The only reason I'm posting a summary of another blogger's review of Twitter search sites is I'm lazy. That's right... L A Z Y and would rather someone else spend hours and hours (OK, several minutes) trying out the assorted search services prowling through Twitter traffic.

Rafe Needleman, who blogs at CNET and elsewhere, is the appropriately named guy who tried out a bevy of Twitter search scoopers.

His review is here http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10272370-2.html?tag=nl.e703 and he makes the case that three of the sites he's tried are a cut above the others.

And they are (followed by, first, Rafe's comments, then my own):

A Seattle startup, CrowdEye.com, is in beta stage and wants people to test its Twitter search option.

So far, less than fully impressive.

The founders are former Microsoft employees, including the company's former head of search engineering.

But to the point: so far CrowdEye doesn't let one dive very deep or far back.

Best I can tell, the search now offers the past three days.

And even then, I don't like the results.
Go to Search.Twitter.com and plunk in "spokane weather." On Thursday June 18 you'll get 20 results.

But on CrowdEye, you get two results ONLY if you search for Spokane weather WITHOUT QUOTES. And neither of those two is found in the listed results from the Twitter search page.

Gotta be something odd going on. Anyone at CrowdEye want to explain when we'll get more choice and why some results look funky?

On the other hand, some features, such as a listing of regularly posted links tied to keywords, looks very promising.

RapidRepair, a Michigan tech service firm, will post a fully detailed summary and pictorial essay on the inside guts of the new iPhone.

It will be posted at the company's site early Friday, June 18

http://www.rapidrepair.com

The images and commentary will later be followed by a do-it-yourself iPhone repair guide, to be posted at the site within a week.

Really bored? You can even dive back into the early days of Twitter, now that another company, TweetScan, has developed a Twitter historical search feature.

TweetScan is not related to Twitter.com.

To learn about or sign up for the historical search, go to http://tweetscan.com/main.php

The service is not free, costing $20 per year.
You can't blame TweetScan for trying to make money off Twitter.

The service says it searches back to Nov. 1, 2007. That means the search database goes back through more than 220 million tweets.

The heat inside data centers has been discussed and mentioned multiple times. But one seldom hears about the impact on the center when coolers don't work.
We found a summary recently on datacenterknowledge.com that explains how hot a failed cooling system will leave a room.
datacenterknowledge.com/archives/category/downtime

The streaming music hub Last.fm was offline for about 6 hours Sunday (June 14) after multiple chillers failed in its London data center, causing a dramatic rise in temperature inside the data center. The temperature in one row of racks reached 50 degrees C (122 degrees F), according to a chart posted by Last.fm of conditions at its Braham Street data center, which is operated by Level 3 Communications. UPDATE: The Last.fm site is back up as of about 8:30 pm Eastern time.

Last.fm kept its users updated with a series of whimsical posts on its Twitter feed. “Crikey, one of our data centers has overheated! We’re fixing it as fast as we can, but the site will be down for a bit,” read one Tweet. “Apologies for the downtime, our datacenter appears to have landed on the sun,” read another. It’s not clear whether the thermal event affected other customers, but Level 3’s facility also hosts many telecom providers, hosting companies and enterprise firms that would be less amused by a lengthy outage.

TechCrunch noted that Last.fm had recently touted its uptime on Twitter and Flickr. Murphy must have noticed.

Notable piece of information: about 55 percent of all U.S. homes have installed some type of Web filtering software, to protect children.

This comes by way of a study released by Trend Micro, Inc.

That's only 3 point higher than the 55 percent found by the Pew Foundation in a 2005 study.

For the full release off PR NEWSWIRE, go to http://news.prnewswire.com/DisplayReleaseContent.aspx?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/06-09-2009/0005041027&EDATE=

One of the Web's true visual repositories is NASA's Earth Observatory, about to mark a decade online.

NASA is noting the anniversary with a special map section called World of Change, a splendid compendium of satellite images documenting vast changes in Earth geography.

If you want to see what the Amazon looked like, during a decade of deforestation, this will show it.

Another very curious, sometimes interesting site is TOSBACK.com. It offers about 40 examples of notable sites that have changed or dramatically altered their terms of service.

Facebook, of course, is featured prominently.

So are YouTube and GoDaddy.

Found these via the Silicon Valley Good Morning SVA newsletter: Worth checking out are Plagium, beta version of a plagiarism tracker, and Cogitate, a gravity game using Lego Technic construction components.

We spotted this curious item. We might even Twitter it, but I'm sure dozens have done so already:

LA RUSSA SUES Twitter OVER FAKE PAGE
Associated Press
ST. LOUIS -- St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa is suing the social-networking site Twitter, claiming an unauthorized page that used his name to make light of drunken driving and two Cardinals pitchers who died damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.

The suit filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco seeks unspecified damages.

Well, there's no doubt a good reason for the Higher Echelon of WikiMasters to ban further changes to Scientology entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Tom Cruise has nothing to do with it.

A fairly complete explanation is at the WSJ.com site (normally, subscription required).

We'll boil it down for you:

Lifting just the main part of the WSJ story:

The decision follows six months of debate among administrators of the user-edited encyclopedia, who found conflicts between Wikipedia editors who were Scientology enthusiasts and those who disliked the religion. Some 430 Scientology entries on Wikipedia resulted in constant battles over revisions between the two camps.

Credit: The Guardian

The Guardian broke this story this week. It's the ultimate coffee shop book-making contraption.

It's a rich idea, with a smoky complexity and a slightly bitter taste of capitalism at the very bottom of the cup.

The full story is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/24/espresso-book-machine-launches

Launching in London this week, the Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait.

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Tony Fryman, president of Cyan Worlds (the maker of Myst, Riven and Myst Online AKA Uru), offered an update today on sales of its new iPhone app.

His comments, sent by e-mail:

Specific sales numbers are confidential but we have done well in the rankings. We continue to hover around the top 10 Paid Apps (which includes all apps, not just games).

All but one of the games ahead of us are being sold at the 99 cent price point. We are around the top 5 Paid games and we have been featured in "New and Noteworthy" on the iTunes apps front page. We are extremely pleased with the quantity and tone of the positive reviews Myst has received.

Very pleased over all.

The Myst app is $5.99 to download at iTunes.com.

The good news at Itron keeps coming. Yesterday (May 19) its stock soared 13% on news that an analyst regards its smart meter equipment among the most reliable and most ready for federal smart-grid investment.

Now Google, on its own Google blog, has said it's added Liberty Lake-based Itron to its list of approved smart energy partners.
For more details on the PowerMeter system (Google's home or business-based energy tracking software), go to http://www.google.org/powermeter/contactus.html

The story, on the Seeking Alpha site, lays out the key info:

When interviewing Don Poffenroth and Kent Fleischmann, owners of Spokane's cool Dry Fly Distilling company, we encountered yet another instance of Twitter taking over the human spirit.

The company rounds up (very easily) volunteers to work a three-hour shift each Saturday to bottle that week's vodka and gin. Last week, however, the volunteers who signed up, all as a group, had to cancel. This was on Thursday morning.

Poffenroth sent out a Twitter blast asking followers to sign up for the Saturday shift (the reward is a lunch and some samplings of the products).

"We put out the tweet 11:56 a.m. By 2:30 p.m we had eight people sign up," said Poffenroth.

The Twitter handle for the company is dryflydistiller.

Privacy advocates in Greece have told Google to stop gathering images for its Street View mapping/photo application.

They have told Google Street View can't collect images until it provides it provides additional privacy guarantees.

This unusual step is the result of Greece's Data Protection Authority, or DPA.

The group ignored assurances from Google that it would blur faces and vehicle license plates when displaying the images online.

We were sent the link to a YouTube short, very cool WSU video that gives a nice overview (literally) of the WSU campus as seen in Second Life. I wonder where they found that large body of water next to the Pullman campus.

The link if you care to share it: http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/admin/post.asp?blogID=4

Thanks to Richard Miller

Myst for the iPhone (referred to as iMyst by some) is now No. 10 on the list of top paid apps on the iTunes store.

That's notable for an app just released. And doubly notable because the Myst app is among the highest priced games for the iPhone. It costs $5.99 and every other app in the list costs just .99 cents.

Need help trying to use some of the two dozen different Google applications you're using?

It's never easy to find the exact help file; and don't even try to find the best source for help by Googling the forums.

Use Google's approved list of help documents.

They're right here: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/download-googles-help-files.html

Spokane game developer Cyan Worlds has released a new version of its groundbreaking game “Myst” for the Apple iPhone.

Company President (Not CEO as we earlier said) Tony Fryman said Apple approved the new application for the iPhone late Sunday.

The game can be downloaded from iTunes.com for $5.99. The game takes up more than 700 megabytes of storage, making it one of the biggest apps being offered for the iPhone, Fryman said.

In the original version, players explored a mysterious island world and used the mouse to find clues and decode puzzles or challenges.

Two challenges faced by Cyan’s developers were to use the iPhone’s touch screen technology instead of a mouse, and to maintain the high quality of the game, said Cyan Worlds CEO Rand Miller.

Fans who’ve downloaded Myst for iPhone have posted reviews saying the game provides superior-quality sound and images and retains the feeling of the original version, first released in 1994.

Revenue from the sales will be divided three ways, with Apple getting about 30 percent, and the rest split between Cyan and its Japanese partner, SunSoft.

While the app for the iPhone will generate some cash, Miller and Fryman are looking for ways to find new projects to hire back developers and designers. At present the company has fewer than 10 developers on staff.

“Now that we have our feet wet in the app development area, we have some ideas for other games that could be interesting as well,” said Miller.

Miller and Fryman have no idea what the Myst app will generate in sales. Both expect Cyan Worlds to make some reasonable amount of revenue.

"Yeah, I hope we make money," Miller said.

"We could use some (cash) at this point."

The iPhone app for Myst has just been released.

It took a few tries. The Myst app is much larger than typical iPhone games. It measures more than 700 mb.

We'll add more details later, including price and a short review.

We learned of the approval just before midnight on May 3.

Congratulations to Cyan Worlds!

A chance to vote online to get a Trader Joe's in Spokane.

The chic food retailer has a system that lets deprived foodies vote for or request a new Trader Joe's in their community.

It's here: http://www.traderjoes.com/contact_us_selection.html
Click on the drop down box and choose "Location requests."

Priggee returns.

The PI (now just an online publication) has begun using the cartoons of Milt Priggee.

We all know and love Milt from his days as the only working cartoonist in Eastern Washington, back when he toiled here in Spokane.

Here's the link to cartoons posted at the PI http://blog.seattlepi.com/miltpriggee/index.asp

Here's the announcement story: http://dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2009/04/16/milt-priggee-joins-seattlepicom/

Cyan alert!!!!

We'll be posting in a day or two some updates on the effort to develop Myst for the iPhone.

Date and time are uncertain.

Information of course depends on the availability of our good pals over at Cyan Worlds.

More to come....

Today's announcement by Washington's attorney general brings to mind the question: why did no one figure out a way to recover the deleted photos in the Daniel Ross case, back in 2006?

Ross was the Spokane firefighter fired for having sex with a 16-year-old girl in a city firehouse. Police investigators deleted images of his contact with the minor off his camera.

That incident made me wonder how easy or how hard it is to recover deleted images on a camera memory card.

Here's the formal spiel: On Wednesday Attorney General Rob McKenna hailed the signing of a bill that allows his office, in concert with the Washington State Patrol, to lay the groundwork for the creation of a digital crime lab.

Digital devices can frequently help track down suspects in cases involving terrorism, homicide, illegal narcotics, stalking, child pornography, harassment or robbery.