Nextwebgen posted their 10 Worst Company Domains, which are apparently the result of people registering their domain names without running it through their public relations department, branding / identity / in-house graphic designers or at least one other literate human being who speaks English.

Gems:

The Italian Power Generator company…
www.powergenitalia.com

Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange
advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com

Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net

Let that be a lesson to anyone starting up a company and thinking about names and domains… run it past a few people first. :-)

Top 10 Worst Company URLs

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While on yelp.com I was in a thread where a few people thought a user had created a fake profile to promote his business, and someone mentioned there had been a study done that found gender differences in writing, and then created a program to analyze writing and determine the gender. I put the “girl”’s comments in and it came out as “weak male,” but so did almost everyone’s posts. Either way, it’s an interesting concept and fun to play around with.

In 2003, a team of researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Bar-Ilan University in Israel (Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni) developed a method to estimate gender from word usage. Their paper described a Bayesian network where weighted word frequencies and parts of speech could be used to estimate the gender of an author. Their approach made a distinction between fiction and non-fiction writing styles.

A simplified version of this work was implemented as the Gender Genie. They showed that fewer words were needed and that writing styles varied based on the forum. For example, fiction and non-fiction differs from blogs (informal writing). Even though the genres differ, there are still gender-specific word frequencies.

This Gender Guesser system is heavily based on the Gender Genie. In particular, the word lists and weights are reproduced from the Gender Genie. The Gender Guesser extends the interpretation of informal writing to work on blogs and chat-room messages, and combines formal writing styles (fiction, non-fiction, essays, news reports, etc.). It also looks for weak emphasis — used to distinguish European English from American English. In general, if the difference between male and female weight values is not significant (a “weak” score), then the author could be European. This is because the weight matrix is biased for distinguishing genders in American English.

Gender Guesser

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Should you find yourself incarcerated and vegetarian you better hope you get sentenced in Idaho, Massachusetts, or one of the other eight states listed in PETA’s guide to the Best Prisons for Vegetarians (Illinois didn’t make the cut, not surprisingly). Georgia offers vegan BBQ and peach cobbler, Tennessee has texturized vegetable protein ala king and a veggie burger, and Hawaii has grilled tofu slices and a vegetarian teriyaki burger.

Check out the menus of the top ten states over at PETA and see if your state made the list.

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Don’t you just love those dreams where you end up flying through a foreign landscape? Wouldn’t it make a cool video game? That’s what Thatgamecompany–the same people who brought us the lovely, abstract protozoic flOw game–thought. Cloud is their action flight game that allows you to realize your lifelong dreams of imaginative flight, at the same time you can manipulate clouds to create weather. “A childhood dream simulator” is how many of its fans describe it. It is a unique game; a relaxing, non-stressful, meditative experience that is familiar to players of flOw

The game is completed as a USC game innovation lab research project. It contains four major tutorial levels, representing four different dreams from the child’s point of view, which help players understand how to play the game. There are also ten extra mini-levels for players to enjoy the game features introduced in the training levels.

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The audio is from a stand-up routine from comedian Eddie Izzard, and animated with Legos by Thorn2200.

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Here’a a great little humorous website where you can insert your own subtitles into clips from Bollywood movies. Here’s a bunch that are IDM-themed.

[More lol and ones by me after the jump]

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You can get almost everything over the internet from videos to furniture, but booking a band for your next event is not quite as easy. Sure, you can try surfing through Myspace and Google, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could just type in your zipcode and select the genre you want, click on your choice, and pay them an advance online? Splashtone is a website in beta stage that aims to make booking a musical act as fast and simple as possible. It’s split in half by audience type, Event Planners or Musicians–and you register an account on either side. If you’re a musician you create a profile similar to the ones on Myspace and add PayPal info if you’re down with getting paid online.

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Tux, the chubby, cuddly penguin mascot of Linux is now as open source as the software package it represents–how appropriate!

If you would like a plush Tux, head over to The Free Penguin Project and download their latest “development release” of open source sewing patterns. The blog attached shows a few of the penguins made from the patterns, a few of them differently-colored. I think this would make a pretty cool Etsy project, seeing how many variations and interpretations you could get from one pattern.

No fabric on hand? You can still get a 3D Tux in paper form by downloading and printing out the Paper Tux Model made by Pricoinsa.

[Thanks, Fractalspin Blog]

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