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Could you spare a minute & share your COVID-19 vaccination cost, please? LinkedIn

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been tracking the top 5 hot searches in India on Google Trends (http://www.google.co.in/trends). Here are the results: If you're interested in making visualisations out of it, please feel free. But there's one particular thing I'm trying out, which is to categorise these searches and see if there's a trend around that. I've added a "Tag" column. Could you please help me tag the spreadsheet: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Av599tR_jVYgdE5zTU5QWjcxVWVCaTBuY3d0NkUtc1E&hl=en_GB It’s publicly editable, no special access required. If you could stick to the tags I already have (Business, Education, Entertainment, News, Politics, Sports, Technology), that would be great. If not, that’s fine as well. And if you’ve made any visualisations or done any analysis using this data, please do drop a comment. ...

The Dilbert search index now carries 15 years worth of Dilbert comics — over 5,500 strips typed out. This is mainly due to the contributions of BFMartin (over 6 years worth of strips) and Paul Dorman (over 3 years worth of strips), myself (over 3 years worth of strips) and a long tail of contributors. You can search the strips here. While you can find strips as far back as 1989, you won’t see the images earlier than 2002 because geek.nl (whose images I’m shamelessly hotlinking without permission) only holds images that far back. But once you know the date of the comic (say 1991-02-03), you can visit the Dilbert official site at dilbert.com/1991-02-03/ and see the strip. ...

It’s been three weeks since I initiated the effort to type in the Dilbert strips and the results are encouraging. About 2 years worth of strips have been typed out. So this Dilbert viewer now has a reasonably sized index for searching. Many thanks are in order here. The first is due to geek.nl, whose images I have taken the liberty of hotlinking. Thanks also to those who’ve taken the time out to type strips: ...

UPDATE: 13 Jan 2026: Scott Adams passed away. RIP. UPDATE: Mar 2023: Dilbert.com was closed but archives are accessible via the Wayback Machine (slow). Search does not work well. Dilbert viewer is an alternate interface via Reddit. UPDATE: 2012: dilbert-search.appspot.com died, likely of old age. – Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to search through the Dilbert archives using text? This used to be possible at Dilbert.com some years ago, as a paid service. In late 2003, I needed to find some Dilbert strips for a client, so I’d subscribed for a year. I could then search for the quotes (I happened to be looking for “outsourcing”, so you can guess the context). ...

The ultimate irony. Amazon has written an API that invokes humans. Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call - the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this Artificial Artificial Intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work. ...

PostSecret, where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard. Showcases the extremities of human idiosyncracy.

Bitzi. “The Free Universal Media Catalog”.

Distributed Proofreaders. As the name suggests, it’s a distributed web-based tool for proof-reading books for Project Gutenberg. References from Slashdot and kuro5hin have spiked the number of pages proofread. But even that apart, they’re targetting over 1,000 pages a day. That’s over a book a day! via kuro5hin

Contract research by Eli Lilly. They put up problems in chemistry. You solve them. You get paid.

BountyQuest is a place where companies post rewards for documents – and anyone who comes up with such documents gets a prize. Many requests are for patent debunks.