The content is no longer centered, but instead aligned to the left, and the left sidebar is styled differently, with different colors and icons. The header and search box have a grey background that clearly separates them from the search results. As far as these are concerned, the only visible change seems to be that the site URL appears right under the search result link, instead of after the site blurb.

Here’s the old interface, for comparison:

Note that the new-ish black menu bar is already on both versions.

Hey, Internet: What if We All Read the Same Book?

The idea was put forward by Jeff Howe last year, as a way to reinvent the book club concept and giving it a global reach, instead of being something you do with people in the neighbourhood (or city). So last summer One Book, One Twitter got around 12,000 people from all over the world reading and discussing (on Twitter) Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (great book, by the way, you should read it). And then it was over.

The same Jeff Howe is now trying to revive the idea, and the Twitter-based book club is back. The initiative has a new name – 1book140 – and it’s now monthly instead of a one-off thing. The book for this month is The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, as chosen by “the crowd”, and the discussion is already going strong on Twitter, in tweets annotated with the dedicated hashtag for each part (#1b140_1, #1b140_2, #1b140_3, etc.). Here’s the reading/discussion schedule for June, and an FAQ for those of you who want to quickly get into it.

I’m joining the club myself, and might even start tweeting about it.

On a funny note, 2 weeks ago Sir Alex Ferguson has publicly criticized Twitter by saying it’s a “waste of time” and that people should instead “go to a library and read a book”. Well, there you go.

Allow me to explain. In this xkcd comic, this factoid about Wikipedia is stated:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.

Oh really?

So I headed over to a random Wikipedia article and landed in the page for Water Gun. Following the instructions above, and just after following 16 links, I landed in… the Philosophy page!

That’s xkcd being awesome again.

UPDATE: There’s a whole page on Wikipedia about this.

Forget about all the other announcements from Google in their I/O conference. All that matters is the announcement that Angry Birds finally made its way to Google Chrome.

It’s now available in the Chrome Web Store with 70 free levels. Chrome also gets some exclusive content: there’s 7 levels part of a so-called “Chrome Dimension”. This web version of Angry Birds will also soon support the new in-app payments system, so new (paid) content will probably make its way to this Chrome version.

As if I didn’t have enough time-wasters already…

Our beloved Pac-Man just got an upgrade. The World’s Biggest Pac-Man is a patchwork quilt of user-generated levels, featuring 4794 mazes at the time of writing. Every maze has an exit point on each of its four sides, leading to its neighbours. It’s a virtually endless Pac-Man game. I pity those with gaming OCD…

Anyone can log in using Facebook and design their own levels, or just play for fun.

The game was unveiled at Microsoft’s MIX11 developer conference as a way to promote Internet Exporer 9 and its support of HTML5, but it should run well in any browser that supports the new standard, like Chrome and Firefox.

(via TheNextWeb)

UPDATE: This was in fact part of a more elaborate April Fool’s joke pulled by LinkedIn itself. When accessing the ”People you may know” page, one would be presented with some unlikely connections, like Robin Hood, JRR Tolkien or Albert Einstein.

The account was verified by Twitter on March 1st, and got 1 million followers in just over 25 hours. Which is a Guinness World Record, if you care about that sort of thing.

This is going to be so much fun.

The battle against copyright infringement is something I’ve always frowned upon, not because I don’t think authors should have the right to protect their material, but because of the way it is usually done. The likes of RIAA spend millions in lawsuits every year, some of them as ridiculous as suing a student for $675.000 for downloading and sharing 30 songs.

So it’s great to hear, directly from someone who has had their work “stolen” several times, that this “stealing” actually helps the author. Neil Gaiman, a best-selling author and a creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama, explains how he discovered that piracy is not really something to be feared. Money quote:

Nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free. What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people. You’re raising awareness.

That about sums it all up, and it’s something I have been saying for a while now. And I believe this not only applies to books, but also movies, music and games.

In related news, the Canadian torrent site isoHunt has been sued for $4 million in a major attack by 26 record labels in Canada.

(Source: ORGZine)

It’s interactive, made in Flash, and allows for a quick view of all the games across 4 dimensions: teams, days, stadiums and groups.

The middle section displays the games, depending on which section the mouse is hovering on. For example, hovering over Portugal (left section, “National Teams”) displays the list of games where Portugal is playing (see screenshot above). This will also highlight items in the other sections – the group Portugal is in (bottom section “Groups and Stages”), the stadiums where the team will be playing (right section “Stadiums and Cities”) and on which days are the games (top section, “World Cup 2010 Schedule”).

It’s the best calendar for the World Cup I’ve seen so far.

(World Cup 2010 interactive calendar)