At least the guys at Google have a sense of humour, and sure do love making easter eggs. Try clicking on the “Next »” bookmark link in Google Reader, (Settings > Goodies) and if you have no unread items a message will be displayed informing you that you have reached the end of the internet, linking to this site.

See the page here: http://www.google.com/reader/next?go=noitems

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Most online virtual worlds don’t let you live a virtual life with a job, mayor, prime minister and the constant threat of invasion, but one game begs to differ. Erepublik is the virtual browser game with it’s own economy and society complete with politicians, military and real towns and cities. It’s the “biggest online historical experiment”, complete with beta status.

I’ve been playing the game since April, and I have to say it is nothing like any other game i’ve played. It is more realistic, and best of all like any good game is completely free. Find a job, train for the day, or even start your own company - the possibilities with Erepublik are quite literally endless and limitless.

I’m guessing this is either a love it or hate it game, but if you’re willing to try it I would advise signing up and becoming a citizen of the eRepublik world. - Sorry, forgot it was invite only. I have a few invites left if anyone wants one - email me.

eRepublik: http://www.erepublik.com/

I came accross a referrer over in mint a while ago from a search on a site from http://www.cuil.com/. I usually check out referrers (especially new search engines), and I was pleasantly surprised by this site in particular.

The site is amazing - the homepage has a really awesome live suggestion system and looks very sleek. The whole site design and interface is neither intrusive or old looking, and the search results themselves are displayed in a way that i’ve never seen from a search engine before. The whole site just feels right, and although I’m not familiar enough with it to use as a Google replacement this site proves that search engines can have great designs, and still be functional.

Unlike Google’s list layout for results, cuil displays the results in a sleek grid layout, and lets you select whether you want a double or triple column view.

I think this type of search engine will eventually be the future, but while Google offers much more than plain searching they will always be a major contender to the new and slick search engines appearing all over the internet. While Google and other big search engines have the resources for bigger and faster, the modern style and less popular search engines have the capabilities to be slicker and more experimental with their features.

The day after last.fm performed their controversial “facebook” like redeisgn, I reviewed it and said that they had removed features rather than added new ones, and that the general refresh was unfinished. This is an end user problem that is apparent all over the site, but now i’ve noticed the API [both old and new] is broken too.

This is fantastic - not only do they take a step back with the new last.fm, but they actually manage to break something that is relied on for the displaying of last.fm data on tonnes of websites. It seems that their goal was to piss people off the most they could, and they seem to have reached that goal here.

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I very rarely talk about the spam comment status of my blog. I normally get under 10 spam comments a day, which is quite a low figure, and is one that i’m happy with. I normally navigate to the Akismet spam comments control panel and hit “delete all” after i’ve quickly skimmed through them. Most of the comments I get are full of pointless links and randomly placed BBcode, (presumably for mass deployment of the same comment over different site systems) but some don’t contain any links in the comment body at all; just the website URL of the [spam] commenter. I am completely astounded as to how Akismet is able to catch and delete comments such as those, and it does so by asking very little from the user.

It’s the one service I think my blog relies most on to stop the pointless spam infestation that resides within the internet, and I don’t think the service has allowed one spam comment to be allowed live yet, that’s how darn good it is. I think I highly underestimate it, and the small link situated in the “Buttons” section in my sidebar hardly gives it the credit it should have.

I signed into Windows Live Messenger this morning, and was greeted by this strange box that hovers below people’s display pictures. I thought i’d learnt to live with the box, but it drew attention to itself when it wouldn’t go away. So, I fired up my Virtual PC 2007 XP image, and installed Windows Live Messenger there too. When the box popped up there too I knew something was up with the whole service, and as other people were having the same problem too. Is this going to be some new feature for messenger? Not the white box obviously, but some wierd service related to it. I doubt it’s not intentional.