Archive: April, 2006

Last week I posted about Pamela Anderson, National Newspapers, and the Juno Awards coverage. It’s more obvious to me now than last week that Pamela Anderson’s cleavage is BIG news. Since then, Pamela Anderson’s Breasts have been The Story around here!

No, we’re not hanging out by the watercooler (yes we actually have one) talking about them. It’s the web traffic we’re getting on the subjects. Queries like “Pamela Anderson and her two best friends” – “Pamela’s Booby Prize” – “Pam’s Breasts” – to say nothing of all the straightforward Pamela Anderson, and Pam Anderson queries. It’s completely remarkable. The only other wildcard queries we get related to Paris Hilton, and that can be traced back to the posts about Hilton Hotel’s marketing Almost all other search traffic to our site, and this blog is search engine related.

Strangely, we’re also now getting queries for “Pam Anderson and Paris Hilton”

A couple of people I know down South asked me about the pictures themselves. Were they newsworthy in any way that they were put on so many cover pages? Nope. I’m posting copies of them below. It really must have been a slow news day. For the record, they all come from canada.com web sites.

Google and Earthlink have won the bid to provide the city of San Francisco with wireless service. The network will give users throughout the city the option of accessing the Internet via a two tier system.

The two companies are currently in talks to discuss the network’s infrastructure. Google will offer a free service, while Earthlink will provide a premium service that runs about four times faster. The Earthlink service will cost users about $20 USD a month. The city of San Francisco hopes the network will be up and running by the end of the year.

A few months back the city of San Francisco put out a request for proposal to create an affordable, broadband WiFi service for everyone in the vicinity, including low income, underprivileged families. A total of six bids were handed to the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services, with Google and Earthlink being the highest profile team. The other five bids came from Bridge Global, MetroFi, NextWLAN, Razortooth Communications and SF Metro Connect.

So last week the Juno Awards were held in Canada. I only got a chance to catch up on the local news yesterday, as I’ve been away for most of the last 2 weeks. Seems like Pamela Anderson’s breasts were The Story.

No, it wasn’t a story about Pam Anderson’s breasts getting larger or smaller. It was the fact that every newspaper in Canada seemed to devote half the front page to a picture of “Pammy” in a low cut gown. I wonder if every newspaper’s distribution went through the roof because of “the picture” of Pam’s Breasts ?? The funniest bylines I saw which appeared for “other” stories on newspaper’s top pages were “Booby Prize – (and in a much smaller font) Maritimers boo Pammy’s seal hunt rant” and “Mounties Stand Erect.” I guess it was slow news day.

Perhaps the funniest one I saw was this morning, Warren Kinsella wrote a line about “Pam Anderson and her two best friends.”

If different pictures of Pam’s breasts could be featured daily in the newspapers, perhaps they would be able to remain competitive with all the online news portals, or at least the 2,210,000 (+1) web sites that reference “Pamela Anderson’s Breasts” (!)

Pixsy Corporation recently released an interesting new visual search engine. Unlike traditional engines that comb the static web, Pixsy.com aggregates RSS feeds and extracts images and videos, indexing them into categories.

Pixsy uses its own propriety algorithms. Since RSS feeds are continuously updated in real time, Pixsy is able to provide its user base with a constant stream of the latest images and videos. These are not hosted directly off of Pixsy servers; instead, Pixsy forwards traffic directly to the source.

Some of the well known RSS sources Pixsy searches include:

• Reuters
• BusinessWeek
• The New York Times
• BBC
• YouTube
• CNet
• StupidVideos.com
• USAToday
• iVillage
• StarPulse
• Variety
• Golf.com

Here’s a break down of Pixsy’s features:

• The search bar is located at the top right of the screen.
• Categories are located at the left hand side under ‘Browse By Category.’ These include: World News, Celebrities and Entertainment, Politics, People and Dating, Photo and Video Sharing, Posters and Products, and Tech News. It would be nice to see a clustering type of system set up, that dynamically changes the categories whenever a query is entered in the search bar. For example, a search on your favorite band could break the categories into more specific subtopics such as Tour, Photo Shoot, and Latest Video, etc. Perhaps there isn’t enough RSS data available to do this.