There’s an amazing database of old theaters available at http://cinematreasures.org/theater/ . This searchable subject index is part of a larger site but let me talk about this database search first.

You can browse it any number of ways — number of seats, number of screens, architect, chain, status (open, renovating, demolished, etc.) Occasionally stats are incorrect (one theater is listed as having just one seat) but there are lots of commenters pointing out errors and offering information.

I browsed through the most-recently added theaters and found a list from all over the world including Paris, South Africa, and Oil City PA. Theaters are listed in a table showing name, location, and status. I then went and looked at the listing of demolished theaters (over 5300 of them.) Each theater has its own page with a description and sometimes photo, but lots and lots of great comments. For example, the page for the Shawano Drive-In included information from commenters about when the theater first opened, when its screen was knocked over in a storm, and even a pointer to a Flickr account where the opening ad for the Shawano theater has been posted. Other listings, such as the 10th Street Art Theatre in Atlanta Georgia, have lively discussions in the comments about the exact dates of theater operation, when/why it was closed, etc.

As I noted, the database is part of a larger site, Cinema Treasures, at http://cinematreasures.org/ . This site includes theater news, a link list, a FAQ, and a variety of other classic theater information.

I am very bad at going to movies but even I found myself enjoying the nostalgia of going to Saturday afternoon matinees as a little kid. Well worth a visit.

Ben Goertzel talked to Google director of research Peter Norvig, and paraphrases Peter’s statement on whether or not Google is developing a powerful AI/ AGI (Artificial General Intelligence):

<<There has been some talk about whether Google has a top-secret project aimed at building a thinking machine. Well, I’ll tell you what happened. Larry Page came to me and said “Peter, I’ve been hearing a lot about this Strong AI stuff. Shouldn’t we be doing something in that direction?” So I said, okay. I went back to my desk and logged into our project management software. I had to write some scripts to modify it because it didn’t go far enough into the future. But I modified it so that I could put, “Human-level intelligence” on the row of the planning spreadsheet corresponding to the year 2030. And, that wasn’t up there an hour before someone else added another item to the spreadsheet, time-stamped 90 days after that: “Human-level intelligence: Macintosh port">>

We have to keep in mind that AI is somewhat loosely defined. Google already has many places that would be considered AI decades ago, and may be considered AI today (Marissa Mayer includes the spellchecker on that list). But when it comes to hosting a general human-level intelligence – and we exclude concepts like CHI – we have reason to assume Google, and anyone else for that matter, isn’t quite there yet (or is keeping it secret from us!). However, the general direction Google must take to stay competitive and expose users to their ads is clear as well: make their search engine become smarter and smarter. Not coincidentally, it’s one of their top goals to have the world’s best AI research lab.

[Thanks Siggi Becker and Andreas Stuhlmüller!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Attributor.com sent me an unsolicitied opt-out but nevertheless interesting bulk mail describing a new service of theirs that aims to empower news distributor AP to track AP content across the web. From the email:

<<Attributor Corporation, a provider of transparency and accountability to online publishers, today [May 31] announced that the Associated Press, the largest and oldest source of independent news and information, has selected Attributor to monitor the unauthorized use of its content online. Attributor will identify copyrighted AP material across the web, provide context on where and how the content is being used and empower the AP to make intelligent business decisions based on the use of their material.>>

AP makes money by licensing their content, but what it means precisely to “make intelligent business decisions” when they discover non-licensed copies is left unclear (maybe it just means “sue the hell out of a blogger”). On the other hand, tracking copycats is and was quite easy before (you can do a simple Google search, or Google blog search, for several quotes taken from different parts of the source article, for instance), the only hard part being to act up on all those copycats in any meaningful way. If you run a blog and you’ve seen a spam blog automatically fully copying all of your content without providing credit, you might know that just getting someone to react, or asking their host to take a copy down, can take weeks of emailing back and forth before it shows any results...

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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David Szetela spotted this today and contacted Google for confirmation. AdWords is now bolding the expanded match terms in the ads.

The example he used saw handbag being bolded when the search contained purse. This should be interesting. I will have to delve a little deeper into this. Can you turn it off, like expanded match etc.

I am starting a thread on this here. Keep track of developments there.

This news is a couple days old, but it’s definitely worth noting — Apple has announced their intentions to give users of their Apple TV product access to YouTube content. The interface is actually pretty slick according to the screenshots found and Gizmodo — and I must say that I’m pretty excited to get [...]

Last month Google Video started to index videos from third-party sites like Metacafe. The most interesting part was that the site offered "previews" of the videos, but they were more like the full videos. The practice was beyond fair use because Google served the entire video in a Google Video player inside the search results page. Google even hosted the FLV files, probably for performance reasons.


Now Google Video shows 15 thumbnails from the videos indexed from third-party sites and the only way to watch the video is to go to the original source.


Blinkx, another video search engine, shows a 25 second preview for most of the videos, while Yahoo Video shows only one thumbnail for third-party videos.

You can replace FeedBurner with Google and Blogbeat with FeedBurner in the image above. The rumors turned out to be true: Google acquired the Google of feeds, FeedBurner. The reasons are many, but the most important ones were to improve Google's analytics tools and to add a new medium for AdWords advertisers.

"[FeedBurner's] web-based tools, including an extensive feed and blog advertising network, help publishers promote, deliver, and monetize their content on the Web and make feed-based content more accessible and manageable for its end users. (...) Google believes that feed-based content and advertising is a developing space where we can add value for users, advertisers and publishers."

FeedBurner's team is optimistic and it doesn't seem to be scared by the fate of some of Google's acquisitions (like Measure Map, Dodgeball, JotSpot) that are barely visible right now:

The fact is that there is an immense amount of work to do in order to a) continue to provide our customers with the best feed analytics, b) begin to provide a more comprehensive 360-degree view of audience and reach, and c) enable publishers to most efficiently determine the best ways to distribute and monetize their content.

We like our chances. We are confident that we are going to be a part of the company that can best deliver the most comprehensive suite of services to publishers. We are confident that we're going to continue to have fun and innovate for customers as rapidly as possible. We are confident and hopeful that you'll look at your feed dashboard soon and say to yourself "Well, *that* was a good idea!"

Moreover, Feedburner could provide a lot of useful information to Google Reader to filter the most popular/interesting/relevant posts and could enhance Blogger's feeds without having to "burn" them at feedburner.com.

If this isn't a good news for you and you're using FeedBurner, you can opt-out of allowing Google to get your data by sending an email to accountx@feedburner.com until June 15. "Opting out will terminate your user agreement with FeedBurner, permanently delete your FeedBurner account, feeds, and all related statistical data and history, and prevent the transfer of your data rights to Google."

It’s Friday and thought to put a fun blog post up. I stumbled upon some questions which were published by Google as a recruiting tool. Now, I’m not sure how old/new these questions are that were published, but most likely still used. Answers are provided in Bold.

1) Solve this cryptic equation, realizing of course that value for M and E could be interchanged. No leading zeros are allowed: WWWDOT - GOOGLE = DOTCOM

Answers: 777589 - 188106 = 589483 or 777589 - 188103 = 589486

2) How many different ways can you color an icosahedron with one of three colors on each face?

Answer: 58,130,055

3) Which of the following expresses Google’s over-arching philosophy?
a) I’m feeling lucky
b) Don’t be evil
c) Oh, I already fixed that
d) You should never be more than 50 feet from food
e) All of the above

Answer: b

Wonder about some benefits?
– Free cafeteria meals
– On-site dry cleaning
– Coin-free laundry room
– Free annual ski trip
– Dog-friendly offices
– On-site doctor and dentist
– Free commuter shuttle service to several Bay Area locations

Still interested? Then what are you waiting for? Apply at Google now!

Pablo Palatnik is Managing Partner of eTrend Media Group, which specializes in Pay-Per-Click Management & Social Media Optimization.

I’m late to talk about this one, but today is Google Developer Day. It’s wild that thousands of developers are converging in Mountain View alone, and Google is doing presentations in 10 cities around the world. The Mountain View sessions are being held in the San Jose Convention Center, and you can see the full schedule here. If you’re reading this post, you’re probably not at the event though, so you’ll want to check out the streaming webcasts.

There’s a bunch to talk about, too. There’s a new version of the Google Web Toolkit, which lets you program in Java and then convert your code to AJAX/JavaScript for free. Even more fun is Google Gears. Google Gears is a plug-in that lets online web apps store data locally, and that lets you do neat things like an offline version of Googler Reader (which I’ll be trying out when I fly up to SMX Seattle soon).

By the way, note that the Google Gears blog post is by Aaron Boodman and another Googler. That name might sound familiar. Aaron Boodman is the guy that did Greasemonkey, which (in my opinion) is one of the most wicked-cool Firefox extensions in the world. Aaron and several other Googlers are providing Google Gears under an open-source license. They’ll be collecting feedback from across the web (plus companies like Adobe) to try to make Google Gears an open standard that any web app can use.

Kudos to the folks that organized and will speak at Developer Day, the Google Reader team for putting together an offline version of Reader, and especially the Google Gears folks for making some really useful code and releasing it with an open-source license. There’s a ton of other great sessions today too, from Patrick Riley talking about Custom Search Engines to Jeff Dean talking about Google’s infrastructure (including MapReduce, the Google File System, and BigTable). Good stuff.

When Google first released their API (which I think was spring of 2002) there were things in the API documentation that weren’t normally discussed at the Google site. Like a syntax called daterange:.

Daterange allowed you to do a search for all pages added to Google’s index, or refreshed by Google’s index, within a certain date range. Dates were specified with Julian dates, which are static and change at noon. (Today’s Julian date, for example, is 2454252.)

Taking my knowledge of the daterange syntax, I created a tool called GooFresh, which you can use at http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/tools/goofresh/ . GooFresh allows you to search Google’s Web results for date-based content. (And it converts dates to Julian for you too.)

I got an e-mail from a Google engineer today telling me that the way the daterange syntax was being handled has changed slightly. Before a Web page was marked with a certain date when it was added to Google’s index and whenever it was refreshed in Google’s index — in other words, whenever Google re-indexes it. NOW, a Web page will be found on one date only — the date that it’s added to Google’s index. It doesn’t matter how many times it’s refreshed by Google’s spider, the only time it’ll appear in response to a daterange search is the date it was indexed.

(Note that just because Google indexes a page on a certain date doesn’t mean it’s a brand-new page; Google may have just discovered it. Keep that in mind.)

For those of us who like to monitor additions to the Web, this is great news. It’ll allow you to do date-based searches without having to plow through tons and tons of repeat pages that get indexed on a regular basis (like home pages, or section pages.)

The engineer I spoke to said that the new way of handling daterange is currently being rolled out and should be updated by the end of the week. So you may try this search and get weird results. I found a couple of times I’d do a search and get huge numbers of results ( site:us daterange:2454251-2454251 ) but when I revised the search to add a little more syntax I’d get reasonable numbers of results ( site:us inurl:us daterange:2454251-2454251 ). You’ll have to do some experimenting.

Feel free to use GooFresh to do that experimenting. But be warned; Google was awfully quick on the trigger about stopping me after a search and saying, “Pardon us but you look like a scraper. Please prove you are not with this CAPTCHA.” This got real old real quick…. I didn’t think I was typing THAT fast…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Some online publishers may get an unwelcome jolt on June 1st. Google, which provides thousands for ads to websites through it’s AdSense program, will shut off adds to certain websites beginning Friday.

The search giant has notified a number of Web publishers in the last few days that they will be dropped from its popular “AdSense” program starting June 1.

More details

I hope everyone in the U.S. is having a safe Memorial Day. My wife and I were out of town last week and got back on Friday. A couple people on my 2007 vacation suggestions page mentioned Mexico, and that’s where we decided to go. We found a resort in Los Cabos on the Baja peninsula and just relaxed down there for a week by the beach. The weather was perfect for reading summer books. Here’s the view (my wife took this picture):

When I look at my personal Google Reader trends page I can see where I’ve been reading fewer feed items during May, and then no feeds at all last week, followed by a couple catch-up days:

I’m still on vacation this week. The first work-related thing I’ll do is talk with webmasters for SMX Seattle 2007 next week. I’ve never been to Seattle/Kirkland/Redmond/Bellevue before, so I may try to go up a little early and see the Google office up there. I’d love to see where the Google webmaster console magic happens.