The impressionist Rich Little was selected to address the White House correspondents’ dinner as a follow-up to the scathing routine last year by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert. Now a favored online tactic to mock the president, altering the Google search engine so the words “miserable failure” lead to President Bush’s home page at the White House, has been stopped.
Google announced on Thursday on its official blog that “by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web” such mischief would instead “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself. Indeed, a search on Saturday of “miserable failure” on Google leads to a now-outdated BBC News article from 2003 about the “miserable failure” search, rather than the previous first result, President Bush’s portal at whitehouse.gov/president.
Denise Caruso was one of the top technology writers of the 80s and 90s, hanging out with the A-list digerati and penning an influential column for The New York Times. Then in 2000 she dropped out, upset by the excess and bombast of the first Internet boom, to launch a small non-profit group in San Francisco called the Hybrid Vigor Institute. The name reflected Caruso’s belief that the best problem-solving happens when different fields of expertise converge to work together.
A novel whose narrative consists entirely of mobile phone text messages has been published in Finland. “The Last Messages” tells the story of a fictitious information-technology executive in Finland who resigns from his job and travels throughout Europe and India, keeping in touch with his friends and relatives only through text messages.