York and New Jersey. No wonder the Garden State gets no respect.

     Have fun!

[ALSO: The group called "Media Matters" has published another internal memo from FOX News, this one about the "notion" of climate change. It has the bosses upstairs telling FOX reporters to question that "notion" in their stories.

    Interference from above is hardly unheard of in the news business. But at the best operations, reporters and news department managers are given editorial freedom to report the facts. Period.]

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]



Googling Rosa Parks

The folks at Google are honoring Rosa Parks today, using their ever-changing home page logo to depict a Montgomery City Bus and children. The Montgomery Bus boycott began fifty-five years ago today.

     And just for the record, a Google search of Rosa Parks name (in quotes) returns exactly 1,060,000 results (in .23 seconds). Weird that it would such an exact number no?

    Reminds me of the story I heard about the first men to climb to the top of Mt. Everest. They determined the height was 29,000 feet, but they gave a slightly different figure because they worried nobody would believe such an exact number. Later GPS measurements determined the mountain is 29,035 feet in height, so they were pretty close. Those measurements also showed the mountain is moving a couple in inches a year. Wait long enough and it may be in your backyard!

    There an an excellent interactive 360 degree video from the top of Everest here.

    None of which has much to do with Rosa Parks, except for the fact that she reached new heights for the Civil Rights movement with her simple yet monumental achievement 55 years ago today.

From Pogue's Lips to the Tech God's Ears

     David Pogue in The Times writes the semi-obituary of cell phone companies in a column today.

     Now...If only he can make the same arrangement for the endless "bundling" that makes cable and a fast net connection an offer you can't refuse (and one that costs a bundle!).

   And by the way, Google is now also offering real-time searching. Put in a name or a phrase, and as new items are found, they appear at the top of your list of found links. Pretty interesting if you want an instant take on what a sampling of folks are writing about a given person or topic.