Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

I’m having fun playing with the new search engine called Cuil (said “cool”). They show images based on tags, next to each search result. The results are counter-intuitive in only the way that artificial intelligence can deliver. The image shown does not always (or frequently I’ve learned) come from the website that Cuil links it to!

Check out this photo of a search for “abandoned stuff” and also for “small dead blog”:

My blog shows up as the first result, not bad if I say so myself. But that photo I’ve never seen before, and the guy in the second result is not even me or anyone I know (but he must be important and bloggy because he shows up next to the top search result for “stephen taylor” as well). Even more odd are the suggested Explore by Category options where nearly every option is captioned. The captions have spelling errors (like for Progressive Bloggers), and Rick Mercer’s caption says “Richard Vincent”!

“Small Dead blog” on google brings up Small Dead Animals a few searches down from the top. Yet on Cuil, it’s not even in the first four pages of results! I stopped looking after 4. And the first result is a malicious parody/indictment of Kate’s blogging. Cuil (or whoever enters/generates the descriptions for categories) describes Kate McMillian as “a popular Canadian blogger”. Good thing they didn’t pull a quote from Canadian Cynic or MWW’s blogs? Speaking of which CC dominates the front page of Cuil with a search for “canadian cynic”. Why does Cuil hate Small Dead Animals?

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Why Cuil will fail (besides its terrible name).

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Blog navel gazing moment:
This is my 2005 blog post on AbandonedStuff.com . I have many more posts on other blogs, some even included in the 2005 count.

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You can listen to stupid or mentally ill people (it’s not clear) on You Tube, after they’ve been put there by British police.

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Hat tip to Slashdot.org

…And no, this time it isn’t me giving blogging a bad name. It’s that other political blogger from Saskatchewan - Kate at SmallDeadAnimals.com

In an apparent effort to link Liberals Warren Kinsella, Jason Cherniak, and Pierre Trudeau with Hitler, she’s suggested literally that it wasn’t Nazis who killed people in Germany during the early part of the 20th Century. Figuratively, of course. She was making a different, non-ridiculous point. Clever, eh?

While comparisons with Hitler are being made, since that cat is out of the bag, was Hitler famous for demonizing political enemies so it was easier to kidnap and kill them without public protest? Yes, that’s what happened in Germany. Fortunately that doesn’t remind me of anything going on in politics or on the blogosphere in North America these days…

I gave up reading her blog and commenting there last November after she modified In Flanders Field to mock Toronto media for political purposes. Since then she’s endeared herself with more Canadians by calling for a national catastrophic famine to wipe out socialist pansies, and made fun of Kinsella by making fun of holocaust survivors. SDA now reads (and possibly always has) like a big inside joke that only some of the most vile commenters on the web seem to actually enjoy. Everyone else sees it for the confusing, and mean spirited, angry train wreck that it is.

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Hat tip to Scott Tribe