How sad.

Ask.com, which used to be known and have the URL of askjeeves.com is jettisoning it’s Butler mascot, Jeeves. The press coverages suggest this should be from "next Monday" but on going there now, you will find Jeeves no longer exists. All gone, done, walked off the building. Hasta la vista, Jeeves. And this, only after Jeeves underwent a change in image himself in September last year - when he disappeared for a week and came back as a new man. Perhaps that should have given him some indication of his potential no-future. Going through a mid-life crisis like that is never thought well of by one’s employers.

The writing was on the wall even before this (August 2005) when Jeeves was not invited to appear in advertising, but just sit on the homepage. From that press release, the following quote -

The butler isn’t retiring — he remains prominently featured on Ask Jeeves’ (ASKJ) website. But by keeping Jeeves the butler out of the ads, the company is hoping consumers will visit the site to try to find him.

Oh Jeeves, Jeeves - you should have seen it coming.

The ask metaphor or pretense always annoyed me anyway - having to type in a whole question, when in reality some simple key word searches would do the trick. But at least the Butler made it more plausible. I just always think it’s a little sad when an icon is dismissed after so many years for the sake of a so-called image change. Perhaps that comes with age - and that dooming feeling that with time, I too may be retired out.

But with Google going all out to do everything else (blog communities, groups, products like Google Earth…) then perhaps it is time for Ask.com to highlight it’s one main function - a search engine. To do this, apparently all the adverts found on the page are going also. That will be good.

I often wonder what is happening with Alta Vista also - this search engine provides a really good image search also - behind that of Google Images. And for a scrapper into altered projects, image searches are the most important to me in all of this.

My top searches are done through - in this order -

1. Google (90% success)
2. Yahoo - the yahoo and google search bars are shoved out at you by many other downloaded products, your Internet Service Provider, and Internet Explorer / Mozilla and other browsers. You can’t get away from them.
3. Alta Vista
4. Very seldom - Ask.com.

Maybe this might change if ask.com gets modern, despite my sympathy for the retired Jeeves.

(sidenote: I hadn’t realised the relationship here, but the new Ask.com frontpage lists categories for search, including Bloglines. Ask.com has an association with Bloglines)

It’s nice to see Mo Jackson gaining some praise instead of grief on the 2Peas boards lately. 46 posters on this thread. As the thread started off asking about her latest kit out, and whether anyone had it, I actually took my lunch break off work and went to take a look at Mo’s website. Nice kit! Bright popsicle colourings for summer, with a beach theme. I hadn’t seen it before, so am glad to have been pointed in its direction.

I took the time to comment on some of the gallery layouts also. It’s nice to be able to do that from work - with a lot of scrapbooking communities and galleries, my workplace security firewalls stop me doing this. Also for many blog comment systems. It frustrates me enormously. But it looks like I have full access at the MoLand Mall from work - thanks to following through on that 2Peas thread.

Again, it’s nice to see the praise and support for Mo, rather than the problems which still hinder Mo’s website lately. Nice one, 2Peas.

Discovered tonight, a Forum for Artist Trading Cards.

ATCards.com is simply that - a series of community forums to discuss and set up swaps for Artist Trading Cards. There are a few templates also - to create envelopes from, or the standard cutting template to cut ten cards from one sheet of cardstock. There are some nice articles, and links to more information on ATCs, but perhaps the most powerful part of this very professional website is the set of forums and galleries. Swaps are - obviously allowed, as is discussions and chats over art, techniques, artists and calls.

Scrapability’s Scrap Blog of the Week -Week 9 2006 : Digi-ScrapLift Fun

Susan’s Digi-Scraplift Fun blog is more than fun, it’s inspirational. A layout is selected from a range of galleries, and scraplifted. Susan also says why she thinks the originating layout is so worthy of scraplifting. Susan frequents quite a few of the major digital websites to select what she likes, and links to these in the galleries. She then challenges others to scraplift the selected layout, and posts these onto the blog also.

Previously I’ve blogged about going through an online group class trial for a concept called Women Under Construction. Below is an exercise I’ve spent the afternoon doing, from week 1 of the class - I’m three weeks late, but it just felt right to do this today. There is nothing scintilating about it, no great digital theatrics - it’s meant to be a collage of my life dreams, and that’s exactly what it is. We were asked to sit with magazines and just pull out the images which appealed to us and slap them on. I took the bottom image from a magazine, as it spoke to me - scanned this in, and started from there, with clippings from all over the place. It’s in 8 1/2 x 11 inch format, to allow an easy printout and perhaps framing with a cheap but functional frame. Each image has a meaning, but only to myself. Love it. I am constructed.

The Title of this Collage is…

Life is a Big Happy Dog on the Beach