In the Wall Street Journal on Thursday on the 27^th, Walter Mossberg reviewed Answers.com. His final sentence was, “I urge you to try it.” The gist of the story was the Answers is a search company that strives to actually answer your questions as opposed to just giving you links related to query. I’ve tried it out, and it’s not bad for certain forms of querys. However, it is not nearly as extensive as searching the web.

Snap is back in business again (or still if it never left) as an Idealab company. Idealab is the group that backed GoTo.com which became Overture which in turn was acquired by Yahoo!. So, sometimes they get it right… especially considering that Google ended up licensing the rights to paid search to Yahoo! (who had obviously also acquired Overture’s patent portfolio).

But… whatever. A bunch of new search companies. You’d expect it now that search companies can’t get out of the way of money being thrown at them. The interesting thing is that Google sometimes links to Answer.com in the “definitions” field (located at the upper right hand corner of a search result page). Try searching on “earnings,” then clicking on the underlined “earnings” in the definition field. Goes to Answers (at least it did for me). So regardless of whether or not Answers is actually paying Google, Google is helping to build Answers’s brand… just like Yahoo! did when Google first started out. Interesting.

I spent most of the day yesterday transfering over my old posts from TypePad to my hosted MovableType account. It was not easy. In addition, I am transfering over my domain name (zoinger.com) to 1and1 where MT is being hosted.

I’m transfering over my domain from Yahoo! because they insist on placing a framed ad at the bottom of the page when forwarding a domain name. It’s just plain fugly. If the Yahoo! folks had a clue, they wouldn’t do this. I mean, who in the hell is going to click on a framed banner ad at the BOTTOM of a page? I’d like to tell the people at Yahoo! that it’s idiotic to do this, but good luck getting help from their customer “support.” Yeah right.

I’ve just noticed how much open-source software I am now using on my Windows XP machine. I use Firefox for browsing almost exclusively. I do use IE primarily because I have its cookies set differently than I do in Firefox - so, for example, between IE and Firefox I can easily log into two different Yahoo! Mail accounts. But if there was an extension that allowed you to manage and quickly switch between different Yahoo! Mail accounts, I won’t need IE for this… a quick account switching extension for Yahoo! Mail… that’d be cool he dreams.

But back to the point. Firefox for browsing and Filezilla for FTP (so much better than FTP Voyager which I had purchased previously). I use VirtualDub for video format conversion and resizing. Just check out the OpenCD Project for other open-source applications of note. Heck, I’m using MovableType like a word processor to create this blog.

I use NASA’s World Wind program to download LandStat maps of the world, satellite images, weather data. I don’t know if the application is open source, but the data is open to the world. Neat.

Even more interesting is that I use open source on top of open source. What do I mean? Well, I use an extension called Spellbound in Firefox to check spelling when posting in MovableType. When I was using TypePad, I also used Spellbound instead of the default TypePad spell checker. Spellbound is a much richer spell checker, since it lets you store custom words like "Google" and "Bay." Words I’m using all the time.

Just noticing all of these cool applications that have snuck onto my PC over the past seven years or so… but really in the past three or four years. All brought to you by the Internet. Just think what is to come. I’m sure Microsoft is thinking about that.

Last night the World Economic Forum opened its annual event in  Davos, Switzerland. This year you can save yourself the $12,500 membership fee and a $6,250 annual meeting fee by tuning into their webcasts.  A list of sessions with links to the video streams can be found here. Also somewhat new this year is their blog (it started in April of last year). It’s a big hobnobbing event with guests this year such as Bill Gates, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. With such luminaries in attendance, there’s guaranteed to be some insightful content.

It’s surprising to think back to the early-to-mid ’90s when almost no one owned a cell phone. I remember giving a friend of mine a hard time about purchasing one back then. "It’s too expensive… it’s just a status symbol… you’ll never use it… it’s just a trend," I told him. Times have changed.

Now I don’t even have a landline (I have cable for high-speed access). My cellphone is so valuable to me it goes with me where ever I go. I couldn’t live without it because it’s my:

• Alarm Clock - Since my clock radio died a few years ago, I’ve used my cellphone as my alarm clock.
• Flashlight - The backlight makes a great emergency flashlight. Use it all the time.
• Phonelist - I’ve got most of my important numbers programmed into the address book.
• Reminder - I have reminders sent to me via SMS from Yahoo! Calendar to notify me of upcoming appointments.
• Navigation Device - For example, you don’t need detailed directions to get to a friend’s house for the first time. Just get close, give them a call and have them talk you in.
• Notepad - I just type in an SMS message, and save it instead of sending it.

I’m sure there’s some other stuff I am forgetting, but that’s the main list. However, the really surprising thing is that my phone is completely out of date. It’s an old AT&T Wireless TDMA Nokia 8260 (or a very similar model). No web access, no fancy QWERTY keyboard, no color screen, no PC synchronization funtionality… pretty much just a straight-up phone. Perhaps mobiles are here to stay?