This evening, I received several emails about new Twitter followers with randomly generated names. I can only assume they were robotically created. That might appear to qualify as Twitter spam, but really it’s more like follower spam, which doesn’t really bug me.

One of the great things about Twitter is that I only see the updates of people I follow. So though these three new accounts are following me, the emails I received are the last I will hear of it. I could go and block them through Twitter’s website, but I don’t know that I care too much.

Another great(er) thing about Twitter is that you can connect with people with whom you would otherwise never connect. Take The Real Shaq, for instance. If you know anything about basketball (or followed LSU sports like a decade ago – Geaux Tigers!) you might know who Shaq is (he also did that get-the-kids-to-lose-weight TV show for about 3 episodes). There has been much debate about whether or not Shaq is the one updating that Twitter account, but today that debate was laid to rest.

Check out this blog post called “Finally, a Use for Twitter” to read the whole thing. Maybe then you’ll sign up for your own Twitter account.

The most recent series of webisodes involves an outburst by Oscar, which spawns an office-wide investigation. If you just can’t get enough of The Office, then here you go: I’ve embedded all four webisodes below, for your viewing enjoyment. Let me know your favorite parts in the comments!

[To watch any of the videos in full screen, simply click the full screen icon in the upper-right corner of the video you want, after clicking on the Play button.]

Part 1: Investigation

Part 2: Listeners

Part 3: Snooping

Part 4: The Explanation

Be sure to let me know your score (moreso than your thoughts on my geekiness) in the comments.

You can access the quiz here.

You and I now know my results:

However, another thing you might find on Hulu’s site (besides their great Super Bowl commercial) is this web-exclusive clip of Michael, Dwight, et al from The Office, called “The Cup”.

If you want to laugh really, really hard, just hit the play button.

To enable the feature, go to Settings while logged into your Gmail (or Google Apps) account. You should then see an option for Labs, which you should click on. The Labs Settings include a number of neat, somewhat experimental features, and toward the top you should see the one for Offline reading. In my screenshots, you’ll notice references to Schellack.net – that’s because I am signed up for Google to host my email, so it’s like I use Gmail, only it’s Schellack.net! Any Gmail user should now see essentially the same thing, only with the normal Gmail branding:

Turning on the setting and then hitting the Save button will add a new Offline link to the upper right-hand corner of Gmail. Click on that to bring up a little wizard-like screen, reminding you not to download your email messages onto a public or shared computer. Click through, and you will then have to install the program called Google Gears onto your computer, which is a plugin for your web browser to enable web applications to store data locally on your computer, among other things (you have to give it permission for each web application). Next, or if you already had Gears installed, you will have to give your permission for Gmail to use Gears, which will be followed by the downloading of your email messages.

You should see a new, small spinning icon in the top-right of Gmail, and this little screen, associated with that icon, to show you the status of the synchronization:

The Offline feature downloads messages from newest to oldest, so you’ll have the most recent messages on your local machine almost immediately. It only took a matter of minutes for all of mine to be downloaded, and then Gmail began to go back and download all of the attachments. The whole time that the Synchronization is occurring, the status window shows you how far back your synced mail goes, should you go ahead and disconnect. Were you to do that, the synchronization would pick back up where you left off as soon as you reconnect. It all appears to work very seamlessly, and I noticed no slowdowns with my online Gmail or any other downloads.

Finally, you will begin to see a new section of settings in your Gmail for Offline, enabling you to disable offline mail, allowing you to create a desktop shortcut to easily access your mail when offline, and letting you know that new mail will only be downloaded if it is newer than six months old.

Google posted some info on this new feature on their blog on Tuesday, here. If you use Gmail, be sure to try it out and let me know how it works for you.

His first blog post is quite humorous – it’s his email correspondence with Barack and Michelle Obama. Check it out here. The blog is running on WordPress, of course.

Oh, and if you haven’t read Blue Like Jazz, I do highly recommend it!

Cuil does not offer the many ancillary services/products provided by Google, such as image searches, local searches, map searches, online word processors, and email accounts. What Cuil focuses on is just search. It claims to do a better job of offering more relevant search results by ranking pages’ content and relevance, rather than inbound links – what Cuil refers to as “superficial popularity metrics”, and which Google uses as at least par of its search algorithm known as PageRank.

According to their home page (as of right now) Cuil also says that they have managed to index 121,617,892,992 web pages, compared to Google’s reported 40 billion.

That’s all well and good, but none of that provides an answer to the most basic question that defines how well a search engine works: does it give me what I am looking for?

To that end, I ran a few searches and got mixed results. Searching for Jonathan Schellack did not return this web site. The search returned 17,986 results, but only showed me a subset of that on three pages. Where are the rest, I wonder? In none of the visible results was www.schellack.net/jonathan.

Searching for yourself on the web may be the first thing we self-absorbed people do, but how about the things I search for on a daily basis (I promise I don’t search for myself that often). So I tried out a search for something I had used Google for several days earlier. I entered “sql cumulative returns” to try and find some examples of SQL statements or scripts that would show me cumulative, aggregate information about some data sets I was using. My first search returned entirely disappointing results:

Thankfully, refreshing the page gave me better success, actually giving me some information on the second try. Unfortunately, though, the search engine only gave me results that used the word “returns” as a verb, and I had been looking for that word used as a noun. Altogether, the results we not as useful as what I had found on Google.

When I attempted to tell Cuil to give me results with the phrase “cumulative results”, I got nothing (literally). The page was empty of results, though it told me there were plenty out there:

Trying to search for a less obscure and nerdy topic gave me even worse results. I’m considering picking up an iPhone this weekend when my AT&T contract comes up for renewal (more on that later). Of course, I’m hesitant to buy any technology product that I’ll be locked into using for the next two years, so I searched for “iPhone 3G issues“. All but one of the results on the first page from Cuil were from the same, spammy-looking web site. None of them were relevant:

Cuil presents search results in a different and potentially very useful format – and I love not having to scroll down to view my results – but the fledgling search engine still has a ways to go before I’ll consider using it every day.

Of course, all this leads me to wonder – why is July 12th considered to be LOST’s birthday???