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Welcome to Eszter's Weblog Here you will find my thoughts and comments about all sorts of things from sociology, the Internet, academia, teaching, research, books and movies to current events, fun Web stuff, art, gadgets and just about anything else that comes to mind. If the inspiration strikes you during your visit, feel free to leave a note via the comments link.

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"21st century 8 ball"
01/09/2003 Entry

As you can see from a recent entry, I sometimes look at what searches refer people to my site. Once in a while I come across a rather obscure or funny search. I thought I'd share some of those here occasionally.

Last week I got a referral because someone typed the following into Ask Jeeves:
Do I love Eszter

One could think there is a movie or a book with that name and that's what the person wanted to track down. I know of no such literary work though.

I'm left wondering if the person was trying to use Ask Jeeves as a type of 21st century 8 ball where you ask some random question and let the liquid crystals (or the zeros and ones in this case) decide your fate for you. I wonder how the reader would make sense of the mix of words and images on E-BLOG as a response to that question. It seems just a bit more complicated than the usual 8 ball options but at least you're left with a bit more excitement via the ambiguity than those know-it-all 1-4 word responses so typical of the toy (excuse me, predictive power device).

On a related note, let me add to the list of sites whose existance should no longer surprise me but which still leave me smiling about how obscure things can get online: The Magic 8 Ball (R) Unofficial Homepage including the detailed steps of an 8 ball dissection.

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Links of Interest

How to win the Nobel Prize
Click for Mammogram
Play "Match That Blogger"
Blogathon 03 Archives


Recent entries

» Extending Internet access to low-income communities
» Shattered
» The story behind red alert
» Weekend trivia
» Would you cut up a book?
» Pizza, cholesterol check, the works
» Welcome
» A different kind of road trip
» Allowing comments on blogs
» Paddling for bandwidth
» The right to a soda.. at any price
» Online communities
» Silly.. but we all do it
» Paris notes
» New book on Social Inequality


Previous entries

May, 2002 - July, 2003


Blogger info

Eszter Hargittai
Communication Studies Department
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois 60208
blog at eszter dot com




Blogs I Visit





The small print

A few words on what I will and will not post on this blog (taken from my E-LIST entry of January 2, 2002). I have nothing against posting commercial sites as long as they come highly recommended. In fact, I'm quite interested in improving informed consumer choice so I'm very curious to hear about good experiences with online retailers. What I will refrain from posting are sites that require plug-ins or programs that are painful to deal with. Example: I will not post anything that only works with RealOne/RealPlayer as that program is intrusive and annoying beyond belief and I am not willing to reinstall it on my machine (it was hard enough to get rid of it completely in the first place) nor do I want to encourage others to have it. If your site has audio content, please make it available in multiple formats or choose one that can be run on multiple players (e.g. .avi).


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