Yup: Bush has a mounted pistol that Saddam clung to upon capture. Shown to "select visitors", <a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=615&e=2&u=/nm/20040530/pl_nm/bush_saddam_gun_dc">the president is proud of this particular spoil of war</a>.
New site just launched that is sure to become the google of the blogs: <a href="http://www.blogsnow.com/">blogsnow</a> will track how many blogs are linking to different pages every ten minutes. It searches google, the IMDB, wiki, and the NYTimes.
At present, it is a means of accessing information you might not ordinarily have found your way to. But it has the potential to show what is popular: just click on the popular wiki links being blogged. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukkake">Bukkake</a> was especially revealing to me, since I live here in Japan (and, no, don't believe every kinky thing you here about Japan. sheesh.).
Finally Amazon and Google are leading the net in the right direction: while there are stockpiles of written material on the web, hardly any of it is actually usable in quality research papers. I am specifically referring to citations and endnotes, naturally.
But now Amazon is offering a new service that shows<a href="http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/article.asp?ArtID=6415"> the way of the future.</a>
"You type a name, a phrase, a couple of keywords into the Amazon book search engine, and up pops a list of the books that contain the words you typed in.
Click again on one of the short citations, and you see the actual text pages where the words appear….
Amazon has been careful not to give away the store. They've scanned "only" 120,000 books into their system so far, and they allow you to view only two pages on either side of the keywords. Cleverly, Amazon also doesn't allow you to print the pages where the keywords show up. They're hoping you'll choose to buy the book online instead."