Web spiders have been around for more than a decade. First utilized for search engines, such as Webcrawler, and eventually growing into the search robots from Yahoo!, Inktomi, Google and Excite, these inanimate programs crawled the Internet, constantly indexing in an attempt to make sure their represented search engine was the biggest, had the most pages, and hopefully, was the most relevant for the search you were executing.

Since that time, Web bots have been reprogrammed for specific tasks, from shopping search engines such as Shopzilla, Froogle, and MySimon, to mainstream news, such as Google News - which prides itself on being filtered by bots, not humans. Google News is a key example of a "20%" project so lauded by the search giant, who gives its engineers one full day a week to work on basically anything. One aspiring coder took on the news, and the result is now viewed by millions daily.

Now, Web bots are being even more finely honed, and through newer tools, they are able to be integrated in to well-designed pages that take into account popularity of links, frequency of mentions, etc. and can be tailored to more vertical topics. Techmeme is one of the best - covering all things tech. Part of the Memeorandum family, Techmeme also features sister sites including Ballbug for baseball, WeSmirch for entertainment news and gossip, and the original memeorandum, for politics. Funny how the first focuses of the bots were on those topics where I tend to waste the most time. (Baseball, Politics, Entertainment and Tech) If they come out with flavors dedicated to just Apple or say, electronic music, then I'm sure I'm being stalked.

In the meantime, check out Techmeme and see if a bot is better at finding out the news and organizing it than you and I ever could be.

Listening to ''Can U Feel the Funk'', by Darren Emerson (Play Count: 6)

Barry Zito dominated the 2002 season with a 23-5 record, and garnering the American League Cy Young Award. In the ensuing seasons, he's had his ups and downs, including shocking 15-2 defeat at the hands of the New York Yankees on Opening Day where he gave up 7 runs in an inning and a third. Yet, in his last two starts, he's returned to the Barry Zito of old, pitching masterfully. The main difference? Well, it's his mane difference. With short hair, Barry cannot be defeated. When the hair takes over, he is the anti-Sampson, stripped of his power. This is investigated in this week's ANtics, "A Tale of Two Zitos".

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ANtics Archive: 2005/06 ANtics | PDF | Take the Poll

It's been a while since I've made it out to the theater to catch a film, so when the opportunity arose this evening, I took it, catching "United 93", the first wide-distribution film to hit theaters specifically covering one of the 9/11 incidents (Fahrenheit 9/11 excepted). While I didn't expect to be entertained by the film, I wasn't quite sure what to expect - whether it would be reverential and solemn, or overly patriotic. Instead, we were shown the director's very likely accurate view of the chaos and confusion of the day, when agencies had to face fears never fully anticipated or planned for, and mucked up the process further with failing attempts to communicate, and reactions based on partial and often inaccurate information.

Everybody in our generation has their September 11th stories - just as the generation before us can tell us their memory of when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or the Moon landing. I'll save mine for a later post, maybe on the date's five year anniversary, but sitting through United 93 and seeing the military, air traffic control and others confront surprise after surprise and horror after horror set processes in my head forward, reminding me of how I had learned of the day's incidents, how I had strained to learn as much as I could, how I had reacted to each new piece, and interacted with others - looking back on it and seeing if I had "done the right thing".

Additionally, now that I've greatly expanded my own flight travel schedule in the years following 2001, I felt aligned with the passengers on the flight who had to face the reality that this trip would be their last. I had quite similar feelings when I actually read the 9/11 commission's report while traveling from New York to San Francisco last year. Reading their report while in flight didn't set my mind at ease about my surroundings at all, nor did it instill any level of confidence in our haphazard government and corrupt, foolish, leadership that expanded the crises of 9/11 into the struggles we face on an international scale today.

If you're of an analytic state of mind to see the 9/11 attacks from a different perspective, without partisan rhetoric and gamesmanship, this film is highly recommended. Go see it before you have to wait for Netflix to come through.

Listening to ''60 Miles an Hour'', by New Order (Play Count: 4)

The A's so far this season have been consistently inconsistent as the saying goes, trudging along to a 16 and 14 record after 30 games, lingering in the mix of the indecisive AL West, which as of this moment sees Texas in front by one half a game, while both the Angels and Mariners are slumping below the .500 mark. In an odd twist, the A's actually are playing better on the road than at the "friendly confines" of McAfee Coliseum, with records of 9-5 on the road, and 7-9 at home. For those of us season ticket holders, we have been forced to see the on again off again offense, and I'm fairly sure we've seen an even number of wins and losses on the early campaign.

This trend continued yesterday and today, as the A's offense never got going on a cold night Friday, seeing them defeated at the hands of the lowly Devil Rays, 3-1, erasing the benefits of a well pitched game by sophomore hurler Joe Blanton. Well... it was a good game pitched after the first, when Blanton stumbled to a 2-0 deficit, the eventual margin of victory. Today's contest, only slightly warmer despite the 1:05 start time, saw the A's prevail in quasi-heroic fashion in the bottom of the 9th to take the game 3-2. I wish I could say that there were real heroics and fireworks with bang-bang plays and a walk-off home run, but there was none of that. Instead, we were treated to an A's hitter trotting to first on a 3-1 count, thinking he'd earned a free walk, we suffered through a baserunning double play gaffe in the bottom of the 9th, and only came away victorious after the opposing third baseman channeled Bill Buckner from the 1986 World Series, and booted the ball, allowing the winning run to score and avoiding extra innings.

So - again - a loss and a win. And the offense didn't manage to score more than 4 runs in the two combined games, seeing good pitching on both sides. But if the team is matching pound for pound with the likes of Tampa Bay, they won't live up to their potential and be expected to challenge the Red Sox, Yankees, White Sox or others for the pennant this year. It's time to warm up. We appreciate today's win, but you can't sit around and wait for the other team to hand it to you every game.

Listening to ''Marrakech (Revolution Mix)'', by ATB (Play Count: 7)