My former Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo is out the gate early with an elaborate and delightful April Fool’s stunt called “I Google For You.” Check it out.

I can’t figure out if it’s truly the latter-day, John Henry, man vs. machine thing it purports to be, or whether there’s in fact some Eliza-style script behind the scenes cranking out the slightly customized search results. Since upon inputting one query I learned I was 84th in the queue, yet I received a link to my answer in an emailed reply within a minute or so, something tells me there’s more machine than man at work here.

Either that, or Farhad’s in for a long night!

From the “Did they actually write that?” dept., in Keith Kelly’s NY Post media gossip column (via Romenesko):

Not everyone who was spared in the Business 2.0 meltdown is going to Fortune.

Erick Schonfeld, who was an editor-at-large based in New York, has decided to end his 14-year career and jump to Michael Arrington’s influential blog, TechCrunch.

“It’s true,” said Schonfeld, “I’ve accepted a position to be co-editor at TechCrunch.”

“There was a ‘Schindler’s List’ [of Business 2.0 staffers who would be spared] at one point, but I took my name off it so I’d be eligible for a severance package,” he said

Mr. Schonfeld, as someone who left the comforting rituals of the print world for the wilds of the Web many years ago, I can assure you that career continuation remains a possibility. But even at this late date, I guess, there remains the possibility that colleagues and peers will consider you to have fallen off the edge of the earth…

(Here’s Schonfeld’s post about his move.)

There’s a Walgreens on the corner I pass every morning between BART and the office. (There’s a Walgreens on most corners that haven’t already been occupied by a Starbucks.) And recently, every morning I have seen this sign, and every morning I experience a little twinge of awe.

All Walgreens are connected!

Are they like the Indian restaurants clustered on 6th street in New York’s East Village, long rumored to be connected via underground tunnel to one central kitchen?

Or is this connection more metaphysical — do the stores experience that oceanic feeling of connectedness that tells them, yes, they belong here, they are at home in the world?

I knew Walgreens was a chain. I didn’t know it was a great chain of being.

Each wave of Web development brings with it a new crop of confounding job titles. Consider the Vertical Keyword Analyst, which appears to have something to do with picking keywords that will be valuable on Google in certain market segments that the media business refers to as “verticals.”

Is the vertical keyword analyst someone versed in the lore of vertical keywords but unfamilar with, or utterly bored by, horizontal keywords? Or are we talking about a keyword analyst who happens to work standing up? Can a vertical keyword analyst still live up to the job title after the fifth margarita? Or is this in fact a shrink who uses a novel variation on the old Rorschach technique, asking patients to fill in the DOWN rows of a crossword and then studying their revealing choices?

• No wonder the Iraq adventure has gone so smoothly: Rumsfeld & co. planned the war with PowerPoint.

• Chrome warriors: Here’s a Flash cartoon that had me grinning ear to ear at its sheer cleverness. “An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself.” If you love Chuck Jones cartoon classics like “Duck Amuck,” get thee hence. [via Metafilter]

• I did not know that the historian David Kaiser, who taught at Harvard when I was a student, has a blog, and a good one, indeed. Most recently he puts Judge Anita Taylor’s recent decision against Bush’s domestic wiretapping program (full text of the ruling) in context:

  I was inspired by her opinion and am distressed that a variety of legal scholars, including some opposing the program, have claimed that it lacked legal sophistication. Certainly it did not focus primarily on recent precedents, although it cited some of them, nor did it, in accepted legal fashion, attempt to decide the question on the narrowest possible grounds. Instead, Judge Taylor reached back to the origin of the Republic and to the text and essential philosophy of the Constitution to point out that a President, once again, was taking advantage of an emergency to disregard both…. to those legal professionals who found fault with Judge Taylor’s opinion, I can only reply that it is clear enough to be understood by any intelligent high school student, much less a grown citizen — and that, like the finest opinions of Justice Black, it relies above all on the simple tactic of arguing that the Constitution means what it says.

  [via Brad DeLong]

• Visual design guru Edward Tufte’s new book, Visual Evidence, is out. I haven’t read it yet, but if it is anything like its three predecessors it will not only be eye-opening but will embody the principles it espouses. I wrote at length about Tufte almost a decade ago in Salon, in March ‘97.
• “What happens when you take everything in your house and make one giant chain of dominos?” Some people in Japan find out. It’s on YouTube. I saw it because Doc Searls linked to it back when only 250,000 people had viewed it, and now over 500,000 have, and we should really be shooting for >1,000,000, so I’m doing my part.
• Who knew there was a They Might Be Giants tribute album with covers by the Wrens, Frank Black, and the Long Winters? (The latter two also each have new discs out or on the way.)

This incredibly short little science fiction tale will take you only a couple minutes to read. BoingBoing pointed it out a while back and I just stumbled upon it again. It’s a thing of brilliance. Also funny.

The title is: “They’re Made Out of Meat.” The author is Terry Bisson. Read it.

There is also a well-made little film on YouTube but I prefer the text.

Tonight President Bush will announce his plans to deploy National Guard troops on the Mexican border to rein in illegal immigration. In times of political difficulty and sinking polls, Bush has always found troop deployments a tonic.

But I’m thinking he’s not going nearly far enough. Consider all the creative ways the Bush administration could pursue its goals with a little help from the uniformed services:

• For seniors who have been tardy about signing up for a Medicare drug plan, what could be more effective than a GI at the door? It may be that, as Bush has put it, “Deadlines help people understand there’s finality” — but gun barrels are even more persuasive.
• Schoolkids across the U.S. know that their future depends on how they perform on a growing array of tests that are the Bush-era education system’s hallmark. But if you really want kids to understand a test’s gravity, there’s nothing like the impassive stare of a sergeant at the front of the room.
• Under the Bush administration the I.R.S.’s army of auditors has focused its efforts on making sure that low-income filers claiming the earned income tax credit aren’t cheating. Surely this enforcement effort would prove even more effective with a little military muscle behind it. Suspect taxpayers could have their returns reviewed in the belly of an Abrams tank. If that’s not sufficient, Vice President Cheney could approve a Geneva Conventions waiver.
• The Bush team has faced what it views as outrageous delays in obtaining Senate approval for its most conservative judicial nominees. Well, why wait for senators to achieve consensus or compromise? Why not just deploy a Marine battalion to Capitol Hill?
• Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may or may not be on the verge of indicting Karl Rove. But isn’t this endless Plamegate investigation distracting the government from its important national security mission? To end this threat, all it would take is a 3 a.m. visit from a Special Forces team.

Really, once you get going down the road of martial law, the possibilities are endless.

BONUS LINK: Tom Lehrer’s Send the Marines

Mike Arrington is the lawyer-turned-blogger-and-entrepreneur whose TechCrunch has become the Web site of choice for people attempting to keep up with the cornucopia of startup companies pouring onto the Internet under the Web 2.0 banner.

The amazing thing to me about Arrington is this: He somehow keeps the names of these companies straight.

A post a little while back, for instance, contains this sentence:

“Noam Lovinsky is the founder of Skobee, a new service to help people plan events. They seem to be a direct competitor to Renkoo.”

Skobee? Renkoo? Is Mr. Mxyzptlk in the house?

Joyent, Planzo, Trumba, Rojo,
Meebo, Goowy, Megite, Newroo –
Chuquet, Squidoo, Zingee, Stickam?
Favoor, Zazzle, Kiko, Simpy!

Chant them urgently, and you might find yourself conjuring a Morgul spell. [All names verbatim from the last couple months of TechCrunch.]

I remember when Yahoo launched (yes, I’m becoming a Net codger), thinking, “Boy, that’s an odd name to try to build a company around.” What I saw over the ensuing years was that it doesn’t much matter what you name a company as long as the brand is strong enough — people will just project the qualities they associate with you onto the name.

For that to work, however, you need users — a lot of users — so that you can fill the random syllables with meaning. That’s much harder in today’s overpopulated Web 2.0 scrum, full of hard-to-distinguish competitors featuring similar two-syllable names, curvy cornered designs, and rounded fonts.

I realize that many of these names are chosen out of desperation, since all domain names that actually communicate meaning have been squatted upon by speculators. And if your business is really all about adding a feature or two to the Great Big Web Application In the Sky (or, I guess one should say, Cloud), then your end-game plan is to be acquired by some large company that already has a meaningful brand and intends to toss yours in the garbage anyway — so why waste too much thought on your name?

Still, Web 2.0 sometimes seems in imminent danger of collapsing in a heap of cutesiness, obscurity and alphabetical anarchy.

UPDATE: I had somehow missed this brilliant quiz, “Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?” [Thanks to Oscar for the tip, in comments]

I am trying to pull together my notes and thoughts on ETCon but keep getting distracted.

In the meantime, just for fun, here is (courtesy Metafilter)

Bush Yoga!

I stared at this for a little while trying to figure out the site’s intent; after all, a set of presidential action-figure yoga poses shouldn’t necessarily be construed as mockery. Then again, the film clip that is the site’s only other content makes its politics pretty clear.

Finally, I wonder if they chose not to show the president in “corpse pose” (savasana) for fear of provoking the attention of the Secret Service.