Emily Chang – Designer

Ideacodes co-founder, Emily Chang, has been invited to be on the jury for TWS2008 (the.colis Web Startup), Israel’s office dot com competition, presenting the most promising Israeli web startups of the year. A “well known and respected jury will choose 10 of the most exciting Israeli start ups for a chance to present their venture to more than 500 international and Israeli high tech industry members, private investors and VCs.”

Made my first creature tonight using the just-released Spore Creature Creator. I wanted to go for a cute creature and preferably a herbivore. Since it’s a trial, there are limited samples for creature parts so there were only carnivorous mouths :) Look forward to the full version so there’s a greater tool set.

Mostly, I can’t wait to play the game. I first saw Will Wright give a demo at SXSW in 2007.

I came across Goosh.org yesterday through someone’s tweet and I’m in love. Goosh, a “UNIX-like command-line interface for Google,” combines the search functionality of Google with the simplicity of command line. It brings me back to the days of using Pine for email.

Goosh is written by Stefan Grothkopp and dubs itself “the unofficial Google shell.” It’s a clever browser-based interface that mimics command-line interaction with results displayed in the same style as Google (blue links, black text, green links). I appreciate this hybrid virtuality.

You can search any number of searches with Goosh, including web, blogsearch, wikipedia, news, feeds, video, and maps by entering a simple key command.

Here’s an example of searching for a location in maps. Type “place south park, san francisco”.

You can also search in localized languages. If you type the “addengine” command, this adds Goosh to your firefox search box. Type “r” and an URL and you can results from the RSS feed of that site.

Here’s an example of reading the feed from my site. Type “r emilychang.com”.

See the screenshot below for specific commands.

Definitely try every command to see the result. You can also see a demo of the interactions at Max Kiesler’s post. Perhaps, soon, you’ll be goosh-ing too.

UPDATE 6/3: Akan from Plurk comments below that Plurk was NOT acquired by Pheltup.

Tonight browsing Plurk, I saw heyitskenn’s plurk about the service being acquired by Pheltup

I had first heard about Pheltup through a tweet by msippey, and then saw the launch party on Upcoming.

I hadn’t heard of their acquisition of Plurk yet so I went to Google blogsearch and searched “plurk acquired by pheltup”. There was only one (!) result from a Google crawl of buzztter.com, a site that tracks twitter conversations. Interestingly, the actual tweet hadn’t even been indexed by Google. Seeing @Pheltup in the results was enough for me to know to go to their Twitter page.

Sure enough, Pheltup claims to be acquiring Plurk. The URL goes to a page in the service, which is currently in private testing so I don’t have a login to confirm the news.

It seems like a long time ago when I was relying on RSS feeds and Google alerts to bring me the latest news. These days, I get almost all my news first from Twitter and other micro-broadcasting services, such as Plurk, Pownce, occasionally Brightkite and others. On micro-networks, the flow is multi-directional, short, fast, and immediate. I drop in on the flow or it pings me. The tempo of the interactions is even more spontaneous and immediate than the interactions than the preceding blogs and email alerts. I can feel the network at work. It comes in the form of people’s personal thoughts or interests. Follow enough people with interests that align with yours, with some other eclectic sources in the mix, and you’re bound to hear the news.

Of course, whether there’s any truth to this news is still debatable since some think the new social network, Pheltup is a hoax, complete with its own room on FriendFeed and thread on Get Satisfaction. Guess we’ll see what happens at their launch party. See you there?

UPDATE 6/3: Akan from Plurk comments below that Plurk was NOT acquired by Pheltup.