Slate.com revisits the 1993 Micheal Crighton prediction of Mass Media extinction. Though it did not come true as speculated Crighton does not back off the belief that most of mass media is useless opinion and speculation, produced on the cheap and relying on source-less hearsay instead of hard earned facts.

“I want a news service that tells me what no one knows but is true nonetheless.”

He laments the fact that no media visionary has come forward to build the high-quality information service consumers need, or more importantly to convince them of the need.

Source: Slate.com

Search engines are building more extensive personal profiles to help customers be more effective online. However, this is drawing more concern about how this data can be used in the future, and how expose and individual will be. Will search engines enhance the profile with outside data?  If so who owns the data? Will the user have any control?  

“Fears have been stoked by the potential for Google to build up a detailed picture of someone’s behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick’s “cookies”, the software it places on users’ machines to track which sites they visit.”

Source: Financial Times

Trials to show that brain training in the form of meditation can cause an overwhelming change in levels of happiness. Happiness is a “skill” to be learned according to Matthieu Ricard, a frenchman who studies Buddism and is the interepreter for the Dalai Lama.

“MRI scans showed that [Ricard] and other long-term meditators - who had completed more than 10,000 hours each - experienced a huge level of “positive emotions” in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain, which is associated with happiness. The right-hand side, which handles negative thoughts, is suppressed.”

Source: The Independent

Gordon Bell has created custom designed software, MyLifeBits, that records and saves everything  he does during the day. “The last time he counted, MyLifeBits had more than 101,000 emails, almost 15,000 Word and PDF documents, 99,000 Web pages, and 44,000 pictures.”

He is attempting to bring Vannevar Bush’s Memex idea to life, in which technology could be used to save everything and browse as a supplement to your memory.

Another similar type of project, also being undertaken at Microsoft, is LifeBrowser. Eric Horowitz is attempting to create software that would “automatically identify the most significant events in your life, so that when you scroll back through your history, it shows you only the most important highlights.”

Source: Fast Company A Head For Detail

Pandia lists alternative search engines to the big 3 - Google, Yahoo and MSN. They include Ask.com, Snap, Factbites, Exalead, Gigablast and others.

Source: Pandia Search