I’m a little behind, so I’d like to point out two very interesting articles over at Mark Pilgrim’s weblog. First he has a nice summary of the change to Google’s ranking algorithm. There are links to all the threads and articles I’ve seen around the web; it seems Mark has an uncanny ability to find relevant links quickly. I do not agree however that this is the “beginning of the end” for Google, it’s just an adjustment phase; they’re still committed to having the very best search results possible, and they’re merely responding to an obvious and well-known exploitation of their previous system. If relevancy is temporarily suffering, just them a little time.

Mark’s History of the Tilde also piqued my typographical interest. One of my Human Situation professors remarked the other day that the Greek alphabet wasn’t even finalized until several years into their war with the Spartans, meaning that at the beginning of what would be a thirty-year war, they still found time to debate and codify a standard of writing. He then asked what new characters were in the western alphabet lately. The first thought in my mind was the euro, but that was a little too obvious. A examination of my keyboard yielded three characters—~, @, and *—that I can’t really see a use for before the time of computers. I’m going to look into it.