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W Asks Condi For Potty Break

W potty break note
Yesterday Reuters and Yahoo News both posted the above photo:

U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14, 2005.

Still skeptical about its veracity, I consulted Snopes.com. Although it lists an “undetermined” status, it did so begrudgingly:

We don’t doubt the authenticity of the photograph, as Rick Wilking is an established photographer with 12 years’ experience shooting news photos in Washington (including various White House assignments) who recently covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (leaving that city only, according to Editor & Publisher, “after his laptop and two cameras were stolen from his car parked near the convention center”). As well, Reuters carried other pictures of the same scene from the United Nations, including one that appears to have captured the back of President Bush’s head. We’ve left this as “undetermined” for now to allow for the possibility that the President was merely responding to or adding comments to a note written by someone else.

By the way, my earlier post title was “W Has To Make A #1,” but it was pointed out to me that I have no way of knowing whether a #1 or a #2 was necessary, or whether perhaps something more catastrophic like a shart precipitated the request.

OK, fine, so this entire post was made just so that I could use the word “shart.” Happy? ;-p

Update: Reuters confirms the authenticity of the photo:

[Gary] Hershorn, Reuters’ news editor for pictures for the Americas, says he’s responsible for zooming in on the note and deciding to transmit the photo to Reuters clients. He says Wilking didn’t know what the note said when he shot the picture.

Woo hoo!

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Google Blog Search

GoogleSearch Engine Watch and Charlene Li’s Blog report that “Google has introduced its long awaited blog search service [two different interfaces, but the same results], becoming the first major search engine to offer full-blown blog and feed search capabilities.”

More information is available at Google’s About Blog Search page, although it actually underplays some of the features:

Google blog search results point primarily to individual blog postings, with a title and snippet from each—strongly resembling Google’s web search results. In some cases, links to “related blogs” are presented at the top of search results if a query suggests that the user is looking for a particular blog rather than a specific blog posting.

Results are sorted by date, with recent posts appearing at the top of the list. You can also choose to sort results by relevance. Goldman says that while blog search uses its own unique approach to relevance ranking, it also draws a lot from Google’s web search ranking algorithms.

Google blog search has an advanced search page and a number of commands are available. allowing you to limit searches by title, author and date or date range. You can also limit results to a specific language, or apply the Safe Search filter to results.

You can also discover who’s linking to a post or blog using the link: command. Unlike Google web search, which sharply curtails the number of results displayed using link: command to discourage abuse by search marketers, the link: command in blog search displays a comprehensive and nearly complete list of sources linking to a particular post or blog.

You can also save a blog search as an alert that gets updated any time new content is posted matching you query. Google blog search allows you to issue a query and then subscribe to that query via your RSS feed reader, with either 10 or 100 results being displayed.

Ever since Google bought Pyra Labs, there has been speculation on how it would integrate blogs into the rest of its offerings. It appears that it might have been worth the wait.

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