Some people will do anything in order to get a Gmail account form Google. Using the “Next Blog” button in the Blogger Navbar, I ran across many blogs that have only one post about getting Gmail.

Here’s a boy from China who wants a Gmail, and in the same time he is praying to God to save him! Another example is Brokeman, who started more than three blogs hoping to get one.

OK, Gmail is great, but can’t these people wait for a few months to get it easily and for free?

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(via Choire Sicha)

From Rebecca’s Pocket:

I am very pleased that so many people voted in this election, although I am very disappointed in the results. (…) Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy four years.

From Left Coast:

I would just like to thank the half of America that voted for George Bush. You have f**ked things up for all of us. Thanks!

Wired magazine is giving away a Wired CD produced under a Creative Commons license with their November issue. The CD is featuring The Bastie Boys, who appear on the cover of the magazine, among others include Gilberto Gil and David Byrne.

I’m only afraid that the CD may not be available with the magazine here in Saudi Arabia. The magazine usually arrives lately and it won’t be surprising to see some pages ripped off by the censorship devils of the Ministry of Disinformation.

I knew there was some Arabic blogs out there, but I wasn’t paying much attention because programmers and designers, who did not have much to say to the world, made most of them. They were trying to play with Movable Type and other things. That’s all.

This is not changing. It’s just that one of them called Pixelog.net, linked to my blog and wrote it is worth reading. For my surprise, the guy titled the link with “The Saudi Greeks Are Coming“! I think he meant “Geeks” but, am I a geek? Please, tell me I’m not!

Regarding my post about feeds readers, I received an email from Nick Denton, Kinja’s president, who was surprised to know that Kinja could not read some feeds, asking me to give him some examples.

Therefore, I decided to re-log in to my account at Kinja, and give it another try. I discovered that I made some mistakes when I used it for the first time few months ago. Nevertheless, Kinja was functioning properly this time.

However, I still cannot understand the technology behind Kinja. During my email conversation with Mr. Denton, he told me that Kinja could read all blogs “whether they have RSS or not.” “We parse the HTML, looking for patterns in the code,” he added. So, according to his email “RSS is nice, but not essential.”

Kinja asks you to enter the URL in the “example.com” form. This sounds interesting and easy-to-use. However, this will not work unless you enter a famous blog (i.e. Kottke.org). When you try to do the same with some relatively unknown blogs (i.e. Mahmood’s Den), this method will not work. In this case, you should enter the URL of the feed itself, instead of the generic blog URL, and then everything will go smoothly.

I may forgive Kinja for such a thing because they are still in Beta. But I think they should work on it to improve their product. I like Kinja because they have a clean neat beautiful design, and it is really easy to add/delete any feed. Moreover, I like the way Kinja use to show the latest post from any of your feeds on top, just like a blog.

I’ve been using Bloglines for couple of days now, and it looks faster than Kinja in aggregating the feeds. Something I hate about Kinja is the delay in adding new feeds. However, I prefer it over Bloglines because the latter use frames. I hate frames.

Kinja is good, but it is far from being perfect. There is much to do and work on before release of Kinja 1.0, and I think they can do it.

The PhDs at Google labs used to produce us some of the most interesting stuff on the web. Google News and Google Desktop Search are two good examples. However, the wildest ideas for Google come from a secret army of hackers who work on the API to make some smart, weird and sometimes useless apps. Here are my favorites.

Cookin’ With Google

Many leftovers in your fridge and you don’t know what to do with them? Type ’em all in the search box and Google will bring you all the possible recipes!

Banana Slug

Google is great. But sometimes, just like any other search engine, it could disappoint you and give you no results to your inquiry. Banana Slug adds a random word to your search from one of nine categories to obtain some results hoping to make you less frustrated.

CapeMail

Web pages look ugly in most of mobile phones screens. A faster and easier way to search the web from your phone is sending an email to google[at]capeclear.com with your query in the subject line. Few seconds and you receive the results in your inbox.