Google on Wednesday said it has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset -- a revelation so astonishing that the company originally suspected it had made an error culling its own data.

Holy Toledo! - Google iPhone usage shocks search giant!

...has seen 50 times more search requests...!

So let me see if I understand this.  Build a beautiful device that makes it trivially easy to access the internet and search for what you want and people use it...makes sense to me.

Apple removed the user interface barrier from between the user and what the user wants to do.  Because I can access the internet from my phone, but it is a bit painful.  I mean it ain't bad, but it ain't good.

And just for the record I am very happy with my phone.

About the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo!

Nope.

Not gonna do it.

Go somewhere else to read about it.

...oh ok...since you forced me to.

Damn! but what a bold move!

It is a curious move though, in some regards because in many respects Microsoft and Yahoo have competing platforms: email, search, advertising.  But where the rubber meats the road in Internet superhighway is in the size (and quality) of audience.

Google has been able to charge a premium for its advertising because it has the largest audience.

This merger would put the combined Yahoo - Microsoft search engine market share at a near parity with Google.  Therefore they would be more able to compete in the market place.

It remains to be seen if they can successfully merge the two efforts successfully, not a simple task.

So. I like blogrolls. 

I think they play an important role in the "atmosphere" a blog projects.  Maybe I'm alone in this but when I go to a blog that doesn't have a blogroll I form an opinion of the blogger.  He starts a notch down for me. 

Now the reason a lot of people advocate against including a blogroll has to do with SEO placement and Google branding your site as a link farm.  This seems a rather sad state of affairs, designing a site on a third party's arbitrary requirements.

Google apparently dings you once your page has more than 120 links on it...holy schmolies by some methods of determining my homepage has over 500 links on it.  That is if you take into account all the "digg" and "stumble upon" links for each entry.  Trimming my blogroll isn't going to have much affect on that result.

If you feel the need to try and stay under that arbitrary link count of 120 then by all means do what you need and that may result in a better Google placement.

While Blogging

Me? I like linking to things that interest me.  I like linking to a few of my "online allies" as I call them.  Friends in the real world and online that I have met or hooked up with.  If that impacts my ability to get crawled by Google...well FIGHT THE POWER MAN!

While Surfing

If I find a blog I really like and want to head down a link trail, I am interested in what blogs they link to, I want to follow their lead.  I want to go to places that they advocate.

It helps me find the nooks and cranies that interest me.  It dissapoints me when I come across a really interesting blog and he has NO blog roll...It's like finding a dead end in the superhighway.  I'm left shaking my head and wondering what the blogger was thinking.

And like I said my opinion of the blogger goes down a notch.

All open API's...meaning, you Mr. Phone company can take this platform and use it on your technology.  Freaking cool.

And as an aside doesn't Sergey Brin have a weird eye thing going on?  Freaky.  Is he trying to compel us with his evil mind-powers?

Click on the image above to see Google traffic through a day.

"'Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" ¹

...who controls the internet controls the present: who controls search controls the internet.

In part it's inevitable, the movement towards total loss of privacy. It is the opposite side of the coin for total transparent knowledge. Google is merely the embodiement of forces at work in society at large.

Money quote:

Interviewer: "How can you take fears away that this is a big brother company?"

....silent pause...

Marissa Mayer - VP Google Search: "I guess I just don't agree, I don't think of it that way."

This response is extraordinary in its naiveté. It is almost as if she didn't expect to be asked the question and possibly hadn't even thought about the question before...woah!

Motivation.

Marissa implies the motivation behind google's efforts to collect all the search data is non-predatory. Google only wants the data to improve the performance of their applications. I believe that is true

But what happens in the future...I mean they can say "do no evil", but then agenda's change: Google kow tows to the Chinese government and censors information., Google uses its clout to threaten politicians in North Carolina...I'm not painting Google as actually evil, I think those are business decisions, but I do think they can no longer live within their dream world of purity.

And if they are no longer the angels that they once portrayed themselves to be (if they ever were). And if they are merely a business entity trying to conquer a market and make a buck. And if their motivations are the same as the rest of the businesses in the world (which I believe they are). Then why should I trust them more than anybody else with all the information in the world?

I shouldn't.

Google Street View

As one example: Google Street View, it may show people doing private things in a very public way. [linky]. Google is within its rights to publish photos of people in public places, but what if they publish pictures of YOU that you don't want to be shown? Is that cool with you?

"They should build in privacy protection mechanisms as a matter of course," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. "I don't see them proactively addressing the privacy implications of their various products, and they need to."

Because they're coming to your city...
[pics of google vehicles]

...and they ain't alone
[MS Live vs. Google]

Which brings me nicely back to the point about google merely being "the embodiement of forces at work in society at large." If Google didn't do it, someone else (Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo) would.

btw: Check out Microsoft's street side preview -it's Awesome! [Drive through the streets].

What do we do?

What can we do?

I mean to a large degree Google is an unstoppable force. Larger than most governments, curator of more information in one place than any entity before it, the consumer of more circuitry than any government or company before, the wellspring of geekdom from which all manner of widgits and tools spring as if unbidden from the hand of god.

Out of its maw comes interfaces into the information and out to the world the likes of which were not even dreamed of by futurists in decades past. No government is mandating this? They have money, they foist it on engineers and say GO FORTH AND CREATE. and it is done

.

But how do we put these multitude of genies back in the bottle?

We can't even if we wished to?

And with the rapid pace of change what does tomorrow hold in store for us?

meh.

Hang it...Google is cool

And yet the flip side is too damn compelling.
[google street view]

Maybe we are past this point. Maybe I am interjecting my 20th century sensibilities into a 21st century phenomena...

And yet who do we trust with THIS power?
[AI sooner than you think.]

Because I'm a little leary of anyone who can create that. Except of course me. You can trust me. I'll do no evil...right?

Ok, I'll bottle up that paranoia again and just enjoy all the Google doo-hickeys.

Full Google - Behind the Screen video [50 minutes] : [linky]

George Orwell, 1984 Part 1, Chapter 3, pg. 37

So I love the Stumble Upon toolbar. I like it as a user, it can be a real time suck. I like it as a blog owner because it can drive traffic like nothing else I've ever encountered. It is simple, easy to comprehend and just plain fun.

I was curious as to what other competitors might be out there. And I found a few.

Stumble Upon toolbar - http://www.stumbleupon.com/

The market leader. They have a well designed toolbar, website and backend system. The sites can be rated with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down button. Lots of additional features but they are all superfluous. The only thing that matters is that you can submit a site easily, rate a site easily and view a random site at the click of a button. Simplicity drives the success of this toolbar.

Streakr - discorveryBar - http://www.streakr.com/

A direct competitor to the stumble upon toolbar. The one problem I have with it in comparison to StumbleUpon is the handling of categories. SU allows you to choose a subset of categories from which to return a site. Streakr lets you choose All categories or One category. Neither one of those choices is exactly what I want. A bit nitpicky of me I think.

The Random Site toolbar - http://therandomsite.ourtoolbar.com/

Bills itself in the same space but it is not quite as good. It pulls you back to TheRandomSite.com with a featured content link. It is also slower than stumble upon. This is a sub-optimal solution and we should not pursue this technique.

Google random site button - http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-04-18-n70.html

This random button is a secondary install for the google toolbar. It returns a random site based on your previous search history. The returned sites don’t seem to be as interesting as an anecdotal review.

I was talking about the scale of the solar system with one of my kids and I wanted to find a picture of the Sun taken from Voyager to show how small it was.  I came across this picture.

1970's technology meets 2007.

1970's - Voyager:
Here we have one of the shining stars of the NASA space program, Voyager, sending back to Earth a composite picture of our solar system with all the planets out to Neptune captured in one amalgamation.

Brilliant.

2007 - Google:
And here I am able to go clickety click click and view the fantastic image on my own machine.

Also brilliant.

The vast store of all knowledge that is available to any person with an internet connection is immense, ubiquitous, stupefying and already taken for granted. 

My kids will never know anything different.  Will they ever have the need to open a printed encyclopedia? 

Will their research ever involve going to the school library "stacks" to find a specific tidbit of knowledge squirled away on page 743 from some obscure research scientist from Peru?

Will they even have the need to learn the Dooey Decimal System?

I would argue "no" to all three of those questions.

I mean what is apple gonna do...sue em?

These are the two companies that get a pass, neither one can do any evil or bad thing. So what happens when one steps on the toes of the other...

BTW this is yet another example of google's attempts to put everyone else out of business.

1. Cool new blog (new to me): How To Split an Atom

Steven Spalding’s blog about the Web 2.0 culture, and how to survive in it. A cool blog that bounces around from subject to subject...I like that sorta place.

If you get nothing else out of it remember that at the end of the day, just like espresso, reading How To Split An Atom will at least make you look smarter.

2. Cool Web Thing: XMail Harddrive

Use your gmail account as an online harddrive. This is pretty cool. Check out the how to vid from Billy Nye (any relation to Bill Nye the Science Guy?)

3. Cool Real World Thing: The wings to the new Boeing 787

The engineers involved with the design are curious about its capabilities. They have an interesting question that will probably never be answered. An intriguing perplixiton?

Can the wingtips of the new carbon fiber wings TOUCH above the fuselage without breaking?

Not that I ever want them to...but...holy indestructability Batman! [linky]

4. Extra Cool Thing: Ornithopters

As in extraordinary. The slow fly ornithopter:

I wanna build one! Looks like you can get yourself some over here: Free Flight Ornithopters. Or build one from scratch: [linky]

So I've talked about World Wind, [linky] which comes with an interface for several planets and the moon.  Well now Google has gotten into the act and created a moon map. [linky]

Google goes one better by highlighting the locations of the moon landings.

Well not just ponies.  Good video from the Stanford Business School, about his perspective on Microsoft - Google - and the future and all that.

http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2_2-6167775.html?tag=nl.e622

Go watch it.

I was curious if Google and Microsoft Live Search were biasing their results for..well let us just say less than friendly searches.  For example would the results for "google sucks" be different on both search engines.  Well of course the results are different, but so what?  What we really want to know is does the difference hold any signifigance?

read more after the jump...

I've now had the discussion a few times over the last few months - will MS as the computing standard be toppled any time soon - and so I figure it's worth talking about here.

The answer is - it is the standard and will continue to be so for at least the next 10-15 years. The reason being that there is a whole generation of IT folks who have been raised on MS software. They know it, they can hire for it and their corporate users are comfortable with it. Is it perfect? Nope but it works and to paraphrase Ross Perot - no one will get fired supporting MS software. Sorry Linux and Apple fans - MS has one. Sorry Google fans - there's no support infrastructure for Google. Now a generation from now things can change but that's a lot of lifetimes in terms of how technology works.

Now the home front is an entirely different battle - as computing morphs into the CE realm the OS fades into the background. Seriously who cares or knows what OS is running their home stereo? Or their TV? With the launch of Apple TV and XBOX 360 computing is evolving more and more into devices where functionality - ie. what can i do with this device - drives the usage decision not the OS. And on the home front no one knows who's going to win. But don't count MS out with the success of XBOX 360 - and it has won the gen 3 advanced console game don't let PS3 fans tell you otherwise - MS has an interesting hedge on the next generation of computing.