As predicted (pdf), "Take Your Child to Work Day", is trending heavily on Google -- as of this writing, it holds the 28th and 54th heaviest search queries in Google's Top 100 queries for today.

What's funny about this day, at least to me (and probably to the millions of others who work from home) is just that -- in working from home, our children are perhaps way too familiar with our work. 

In fact, everyday on his way out, my son insists on first stopping by "dadda's office" and sitting on my chair while faux-typing on my keyboard.  For him, there's nothing funnier than declaring loudly and proudly that "aaaaiiimm working".

Makes me think that what I really need is just the opposite, a Take Your Child Away from Work Day. ... unless anyone has any better suggestions?!?!?

I know it's only April, but...

On June 6th, 2009, expect Google and Twitter trends to light up with the phrase "National Donut Day"; a day Americans across the country (or more specifically: Texans, New Yorkers and Californians) will be praying to our crispily creamed overlords for their deliciously dunked contributions to society.  And I, rest assured, will be foremost among them.

For the historically minded, National Donut (or Doughnut) Day started in 1938 as a fundraiser for the Chicago Salvation Army to help the needy during the Great Depression.

Fore more June predictions, click here.

If you saw my earlier post about Wolfram Alpha, then you know that semantic search has been on my mind recently. To define it very broadly, a semantic search engine is one that understands human language as it is actually used. Current generation search engines operate by looking for keywords - we've all essentially trained ourselves to ask questions in a way that search engines understand. The challenge with this is that sometimes we're looking for something a bit too fuzzy for keyword-based search.

A good example of this is image searching. Suppose you were looking for a screencap from the scene in The Godfather where Don Corleone collapses in his tomato garden. Google Image Search is tremendously powerful, but it's keyword-based, so searching for this on GIS would entail a search string like "godfather collapse" and then trawling through the results until you find what you're looking for. An ideal semantic search engine could just be asked "Where can I find a screencap from the scene in The Godfather where Don Corleone collapses in his tomato garden?", and it would know precisely what you want. There's a lot of words in that query that are useless to a keyword search engine but that are essential for a human (or a semantic engine) to understand what you're after.

The folks at Amazon will probably never forget Easter Weekend 2009.  For reasons still not entirely known, thousands of books lost their sales rank over the weekend -- costing those book authors critical visibility and sales.  Problem was, a seemingly disproportionate number of those books were gay and lesbian titles (Wired story here).

Both Google and Twitter trends lit up last night with the meme now being dubbed AmazonFail. And by this morning, the story was all over the mainstream media.

In an attempt to further elucidate Amazon's mode of operation, I decided to run a simple search query at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and The Strand for the term 'homosexuality'.  Hard not to notice that there's a significant difference in organic search results at each of these book stores, especially Amazon's (results after the jump).  That said, I leave the final analysis to you...