The Anti Microsoft Eat Google Rule?

Google wants to tell the teacher on Microsoft for making its search engine the default search engine in the new version of Internet Explorer.

From the New York Times article:

The move, Google claims, limits consumer choice and is reminiscent of the tactics that got Microsoft into antitrust trouble in the late 1990’s.

Oh please. If this is the best thing Google can think of to tattle about, Google needs to cowboy up.

Ed Bott demonstrates exactly how oppressive it is to poor little Google to have to convince someone to select Google from the already-provided list of other search engines one can select as their alternative default search engine. Basically, a user clicks the box and selects Google. It takes maybe 10 seconds.

Meanwhile in Firefox (which I use as my default browser and which is very chummy with Google), Google is the default search engine. The process to make Microsoft your default search engine is substantially identical to the one used to do the reverse in Internet Explorer.

See Ed’s post for more details and screenshots.

I hope whatever authority figures Google runs to to tell this sad tale of woe laugh Google out of the building and suggest that Google stop crying over nothing.

Somewhere along the way someone decided that since Microsoft was so successful it had to stop trying to be successful. All of this jargon about default search engines and whatnot is merely a poorly disguised campaign to let a bunch of other companies leverage off of Microsoft’s prior successes. Somehow the argument has evolved from “don’t prevent my trains from running” to “I am entitled to sell tickets on your train.”

Even Nick Carr took a break from thinking about how smart he is and how dumb the rest of us are to actually make a very good point that us idjits can actually understand:

If Google wants to fully live up to its ideals – to really give primacy to the goal of user choice in search – it should open up its home page to other search engines. That would be easy to do without mucking up the page or the “user experience.” You could just add a simple drop down menu that would allow users to choose whether to do a search with Google’s engine, or Microsoft’s, or Yahoo’s, or one of the other, less-well-known engines that now exist.

Even us numbskulls can mostly grasp the goose and gander rule.

Anyway, I am no Microsoft apologist (DISCLAIMER: though I am a shareholder). I don’t even use Internet Explorer. But I know the sound of a crying baby, and that’s what I hear coming from Google’s crib.

Save Some Trees – No More Yellow Pages

Craig Newmark points to a petition where you can request that your name be removed from the mailing list for the hard copy of the Yellow Pages. 540 million hard copies takes a lot of trees.

I signed up, for both the Yellow Pages and the White Pages. I haven’t used a hard copy of either in years. I don’t need one copy and I certainly don’t need multiple copies, which I seem to get every year.

Second Life Update

Here’s my latest report from the realm of Second Life.

slbuild-702232 I have figured out the building thing and have built a pretty nice house/castle from the ground up. Visitors are welcome. It’s at Sibine (100,75,54). Here is the SURL.

In order to square off the size of my tract of land, I bought a big tract of land next to mine. In Second Life, your monthly fee is based on the size of your landholdings, so I don’t want to keep the excess land. I have two tracts for sale now. One is a 992 sq. meter tract with a small cabin and one is 4448 sq. meter tract with a smaller castle I built. In furtherance of my desire to create a little neighborhood of grownups who share similar interests, I will slash the prices to significantly below what I paid for them for anyone I know who is looking to get a place in Second Life. Email me and we’ll talk about it.

I also have a 7216 sq. meter tract between my house and those tracts that is not on the market, but I would consider developing it for some sort of a group effort- perhaps a tech bloggers’ gathering place or something like that, should enough people be interested.

I don’t know if it’s possible to build a little “memeorandum” community in Second Life, but it would be cool if we did, and I’m willing to throw in some land to make it happen.

Why Blogging Stocks is a Horrible Idea

In a move that boggles my mind, AOL has launched Blogging Stocks, where bloggers will write about individual stocks. Further boggling is the fact that the bloggers are not only allowed to own the stocks they write about, they are encouraged to own them.

Are blogs becoming the new message boards?

I am having nightmares of the Yahoo stock message boards of the mid-nineties. Visions of all those people who don’t know a PE ratio from a bullfrog either bashing or praising a stock based solely on whether they are short or long.

Sure, there’s a code of ethics in place and I suspect that most of the bloggers will comply with it. But one thing you can count on is that some people, be they bloggers or commenters with a hundred aliases, will try to game the system. At best it will be a chaotic blend of legitimate attempts at writing, infighting and position talking.

Steve Rubel says Blogging Stocks will drag more companies into the blogosphere. I think that’s probably true at first. But once the inevitable chaos begins, companies will write off these blogs just as they wrote off message boards long ago.

To begin with, if I don’t take financial advice from some guy who cold calls me early in the morning, tries to sound familiar by calling me “Jon” (Kent is my middle name; my first name is Jonathan) and tells me how he wants to do me a favor by letting me pay him to tell me what stock to buy, why am I going to listen to someone I don’t know who is blogging about a stock they likely own?

This is such a bad idea, I can’t believe it’s really happening.

The Stalwart shares at least some of my concerns and says:

For one thing, people who are interested in investment stuff are really concerned with credibility. They may be willing to take advice from a guy that throws around chairs while blaring heavy-metal, but they want him to be a successful hedge fund manager. Looking over bloggingstocks, you’ll instantly see the credibility problem at work.

I am not saying that the stock market should be completely off-limits to bloggers. To the contrary, I have mentioned the market here once or twice. I read Henry Blodget every day. Fred Wilson (who isn’t all that impressed with Blogging Stocks, but thinks stocks and blogs are a “perfect fit“) mentions the market from time to time.

But a network specifically designed for and devoted to bloggers blogging and commenters commenting on individual stocks they likely own (or in the case of the commenters, may own or short) is a recipe for chaos.

In September 1999 I was quoted in Money Magazine about stock message boards. I said that I would absolutely not look to them for stock ideas or strategy and that I believed doing so was very risky. I feel the same way about stock blogs.

Some will undoubtedly argue that as long as the network blogs only about huge companies and stays away from the penny stocks, where most of the manipulation allegedly occurs, there is little or no danger of gaming the system. While I agree that a few people blogging and commenting about Google or Microsoft is not going to affect the stock price, I don’t see a benefit (other than another stab at the almighty ad dollar) that supports a step down this slippery slope.

And that’s just it. Like every other internet-related business venture we read about these days, this one is chasing the online advertising dollar that many think is both permanent and infinite.

Also problematic, of course, is that the AOL association will lead many to believe, rightly or wrongly, that this information is more credible than some post by some anonymous poster on a message board.

Maybe it will be, maybe it won’t. And that is the problem.

The combination of individual stocks and a blog network is, in my opinion, a train wreck waiting to happen.

Dell Holds the Junkware

Before I starting building my own, I was a big fan of Dell computers. I bought 4-5 computers and a laptop from Dell over the years. When I am asked (as I am often) by friends for computer recommendations, I still suggest Dell desktops (and Thinkpad laptops).

bloatware One annoyance with any new computer is all of the junkware they pre-install on it, likely in exchange for payment from the vendor who hopes against hope you will buy the full version of the crippled junkware version that comes pre-installed.

Dwight Silverman reports today that Dell has added an option to dispense with the junkware. This is great news, and if you buy a computer you should always select the “no preinstalled software” option, if available.

Windows, an anti-virus program and any Office products you buy will still be installed. But you won’t get a bunch of crippled bloatware and offers for ISP services you don’t want.

Kudos to Dell for doing this.

Solution Watch on Note Taking

I missed this when it was posted, but Solution Watch has an excellent and very useful note taking resource. The post covers applications for public and collaborative note taking, private note taking, online document creation, voice recording and even online databases.

For what it’s worth here’s what I use in each of their categories:

Quick Public Pages: Backpack

Basic Note Taking: Onfolio (not on their list); Yahoo Notepad

Development: TextSnippets

Online Documents: None (I just access my documents via FolderShare)

Voice Recording: Odeo

Start Page: My Yahoo; My personal portal

Online Database: None (thank goodness)

Linkcount by Zombie

If Om and Mike won’t link to you, go for a mindless spammer instead.

I have certainly noticed some spam links in my Technorati list (which, by the way, seems broken again, but I’m too weary to try to get it fixed, again).

The other strange thing that happened recently at Technorati is that a ton of old links from Memeorandum starting showing up as new links. I don’t even know how that could happen, unless someone starting pulling up old archives and pinging Technorati. But even if you were that link obsessed, you only get one link added to your account per website, so why ping all those old archives?

Anyway, I thought Seth’s mini-experiment was pretty interesting.

The Shadeless Future of the Traditional Newspaper

Things are going great, and they’re only getting better
I’m doing all right, getting good grades
The future’s so bright
I gotta wear shades, I gotta wear shades

– Timbuk3

Mark Evans, who works for one, has some thoughts about the shadeless future of traditional newspapers. His post was inspired by a speech he heard by Jeff Cole, who heads a team at the University of Southern California that has collected data about internet usage for the past six years.

I have posted several times about newspapers and their dire need to reinvent themselves in the face of their three biggest threats:

1) the internet as a distribution channel that more and more people prefer over a trip to the front yard;

2) eBay/Craigslist and the loss of the classified ads revenue stream (even the non-geeks I know use eBay, etc. to find something they used to look for in the classifieds); and

3) citizen journalism (bloggers and other writers who bypass the newspapers and go straight to the audience).

There are still a ton of people who strongly prefer newspapers. So the old papers have time to evolve. But any doubt about the future of content distribution should have been addressed by the movement online we have witnessed over the past few years. The decision by more and more papers to stop running stock quotes daily is evidence of the inevitable.

But newspapers still have a few things in their corner.

First, talent. If they can redeploy their writers under some new-media structure, they can outwrite most of us amateur hacks without breaking a sweat.

Second, the marketing industry. The marketing industry is based largely on ad creation and placement. Everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows the internet advertising thing is both cyclical and unstable. People simply don’t watch TV ads any more. Radio ads are killing traditional radio. That leaves print advertising.

If the newspapers will let them, the marketing industry will save them. But the newspapers have to play ball by allowing themselves to be recreated as a largely online animal. Sure, the NYT can become a weekly magazine and survive. Other papers can become weekly papers and survive for a while.

But the newspaper gig is up, and the papers who admit it and get ahead on the evolutionary curve are the ones who will make it.

Remember- you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the other guy.

Net Neutrality Tutorial

netneutraility

If you want to know what net neutrality is and why it’s important to you, but you don’t want to spend hours reading boring articles about it, just watch this video.

There is a dangerous combination of greed and stupidity floating around out there that could do something really bad unless we keep net neutrality front and center until the threat of non-neutrality is eradicated.

If you use the internet for anything at all, net neutrality is an important issue to you.

Vista Versions Made Easy

Ed Bott has a good post and an even better chart that explains the differences in the various versions of the upcoming Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP.

It’s still going to be a little tough to figure out which one to buy for a home/office power user with a network. At first glance, I suspect I’ll buy the Home Premium for the computer attached to our audio video equipment and Professional for the other computers on the network.