Slashdot Mirror
The Search Engine Belt Buckle
ptorrone writes "Engadget shows how they made "The Search Engine Belt Buckle" a PDA-based device which shows 24 hours of all the bizarre and banal things people are looking for on the web. Art project or pointless hack? That's for you to decide, people are searching for some pretty freaky stuff out there, so why not put in a belt buckle and get on the scene like a sex machine?"
Why the hell are they using video clips to display this information? Why not, you know, a text file of the search terms? This seemed cool and all, but when I saw that they were using Windows Media Player to do screen capture on a website, they instantly lost 50 square geek points. Square points!
A much more entertaining game to play is, which product(s) is Engadget actually shilling in its latest article?
We all know that this is a commercial blog, so for this last article, was it Windows Media 9, Dogpile's SearchSpy, the PocketPC division of Microsoft, or some combination of them all?
Get off my launchpad!
I don't know, seems like a rather effective way to get people to bend down and observe your crotch area with great interest.
That when you look at the Searchspy list, someone has recently searched for "die slashdotters" :p
Slightly pointless all in all, there's no real skill involved in using WMP on a PDA which you've essentially duct taped to yourself. Since most people won't actually see what it says (unless you're comfortable with the idea of a large group of men and women squatting in a nightclub, huddled around your crotch... but maybe that's your thing) it would be more fun to actually play a proper movie, like a disco scene or some psychadelic winamp-style visualisation, so you could actually appreciate the belt beyond about 6 inches away...