The new Google “Search Plus Your World” feature — which I’m now simply calling “Search Plus” — has just gone live for me. Huge debate erupted yesterday over whether it somehow favors Google+. I can see now that it clearly does, even more than I thought. Here’s a closer look at the changes, including how they turn Google+ into an essential social network for any search marketer.

Virtually every time someone asks if I’ve seen a new photo on Flickr, I first cringe a bit, then reluctantly say no—it’s always no, because the page dedicated to showing new photos on Flickr, Contacts > Uploads, makes it impossible to easily browse those new photos.

Well, I’ve been to see it and I personally think it is the best movie I have yet seen about South Africa – and specifically, one of the most pentetrating, disconcerting and subversive meditations on the nature of racism and repression in the post-colonial world.

As my friend Liezel said, it’s not Woody Allen, is it? I know what she means. Not that Allen’s movies are particularly cool or cerebral these days anyway; and Emmerich knows there are plenty cruder, more clichéd films. But there are few movies on the commercial circuit that convey their clichés with such starry-eyed conviction, or where the stakes are quite as high.

Jonathan Liebesman’s World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles is set in an irony-free zone

Overall, VP8 appears to be significantly weaker than H.264 compression-wise. The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264. Of course, this is still significantly better than Theora, and in my tests it beats Dirac quite handily as well.

Inspired in this specific instance by Maureen Dowd's brain-dead editorial in yesterday's New York Times, but also by the obvious glee with which so many people have denigrated the note-taking value of Twitter, it seemed like time to address the subject. Ever since a friend of mine once claimed – very late and after many drinks – that "Twitter is the death of humanism," I've been regularly thinking about how a simple note-taking technology could inspire such apparent dread in so many people.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.