Marco.org

Great find from Paul Kafasis:

Last week, once-widely-hyped search engine Cuil unveiled their newest product, Cpedia. Cpedia is the world’s first “automated encyclopedia”. If you’re thinking “Well of course it’s the first, because that’s a terrible idea”, prepare to feel smugly correct.

I finally have my own online encyclopedia article. I’ve been hoping to earn one for years, although I was really hoping to get into that other online encyclopedia.

Some choice quotes about me from Cpedia:

My experience using foursquare and Loquacious have developed a somewhat contrary opinion to Marco here. In response to Daniel Jalkut’s observation that today’s new Safari 4 beta doesn’t have any significant new RSS features, Marco Arment astutely observes: Arment notes that because the over-the-air Kindle solution is completely unreliable with no support from Amazon, he plans to completely discontinue it next week in favor of the USB method.

Later, in a section supposedly about John Gruber and me:

And when a customer fails to look over the problems marked ‘resolved’ before submitting his [Marco Arment’s] problem (‘Sorry.

So, on top of the document shredding he’s already done, he’s got boxes too heavy for him to lift that contain stuff he [Marco Arment] doesn’t trust anyone else to touch.Whatever’s in those boxes, you can be sure that it’s something that he has on somebody else, lots of somebody elses.

I honestly feel bad for Cuil. They got too much press too early in their development, and what they were showing was clearly not ready to receive such scrutiny. Worse, it had been hyped by the press as a “Google-killer”. Their basic web search at the time was still young, slow, and bad, so they got slammed in the press and quickly became a laughingstock of our industry, even temporarily moreso than the Zune.

I have no idea what they’ve done since then, but if this feature is meant to become a serious product, I truly feel bad for them. They’re like those guys who come up to you at “networking” events and tell you all about their greatest idea they’ve ever had, and it’s a really terrible idea that you know will never work, but they’re such nice guys and believe in it so much that you don’t want to tell them the sad truth, so you listen and fake enthusiasm for as long as it takes before your drink runs out and you have a convenient excuse to leave.