"With over 100 terabytes and 10 billion web pages archived from 1996 to the present, the Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web and the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips."

You're kidding me! I've seen the Internet Wayback Machine before but I assumed they only saved news sites.

Nostalgia: www.danchan.com circa Sept. 16, 2000.
After the redesign: www.danchan.com circa Oct. 10, 2000.

Programmer stuff: Joel actually preaches a moderate view when it comes to code reuse. Finally, something I can agree with. Joel normally likes to take an extreme stance like "Completely rewriting code is big-time mistake...". But in his latest rant, he seems to backtrack a little, the main idea being "Pick your battles." Some things need to be rewritten for performance, for reliability, or for extensibility. Better you do it than trust a room full of monkeys. LOL. Unless you are a monkey...

Are Men Back?: I enjoyed reading Dave's latest fragmented piece which somehow touches upon 1970s feminism, gentlemanliness, listening, inclusion, George Bush "getting it", forgiveness and family fun.

I guess no one pays much attention to neutral countries because apparently Switzerland has moved.

And I can't help but repeat this link to the World's Unluckiest Tourist.

This link to Magnificent Obsessions (ugh, navel lint) on the Daypop Top 40 lead me to another Metafilter link that sounded promising with this title: "The Alternate Reality of the Prettiest Girl." What do you get for being pretty? 75% off food, discounts, gawkers, off-duty taxis, a boyfriend named Ole. What is the effect of beauty on society? You won't find much depth in this NY Times article, but it does have a slideshow! That article lead to another one about "Fei Qian" titled "Ancient Secret System Moves Money Globally." What a title. Ancient. (Chinese) Secret. Money... Ooohh. Intriguing! A couple minutes, a few phone calls and your money is half way around the world, untraceable.

It's a hot day -- almost Vegas-hot -- but today's Wall Street Journal has a short mention of Daypop on the front page of its Marketplace section, so I braved the mid-day sun all the way to Figueroa and 7th to pick up two copies. The title of the article is "New Web Search Tools Offer Useful Shortcuts And Some Nice Twists." It talks about Teoma, Vivisimo and Wisenut, three new contenders for Google's crown, then ends with this:

One other new search site worthy of mention is Daypop. This site, at www.daypop.com, isn't meant to compete with Yahoo, Google or other general-purpose search tools. Instead, Daypop scans and indexes some 3,400 news sites and weblogs, those personal online journals that usually contain commentary and links to other sites.

Daypop's creator is Dan Chan, an avid weblogger who got the idea for what he calls a "current events search engine" while trying to follow news about the 2000 presidential campaign. For news junkies, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Daypop is a must-bookmark site.

This is really good coverage. I only hope that readers understand the distinction being made here, that Daypop is a complement to general purpose search tools and that it is able to index news sites and weblogs daily and in many cases every few hours. Searches for news and commentary, what weblogs specialize in, can turn up articles that appeared today.

One update: Daypop now indexes 4,200 news sites and weblogs from around the world. This number is still increasing nicely given all the site submissions and all my surfing the past few days.

Back to work.