Is it only me that would first see the capacity of the hard disk rather than how many songs it can hold, etc.
For example I came across this page Western Digital Studio 2 TB edition and saw that they have put this in the description
Up to 571,000 digital photos
Up to 500,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 50,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 150 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 880 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 240 hours of HD video
I thought it would have made more sense to me (by way of being able to imagine the storage capacity) if they had put “2 TB storage capacity” along with this number count of which type of file and how many such files will fit on this disk. It may be because I am used to computing vocabulary more than speaking ‘ordinary-ese’.
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I recently explored what Mozilla Ubiquity is all about, and decided not to install it. Seems it is something like Activewords, where you can type in verbal commands for the browser to act upon. For example, if you type “map placename” then it goes and fetches the google maps for that place. I am also reminded of Yubnub that also does the same thing.
Now my thinking is that, there is already a search box at the top right of every browser made these days. Instead of typing ubiquity commands to the browser, the same command can be issued to the search enigne, and search engines do produce appropriate results. I think there will be more and more merging of command-line and the search box in search engines, where search engines operate in some sort of navigational dimension also.
For example, I often visit the SAT Question of the day and Museum of Modern Betas. I have memorized neither of the urls for the two sites I often visit. Their URLs are not conducive to easy rememberance and recall (i.e., they arent easy one word or two word dotcoms). I havent bookmarked them either. Instead, I just start a search whenever I feel like visiting these sites – with the keyword phrases ‘SAT question of the day’ and “MoMB” and the first result is usually correct to click on to be taken to the site. The Domain Naming System (DNS) was invented because people would have trouble remembering strings of IP addresses, now it has become difficult to remember the DNS text name itself, so search engines to the rescue! You can simply type whatever you remember from the main title of the web page and typically within the first few results should be the website you want to navigate to. This gives a new perspective to search engines – search engines are there not only for searching, but also for navigating. I have been using this technique for quite some time now until I recently read about the “facebook login” issue where some other site ranked at the top for the keyword phrase “facebook login” in Google. Then I thought of writing a blog post about what I thought of the subject.
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Links
5 mistakes smart people make – Link.
100 ways to develop your mind – Link.
At what age do children recognise the difference between sarcasm and irony? – Link.
51 ways to become a better entrepreneur – Link.
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On the topic of search engines trying to improve themselves constantly, I was recently thinking about how search engines would match ‘list posts’.
For example, lets say you are looking for list posts about wireframing resources. How would you frame a search query that returns only list posts covering wireframing resources? Interesting thought. This is because, you need to match various articles like the following:
25 Wireframing Resources
20 Resources for wireframing and prototyping
List of Wireframe resources
50 Wireframing kits and resources
The best search query you can form is “wireframing resources list”. I think search engines need to provide a value like ‘n’ or ‘x’ to match ‘any number’ so you could match posts like these with the search query ‘n wireframing resources’ or ‘list of n resources for wireframing and prototyping’.
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