Take an unknown japanese company and suppose it comes on the market with a product that is supposed to kill the ipod. The press is all over it, Digg’s homepage screams “the Ipod killer is here” and your fingers become numb.

They’ve thrown millions at it, the blogoshpere is buzzing, even Michael Arrignton wants to publish it the minute it’s live. On top, you add the words such as stealth startup, known investors, ex-sony employees and the word secret.

The result, a less than working player, which tends to skip tracks in a playlist, mixes up metadata and looks radically different than the ipod, yet based on the same exact idea. It’s black instead of white.

That’s cuil. Except it doesn’t play music, it searches the web.

It’s quite a debacle and it’s indeed all over the web. Searching for “Bill Clinton” returns his biography but a photo of another politician, “Boris Becker” returns the photo of Andre Agassi and finally looking up “Missionary” returns the right definition but not quite the right picture!

Let’s look at the bright side. You don’t have to fiddle with your browser settings, you’re not even tempted to give it a go and they won’t complain about scaling issues like Twitter has.

So let’s look at the facts and let me present to you:

the top 10 Idle list to compete against Google:

- don’t even try
- I ran out.

I shall now get back to my work on glimpsr.com, a search engine that will make Google insignificant.

Good night.

Twittearth is pretty cool and a great use of 3D!

Finally something that gives Twitter some sense of usefulness. It’s like a mood chart for the world at present time. I also like how day/night time are represented.

Probably one of the best ideas for writers on strike to get some money was to come up with alternative ways of working, while being on strike.

Joss Whedon, the creator of the highly rated Firefly / Serenity teamed up with a few actors such as Nathan Fillion (do they sleep together?) and Barney from How I met your mother.

And they came with with a great concept; Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. A blog that publishes a quality TV show on a budget.

The story and the characters is wacky, cheesy and highly addictive. Recommended.

Flokoon is a visual search engine that uses last.fm api. It’s in french.

Pretty cool. Not too sure about the use of it though.