Happy New Year, 2008!

Australia is always one of the first to celebrate the New Year due to its placement nearest the dateline. The fireworks in Sydney are, dare I say, the best in the world. The harbor bridge as a feature with the opera house and warm summer nights makes for the perfect place (not to mention the millions of dollars in fireworks!)



picture via flickr

Godt nytår

Merry Christmas!

Christmas in Sydney was much colder than normal today. I remember my first Australian yule in 2000 and it was a blazing 43 degrees Celsius (109 F). Today was 24 degrees (75 F). I actually wore a wool jumper which made me feel a bit more as if I were back in the Northern Hemisphere. Apparently turkey sales were back up this year, a return from more fish based dinners. I've attached a picture of this year's Christmas tree, my favorite decorations are the faberge eggs my relatives from Denmark gave me last year. I cringed when we ran out of time to buy a real Christmas tree and instead picked up a fake. It fell over while we were out, I'm thankful nothing was broken. Next year we've made the sustainable decision to plant a living fossil, coniferous Wollemia, in a tub and bring it inside each year to decorate.

This year's Christmas tree:



Next year's:

Wikia to launch - human filtered search

TechCrunch just sent through a notice that Wikia will launch to the public in January. Wikia is Wikipedia's venture into creating a human filtered search engine. I'm interested in seeing the result, I hope it provides an alternative for quality search results.

Wikia search launches private beta to the public January 7.

The Crunchies - Vote now

The TechCrunch final nominations have been made. You can now vote on your favorites. Atlassian have my vote (Sydney siders), the founders won Entrepreneur of the Year last year by EY. I'll also be voting for StumbleUpon, 37 Signals, Jackson Fish Market, Kongregate, twitter...

Booktagger on Google Search - 3 entries to 24,000

Before we launched Booktagger.com a couple weeks ago there were three search results for the term 'booktagger'. They were all related to the pre-launch of booktagger.com. Now there are 24,000. Thanks for noticing us :).

Does anyone remember that search related game where you'd try to put two words together in a search engine and try and come up with zero results?

*edit - looks like Google have culled some of the spammy results - was 21,200 yesterday and now 16,800. :)

Flickr Related Tag Browser

A colleague of mine sent me an interesting plug-in site to browse Flickr tags. A pleasant experience. A great presentation of randomness; simple, clean. Check it out.

Flickr Tag Browser (by www.airtightinteractive.com)



A tag is a label, specifically one used to describe an object and usually affixed to it. - wikipedia.org

New Bookshelf - Feature Books

This is a sister update to yesterday's bookshelf additon to the front page. We've incorporated a second bookshelf on the same page called Feature Books. Feature Books are charecteristic of the site. They might be best sellers, most viewed or just plain arbitary selections. All for the dedication to finding the next good read.