I’m a football fan and it’s about that time of year.
I ran across a really cool site yesterday called The Helmet Project. Charles Arey started the project a while back and he is documenting the different football helmets for college (all the way down to NAIA) through the NFL. You will also find USFL, CFL and yes, even the XFL. It is interesting how some teams have had a ton of changes while others have remained virtually unchanged.
Some of the colleges have gone through an alarmingly large number of helmet changes. For example Cincinnati has gone through 19 helmet changes since 1960. Michigan, on the other hand, has had three.
The Helmet Project looks like it has been a LOT of work, and if you are a football fan, I’m sure you will appreciate that.
Today I got an email with a link to a really cool site. Photographer Jack White put together a collection of historic Fort Worth photos from the late 1800’s on. I learned a lot. I never knew Fort Worth had an amusement park or a circus. I also didn’t know that Casa Mañana once had an outdoor venue (pictured right).
I love old architecture because there was so much detail in some of the work. Looking through pictures of old homes (nice ones of course) is like looking through a museum. Its also interesting to see that stuff that is around today was around 80 years ago and even though it looks different, it looks oddly the same.
User submitted news is nothing new. Neither is allowing users to vote on stories. You can digg it, reddit, and sphinn it, but the one that has caught my attention is Mixx.com. So why should you consider using Mixx.com?
1. Mixx Cuts Through the Noise. This is a blessing and a curse because part of how they cut through the noise is by not having as much noise to deal with. Mixx is smaller so that means less submissions, but also less content. The content that makes the cut seems to be of good quality for the most part, so its something I’m willing to live with.
2. Customizable “Your Mixx”. Mixx is great because you can plug in keywords you want to track and articles that are tagged with your keywords show up on your customized homepage (called Your Mixx). So if you don’t want to wade through articles about how legalizing (fill in the blank), OMGWTFKSRSLY [pic] and whatever else may flood the user submitted sites, you can strip it all away and get only what you want.
3. Mixx Makes for Great Keyword Targeting. The nature of the site is to show people what they are interested in, not just a laundry list. Hmm, sounds like what a search engine does. Where there is search, there is money to be made. Use your imagination on what this could do for you, but there is some real potential here.
In addition, Mixx offers a lot of other cool tools, an API so you can customize it even more and the Blender where they show off some of the cool things people have made with the API.
Today I read about a new search engine that is on the scene called Cuil (pronounced “cool"). The brains behind this new engine belong to several Google alums.
From a purely visual perspective, the site interests me. It presents results in a new way; that is, paragraphs over the current standard list used by the Big Three. Cuil claims to have a larger index than even the GOOG at 120 billion pages. When I tested the site in a quick non-scientific way, it left me wondering if this would make it.
One of the joys of being named Brandon Meek (no S on the Meek) is that, well, there just aren’t a lot of us. Outside of a banjo player and a few generic businessmen, well, that’s pretty much it. Several years ago, I bought my name and in pretty much any engine, I will rank first, as I probably should. When I tested Cuil with this though, well, not so much. I mean, I pretty much control the first page with or without a space in the name, but for some reason, my homepage doesn’t make it. Cuil seems to have some serious love for Twitter stuff and Gooruze as much of the results are tied to one of the two sites/feeds.
I want to play with it for a while, if for nothing else, to see something different. I’ve been waiting for a while to see someone, anyone, do something different in the search space. Is Cuil the site that will take control of search? Well as Motley Fool says, “The correct answer is “probably not,” but there’s too much at stake to write off Cuil completely.”
Besides, we need someone to root for and we need someone to push search to it’s next stage.
1. A day without sunshine is like night.
August 07, 2008
11:44 am
I’m a football fan and it’s about that time of year. 
Today I got an email with a link to a really cool site. Photographer Jack White put together a collection of historic Fort Worth photos from the late 1800’s on. I learned a lot. I never knew Fort Worth had an amusement park or a circus. I also didn’t know that Casa Mañana once had an outdoor venue (pictured right).
User submitted news is nothing new. Neither is allowing users to vote on stories. You can 
Today I read about a new search engine that is on the scene called 
