"...the September 19, 2002, issue of Nature reported that neuroscientist Olaf Blanke of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland and his colleagues were able to bring about out-of-body experiences through electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in the temporal lobe of a 43-year-old woman suffering from severe epileptic seizures. With initial mild stimulation, she felt she was "sinking into the bed" or "falling from a height." With more intense stimulation, she said she could "see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk." Another trial induced "an instantaneous feeling of 'lightness' and 'floating' about two meters above the bed, close to the ceiling."

Subjective reports and experimental evidence show that there is no imagination involved in the experiences of synaesthetes; they literally see letters or whole words as colours, or hear a symphony when someone familiar walks into the room. Moreover, the synaesthetic associations between the different sensory modalities involved are persistent, not random. As a result, any given stimulus will reliably induce the same effect in the `dependent' sense in an individual. This characteristic has formed the basis of a `gold standard' test for synaesthetes, discussed later.

The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. The issues are too complex for representative governments to understand. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are also very limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and their increasingly simplistic representation of the world can not provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus. Emergent democracy has the potential to solve many of the problems we face in the exceedingly complex world at both the national and global scale. The community of toolmakers will build the tools necessary for an emergent democracy if the people support the effort and resist those who try to stifle this effort and destroy the commons.

We must make spectrum open and available to the people, resist increasing control of intellectual property, and resist the implementation of architectures that are not inclusive and open. We must encourage everyone to think for themselves, question authority and participate actively in the emerging weblog culture as a builder, a writer, a voter and a human being with a point of view, active in their local community and concerned about the world.

EFF asked the public to write up its experiences with the DMCA, and, working with an army of volunteer editors and law-students, worked with commentors to get the comments into the form that the copyright office expected, for maximum effectiveness. In the end, we helped file nearly 200 comments, more than double what the Copyright Office ever received in previous comment-periods.

If there's any justice, this will move the Copyright Office to carve out exceptions to the DMCA that will give us all the freedom to make lawful uses of our lawfully acquired property. Thanks to everyone who helped with this -- it really made a difference. Link Discuss

The problem is so bad that more than 400 banks were registered to one mailbox alone, international investigators say.

The island has also begun interning asylum seekers while their applications to live in Australia are processed, in return for aid from Canberra.

However this appears to have gone badly wrong.

Late last year, Australian immigration officials admitted that the asylum seekers, mainly Iraqis, had been running their own detention centre since officials abandoned the site following a riot.

"Effectively you could call it a self-managed centre," a senior Australian immigration official told an inquiry.

It's better than a hysterical call for duct tape. But Ready.gov, the Homeland Security Department's new website to help the public prepare ­ and deal with the aftereffects of ­ a biological, chemical or nuclear terrorist attack, still ignores an obvious truth: that such strikes are nearly impossible for al Qaeda-like groups to pull off. Take biological weapons, for example. As previously noted, there's only been one successful biostrike in the history of modern warfare. All other attempts have fizzled.

Why? First of all, smallpox, anthrax, and the like are hard to spread effectively. There are only so many mysterious packages you can send out. Second, the weapons are pretty fragile. This week's blizzard on the East Coast would have wiped out just about any biological agent.

But there's no mention of this at Ready.gov. Instead, families are told, "If you become aware of an unusual and suspicious release of an unknown substance nearby… Quickly get away. Cover your mouth and nose with layers of fabric that can filter the air but still allow breathing. Examples include two to three layers of cotton such as a t-shirt, handkerchief or towel. Otherwise, several layers of tissue or paper towels may help. Wash with soap and water and contact authorities."

Except that under the terms of the Broadcast Flag mandate that the FCC is considering at the moment, all digital television demodulators will have to be designed to be tamper-resistant (i.e., not GPLed). If Hollywood gets its way, in other words, GNU Radio would be illegal.

Which is a damned shame, 'cause Eric just got DTV tuning and demodulation running. Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

The first thing he objects to is the decision to get rid of line sharing. This issue hardly got any play in the run-up to the FCC decision, but it's a doozy. I didn't realize Powell was the one pushing to preserve it. Basically, line sharing is the reason we have a modicum of competition for DSL service. The supposedly deregulatory Powell wanted to keep it, and the supposedly pro-states and pro-competition majority killed it.

This matters more than it might appear. Since broadband is the foundation for many new services, including competitive VOIP, having broadband providers who don't control last-mile facilities is essential. The last-mile owners (phone and cable) will use regulatory and business tactics to hamstring what goes on top

Sure, there are some good reasons to go non-ASCII (for example, if you're writing in Hebrew, or even French), but the tools just aren't there yet, especially as applied to curly-quotes and em-dashes and all of Ms. Williams's precious non-ASCII punctuation.

I've been hashing this out with Nelson Minar, and he's posted a pretty good counterpoint to this on his blog. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nelson!)

The two were clearly on the outs back during the Gulf War, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense, and the first President Bush dubbed Saddam "Hitler revisited." Then Cheney moved to the private sector and suddenly things between him and Saddam warmed up considerably. With Cheney in the CEO's seat, Halliburton helped Iraq reconstruct its war-torn oil industry with $73 million worth of equipment and services -- becoming Baghdad's biggest such supplier. Kinda nice how that worked out for the vice-president, really: oversee the destruction of an industry that you then profit from by rebuilding.

When, during the 2000 campaign, Cheney was asked about his company's Iraqi escapades, he flat out denied them. But the truth remains: When it came to making a buck, Cheney apparently had no qualms about doing business with "Hitler revisited."

This is just the first beta, but Kevin's working hard on improving the system, adding features and fixing bugs very quickly. What a cool project -- and I'm chuffed to see the use of the term Whuffie in the documentation. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

"I told him I wanted to see if we matched up. I was laughing when he e-mailed me back with all his details. He gave his name, address and even his mobile phone, which I had not asked for."

Danielle passed on this information to the police who were able to track him down to Moffat, near Dumfries in Scotland, through the email address he used to flirt with the young Nottingham girl.

Besides being useful for the multi-billion-dollar data storage industry, the BMR techniques could improve magnetic measurements and the study of magnetic effects in individual atoms, molecules and nanoscale clusters. It could also greatly enhance resolution and sensitivity of scanning probe imaging techniques that are widely used to characterize magnetic materials.

"They deceive you into thinking a movie starts on time in order to create a captive audience,'' Weinberg said. "People are actually paying good money to watch commercials.''

Miltos does these amazing, large-scale oil paintings of wires, cables, routers, and Playstations; he also does computer-generated vibracolour prints, and looped motion graphic art of video game footage cut-and-paste. He says he "became impatient with critics and curators who couldn't come up with "a really good '-ism' for this new generation of creativity," so after securing financial backing from the nonprofit Art Production Fund, he hired Lexicon Branding (the California branding firm responsible such product names as Powerbook, Pentium, Zima, Swiffer and Dasani) to brand a new art movement for him. In May 2000, during a packed press conference at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan, he revealed that new name by way of a squeaky, synthetic voice from a Sony Vaio laptop. The word: "Neen." Lecture details, Discuss. At left: Manetas' painting "Madonna and Child".

As you may have heard, Shift's publishers made the decision yesterday to suspend the publication of Shift indefinitely. Our last issue will hit newsstands the first week of March. Putting together the magazine and website has been a labour of love for all of us here, and so it's with great regret that we make this announcement.

I was quite redy to offer Renwano C. my asistance with the transfer his Father's money when I got your letter. You see, I have performed poorly at my job this year, and did not receive a yearly bonus from my employer. Therefore, I believe that if I were to transfer a large amount of money (even as much as TEN MILLION - $10000000 DOLLARS, the amount your are proposing to move), the authorities would simply believe this to be my bonus and it would not raise eyebrows or trigger any red flags.

We notice that in your mailout, you suggest people "forward the mail to anyone you think might be able to help". Unfortunately, you don't provide any date or details of when the [Bugbear] will end its passage through Parliament.

This is a very bad thing to do to us, and the Internet in general. That's because of what's known as the "Craig Shergold" problem...

Basically, not only have you diminished the worth of every fax that runs through our service, not only have you cost us a fair bit relaying a bunch of identical faxes that will go straight into the bin - and not the recycling bin, either - but you've also potentially doomed us to months or even years of fending off people who will persist on faxing their MP the obsolete details of a Bill that the MPs have already voted on.

60 Foot Satellite Dish--full azimuth and elevation rotation. Also includes 1000 sq. ft. underground control room. Inside has been stripped bare. No mineral rights. SUV in picture NOT included.

"We live in an era in which pessimism has become the norm," writes Arthur Herman, in The Idea of Decline in Western History. Herman, who coordinates the Western Civilization Program at the Smithsonian, argues that the decline of the West, with its view of our "sick society," has become the dominant theme in intellectual discourse, to the point where the very idea of civilization has changed... As a counternarrative to this cultural pessimism, consider the twofold optimism of science.

First, the more science you do, the more there is to do. Scientists are constantly acquiring and processing new information. This is the reality of Moore's Law--just as there has been a doubling of computer processing power every eighteen months for the past twenty years, so too do scientists acquire information exponentially. They can't help but be optimistic. And second, much of the new information is either good news or news that can be made good thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques.

In the latest Adventures of Superman (#613 for those not keeping track) Lois Lane fights the evil public domain!

Mr. Funky Flashman (who says, "This isn't just about money Miss Lane... Okay, its mostly about money...") starts a merchandising business based on Superman's image and symbol. He mistakenly believes, "Superman is in the Public Domain." The Man himself is busy fighting supervillains, so Lois steps up to deal with Flashman. She convinces Flashman that a line of supervillains merchandise will only make him more money. Lois knows this will lead to Flashman getting a visit from a real supervillain, and it does. Captain Cold shows up and freezes Flashman solid while saying, "You ever hear of Intellectual Property...?"

I guess DC Comics feels every one, heros and villains, should work together to stop IP violators.

'Kalashnikov' has long set the standard for powerful rifles, but if elderly Russian inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov gets his way the famous name will soon be linked to umbrellas, watches and even aftershave.

The inventor has formed an unlikely alliance with a small German company that wants to attach the Kalashnikov brand to a range of ordinary consumer goods that could also include snowboards, halogen lamps, pocket-knives and energy drinks.

Kalashnikov, 83, has been living on a state pension in a two-room Russian apartment and never saw any royalties on his famous AK-47 assault rifle, which he developed in 1947 while convalescing from injuries sustained in World War Two.

But the end is near for the 24-year-old strip. Well, maybe not "near," but in sight. Johnston plans to end the strip in four years, when her contract with distribution syndicate United Media runs out. She then intends to write a book to tie up the loose ends and reveal what happens to her characters.

"I'm ready to wrap up the strip and end it because all things come to an end," Johnston said in a phone interview. She also wants to avoid dealing with production deadlines when she's in her 60s.

In a simple historical test of the technique, Kleinberg analysed all the annual State of the Union addresses given by US Presidents since 1790. He found that particular word "bursts" could indeed be linked to important events at the time the speeches were delivered.

In the years that immediately followed the American Revolution, for example, sudden bursts in the use of words such as "militia", "British" and "savages" are found.

From 1930 to 1937 a spike in the use of the word "depression" is seen. And from 1949 to 1959 "atomic" is the word with the greatest "burstiness". Later in the 20th century, words such as "Vietnam", "Soviet", "communist" and "Afghanistan" increase sharply in usage.

VIA Technologies, Inc. a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, today announced that the Janus Wireless Project will use VIA EPIA M-Series Mini-ITX mainboards to form the hardware platform behind their WiFi Caravan's zany multi-car, 14-hour journey from Portland to San Francisco on 21st February 2003, running a full service wireless network between vehicles, with public online participation through specified access points.

Broadcasting music, playing games, chatting, downloading and uploading files, the WiFi Caravan aims to show how a 802.11 (WiFi) wireless network can be maintained between several high speed moving vehicles using the existing wireless access node infrastructure, much of which has been abandoned by defunct telecommunications companies in and around the Portland area.

BLOGS: Here are some links to blog coverage (e-mail us if we're missing yours). Some of these were posted live during the event by participants, others are after-the-event musings: artlung (lots of links to other blogs, and news coverage) :: Michael :: filchyboy :: boing boing :: Co-producer and panelist Susannah "Reverse Cowgirl's Blog" Breslin (pictures) :: panelist and BoingBoing founder Mark Frauenfelder's pictures (including the one at left):: panelist Evan Williams :: panelist doc searls :: panelist tony pierce :: funktrain (from Jonah of lablogs.com, with still more links):: errant.org :: ming.tv :: Jonathan :: kitty bukkake (more blog links) :: boogah (pictures) :: emmanuelle :: john3n :: paul's details :: on a clear day :: seliot :: slashdot :: lavoice.org :: turntablemonkey :: standing room only :: kimberly :: OJR :: Search Engine Watch.

VIDEO: Archived video stream is coming soon, and we'll post here when it's available. MUSIC: John von Seggern debuted a new mashup during his set at the event Saturday. Download "Yvonne Reyes vs Digital Cutup Lounge - Grain of Sand" here (http) or here (ftp).

Link to event home page with video, audio, and blog reports posted by participants during and after the event, Discuss

"'Many people like to smoke, and other people like to drink,' says Ricardo Brill. 'I like clocks.' Since 1960, Ricardo and his wife, Elsie, have been fixing ailing clocks, watches and other timepieces at their Hollywood Boulevard location, Elsie's Watch and Jewelry Repair. The great-grandparents, who have been married for 57 years, still serve many of the same customers from when the store first opened."

Here's how the software works. You invite friends to form a posse of up to 10 participants. Representing the group on your desktop will be a colorful image, either one from a set provided by the software or something one of the group has produced. (It could even be a digital photo.) If you're online--and since threedegrees assumes you have broadband, you're probably online all the time--you give your friends a holler simply by sending the equivalent of an instant message. Everyone in the group will see it. If you want to send them a digital photo, you simply drag it over the icon and it shows up on everyone's computer. Then there are "winks": small animations that you trigger to run on everyone's screen. Some of the standards include big lips smacking a kiss or a heavyset cartoon character who drops trou and cuts the cheese. (Sending these to oldsters might cause a NetGen gap.)

The most ambitious feature is called musicmix, an online equivalent of a pajama party where people take turns playing deejay. Each group member contributes favorite tunes into a shared playlist, displayed on a dashboard with a customized "skin," and everyone listens together. A click from any participant can choose a new song. Then everyone chats about the tunes. Interestingly, men and women use this feature differently: guys will see it as a contest--who's brought the coolest tunes?--and do virtual chest-thumps introducing the hottest bands. Meanwhile, the girls use the music as background for their chats.

I was supposed to fly to San Francisco on Jetblue this morning, but the northeast blizzard has grounded all flights. So I'm on the phone to Jetblue trying frantically to get rebooked -- when I discover they have the finest "hold" message on the planet. Here's my transcription of it:

"You know, everyone seems to think being on hold is a bad thing. Let's re-examine this, shall we? Don't look at it as being on hold. Look at it as being held! Because we all like to be held -- don't we?

"For example, when you're sitting in front of a fire with someone special, being held is very comforting. Or when you're upset about something, being held can make you feel a whole lot better. Or when walking in the park with our significant other, we like our hands to be held. Or even coming home from school and having your books held.

"You see? It's not all that bad. So remember. Don't look on it as being on hold. Look on it as being held!"

It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web - build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative.

So what is someone to do if they have a non-Region 1 DVD and want to watch it, or if they want to purchase a movie on DVD that is only available in Europe or Asia? The best way to get around the region encoding is to use a multi-region DVD player...

But not everyone is pleased with the growing popularity of multi-region DVD machines. While it is not illegal to sell such machines in North America, the major studios are not happy about the potential lost revenue. To try and dampen their growing popularity, the studios have been coming up with several ways to make watching movies on these players much more difficult. Recently, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) developed the Regional Code Enhancing (RCE) system that is now being placed on many Region 1 DVDs. The RCE is made to prevent Region 1 DVDs from being played on multi-region DVD players, and there are talks underway to include this technology on DVDs released around the world. Still, many multi-region DVD players are now starting to be released with technology that gets around the RCE system.

Deep in the heart of the Happiest Place on Earth, Disneyland's semi-secret restaurant Club 33 beats like a pacemaker. Officially, the club is located at 33 Rue Royale in New Orleans Square, near the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. A decorative "33" and an intercom next to a French Quarter-style door are the only markers of the club's entrance. Disneyland's info line says 33 is the product of Walt Disney's "vision of a quiet, elegant place where he could entertain special guests." Sadly, Jesus had other plans, and Mickey Mouse's pappy ascended to that Magic Kingdom in the sky five months before the club's 1967 completion.

With Walt gone, it was decided to allow the public to dine there--or, rather, some of the public. Only card-carrying Club 33 members and their guests can enter the exclusive club. Individual gold memberships run $7,500, plus $2,500 in annual dues. Even if one does have this kind of excess income, there's a multiyear waiting list.

Here's one example of how we'll use it: I just installed the 2003 Encyclopedia Britannica on my laptop computer. It came on a DVD disk and took up about 2.4 gigabytes of space. This is the same encyclopedia, with multimedia additions, that used to take up a huge bookshelf. Now I carry it around.

The immense storage capabilities of computer disk drives also make me wonder whether applications we once assumed should reside on central servers might migrate back down to the desktop. Corporations could install employee Web sites on laptop computers, for example.

I'd also like to have a home server that stored everything -- music, movies, reference materials, software, you name it -- for easy access by devices I use around the house. Of course, I'd want a backup of everything.

But the huge capacities of drives for desktops and servers remind us of another aspect of the industry's progress. Disk drives are getting smaller, too. We'll soon embed huge amounts of storage into small devices.

I'm going to work at Google, naturally, which is an awesome opportunity in itself. To go there with the rest of my team (Jason, Jason, Jason, Rudy, and Steve), and to continue working on Blogger, but to have access to these amazing resources (not just money, and servers, and bandwidth, and traffic, and the index, but incredible brains) is a dream scenario.

For Blogger, and for Blogger users (and for the blogging world in general--Blogger-using or not--because I know that's a concern), it's going to mean great things, I believe. We're going to be mapping out more clearly what that means and talking about it soon. We don't mean to be mysterious about that. We just haven't had time to put it all together yet.

From the personal perspective, my whole life is different. For starters, while I'm working on roughly the same thing, I now have a boss (or two)--something I've rarely had in my life. I'm working in a company of 600 (and growing) instead of six (the largest previous was O'Reilly at 150 or so, but that was brief). I'm commuting to another town for work, which I've never done. (I bought a car yesterday--something I haven't had in three years.) And that's just the tangible stuff. Well, part of the tangible stuff.

* How much?

* Will the Pyra-team all have jobs at Google?

* What does integration with Google really mean for Blogger, and, especially, for non-Blogger blogs?

The Blogger story is an interesting parable for Internet business. They shipped (very) early, with a technology that did very, very little. They saw this tiny little need: an easy means of handling putting little blobs of text in order and managing archives of the old blobs, and then they filled it.

The need was little, the demand was enormous. Blogger ballooned to fantastic size, in such short order that it far outstripped the technology's ability to keep up, hence the plague of Blogger outages that provoked howls of outrage from the blog-using public.

And there were security issues, multiple break-ins in which lots of passwords and other personal data were compromised (though never as much as the blogosphere fervrently avowed must have been leaked).

It was fast. It was loose. It wasn't planned carefully and executed with precision, it was hammered together as quickly as possible and patched on the fly -- and it held together well enough to handle more than 90,000,000 posts.

Blogger's financial woes and internecine struggles were a soap-opera that the whole blogosphere watched avidly, often meanspiritedly. Its finances were always a source of axe-grinding, since they were so visible: disgruntled laid-off employees kvetched about missing their back-pay, the BlogSpot hosting service was first overwhelmed by banners and then slipped into homogeniety as the number of banner-buyers contracted to a very few (a phenomenon that afflicted the whole Internet, of course).

Not that it made the service any less popular. In fact, it continued to grow -- which, ironically, made it less reliable and more expensive to run.

And it didn't matter. Problems with reliability, security breaches, financial woes -- none of them could detract from the service's popularity. Blogger's small successes -- a cash infusion from Trellix, a deal to provide blogs through a Brazilian media-portal -- were cheered throughout the blogosphere with glee that nearly matched the nastiness that greeted its problems.

Blogger's been treading water. It has a million blogs tied around its ankle, users who require constant care and feeding (I'm one of them!), who occupy a large fraction of its cycles. New users flow in every day, and the competition is sniffing around its heels, adding features (better RSS, trackback, more flexible APIs, RSS aggregation) that often require less scalability than they would in Blogger's context (this is especially true of Movable Type, which, given its distributed nature, doesn't need to ensure that a new feature can be used by a million blogs simultaneously).

There's a lot of technology research and development going on in blog-mining, from Blogdex to Technorati to Meg and Nick's seekrit new tool, which sounds very exciting indeed. The metadata that can be extracted from blogs -- trackbacks, blogrolls, interlinks, RSS -- provide a very rich field for researchers. Sociologists, marketers, journalists, publishers and anthropoligists are all thrilled to have this ready-to-hand source of quantifiable data about how information propagates, and what it all means.

Google's made a business out of this sort of research. Its PageRank algorithm is the best idea-diffusion-miner we've got right now, and in hindsight, Google's move into blogs seems inevitable.

Google's done very good work with some of the other companies they've acquired, like DejaNews, which is a thousand times the service that it ever was pre-Google. Google's got a whole lot of genuine grown-ups running its show, seasoned entrepreneurs and brilliant engineers whose approach is anything but fast-and-loose. Indeed, after the Deja acquisition, there was a seemingly infinite interregnum when all of that Usenet history was offline, while Google engineered-up a world-beating back-end for it and then carefully decanted all of Usenet into it.

Presumably, Blogger can't go dark while Ev, Steve, Rudy and the gang confab with Google's engineers and distil all the lessons of Blogger's 90,000,000 posts, its outages and rollouts, its complaints and praise, and figure out how to design the next generation of Blogger. We do know that the BlogSpot hosting will migrate to Google's server-farm, but I'm willing to bet that that's not an instant turn-around. Google's server-farm is a core asset and an essential piece of the Internet's infrastructure, and they can't afford to pour BlogSpot into their racks and see what happens.

But it's that usage-volume at Google that makes this deal so exciting. Like Amazon, Google has so much traffic that it can afford to roll out small-scale trials -- Remember the thumbnails of search-results? The limited trial of Folding@Home in the GoogleBar? -- and get instant results about how well a new feature performs. Google's core expertise is making sense of data gathered from the Internet, so it's eminently capable of making sense of the results of these trials.

What this means is that once Google actually does integrate Blogger proper into its service, we can expect very rapid and very solid innovation. Gbloogle will be able to sneak features in for a day or two, extract the data, and make some sense of the data, decide whether its worth keeping the feature, and engineer something Google-grade to put on the back-end.

But Blogger's success isn't only about what Blogger does. Services like the Weblogs.com list of recently updated weblogs, open protocols like TrackBack, and other technologies developed by rival blogging companies are the reason we have a vibrant, enormous Blogosphere, and not an anemic, partisan Bloggersphere. If Google is able to index every Blogger post (and, one presumes, every message-board post, once the feature is integrated), that's great news for Blogger users, but it won't be as powerful as the other blogmining tools until and unless it can do the same for anyone who publishes something that is self-identified as a "blog."

This will be a real challenge. The real challenge. If Google pulls it off successfully, it will be able to generate tons of great, new, brilliant features, use its data-mining to refine them and build secondary services atop them, and that innovation will flow out to the other blogging tools. And vice-versa. Blogger is a success because of the work that Meg and Ev and Steve and Rudy and Jason and the rest did, but it's also a success because it borrowed ideas from other entrepreneurs and inventors, not seeking competitive advantage in locking out interoperability.

If the new Gbloogle of a year or two from now is able to treat all blogs as first-class citizens, this is the best news ever for blogdom.

I've spent the past two hours going through every single blog-mention of Google's buyout of Blogger, and by far the best speculation about the future of Gbloogle I've seen comes from Matt Webb:

GOOGLE ARE BUILDING THE MEMEX.

They've got one-to-one connections. Links. Now they've realised - like Ted Nelson - that the fundamental unit of the web isn't the link, but the trail. And the only place that's online is... weblogs.

There are two levels to the trail:

1 - what you see
2 - what you do
("And what you feel on another track" -- what song is that?)

And the trail is, in its simplest form, organised chronologically. Later it gets more complex. Look to see Google introduce categories based on DMOZ as a next step.