According to Google …
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Category: Google
funny Windows Phone 7 ad
Love it.
… our culture of mobile distraction …
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Here’s another – Season of the Witch. (VIDEO)
I love it because this is the way you phone addicts look to those of us not yet addicted.
Microsoft is desperate to stop their bleeding in the smart phone market. They’ve announced 10 new phones with an all new operating system.
So far, so good, MS.
But the future is Google Android.
(via TechFlash – Windows Phone challenges us to pull our heads out of our phones)
Bing vs Google – image search
I hate the latest version of Google Image search. It looks cool, but is slow and less functional than in the past.
Bing Image Search is far better:
… Unfortunately, for that image search term: “Starbucks take comfort in ritual“, Bing only came up with 8 results, none what I was looking for.
Seems I must use Google despite the interface.
Leave a comment if you know of any other better alternative. (Yahoo is now using Bing, so that’s not an alternative.)
YouTube getting artsy fartsy
I don’t know about you, but I watch far more YouTube than traditional TV.
Can you get this on your regular boob tube? …
Out of 23,000 artistic video clips submitted to New York’s Guggenheim museum through the YouTube Play program, 125 have been selected as finalists. …
Here’s the kind of stuff they picked.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
… Twenty of these videos will be part of an exhibit at the Guggenheim and associated museums around the world, …
LOVE Google Reader fullscreen mode
People often ask me how I can track so many different sites online: gymnastics and hiking.
I can’t.
Google Reader, a website, does it for me.
They’ve added a killer feature that I’ll use 400 times a day:
… we thought we should give our users a chance to maximize their screen space whenever possible… thus fullscreen mode was born. You can toggle the fullscreen mode through the ‘f’ key. Additionally, you can use ‘shift + u’ to show and hide the navigation panel so you can easily change what you’re reading without leaving fullscreen mode. …
Sign up for Google Reader (FREE) and give it a try.
… Mostly you use 5 keyboard shortcuts: j, k, o, f, and u
Easy.
Chrome vs Safari
In June, one test found that Chrome was only slightly faster than Safari on the Mac.
… I saw no compelling reason to switch to Chrome.
But in a real world wifi test on my personal Mac, Chrome was more than twice as fast as Safari downloading measured by speedtest.net.
Loading a YouTube video in both, the speed advantage of Chrome was obvious.
I’ll start using Chrome for video starting now. (With FlashBlock installed, of course.)
Because I use LastPass, it would be easy for me to switch over completely. … But using different browsers for different purposes might be the best solution of all.
UPDATE – I’ve switched permanently. Chrome is now my primary browser.
gmail – NEW priority inbox
I just turned on the latest, greatest new feature. … Seems to work well.
Priority Inbox automatically identifies your important email and separates it out from everything else, so that you can focus on what really matters.
Click PLAY or watch a tutorial on YouTube.
Dana and I talked about how difficult the transition is from an old style email system (like Microsoft Exchange) to gmail. There’s a challenging learning curve.
… But I’d never go back.
Google soon to be EVIL
Microsoft was EVIL.
Now Facebook and Apple are EVIL.
But not Google. Never Google. Their informal corporate motto is Don’t Be Evil.
The leading audiocast is This Week in Google. Their Aug. 11th edition was titled Carrier-Humping Net Neutrality Surrender Monkeys (based on Ryan Singel’s post on Wired)
Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, feels betrayed. He fears Google is considering selling out users in order to profit along with phone carriers like Verizon.
Why should you care?
Your online life could soon be much, much worse and more expensive than today. Especially on mobile devices like smart phones.
Check Jeff’s post – Buzz Machine – Internet, schminternet
What can we do about this?
Well the Federal Communications Commission in the States could grow a pair, to start. They’re supposed to be protecting consumers. Unfortunately they seem to be gutless when it comes to confronting the lobbyists of Verizon and that ilk. Especially in an election year.
The world tends to follow whatever happens in the States.
Jeff feels that if the FCC is powerless, the users of the internet will have to rally round something like his proposed
Bill of Rights for Cyberspace:
I. We have a right to connect.
II. We have the right to speak.
III. We have the right to assemble.
IV. We have the right to act.
V. We have the right to control our data.
VI. We have the right to control our identity.
VII. What is public is a public good.
VIII. All bits are created equal.
IX. The internet shall be operated openly.
Google used to advocate for an open web. No more, it seems.
It may be time they fire Eric Schmidt, to start. And reaffirm the original mission of the company, the one that made people trust them in the first place.
related – Business Insider – One amusing difference between the new Evil Empire (Google) and the old one (Microsoft)
UPDATE: … As Google backpedals, the EFF weighed in with this much cited post – A Review of Verizon and Google’s Net Neutrality Proposal – Legislative Analysis by Cindy Cohn
why a FREE MARKET won’t work
In response to Google and Verizon trying to circumvent FCC rules on Net Neutrality:
If companies always agreed with regulators’ rules, there would be no need for regulators. The very point of a regulator is to do things that companies don’t like, out of concern for the welfare of the market or the consumer.
I’ve seen in my lifetime that competition will diminish if markets can do what they like. We end up with oligopoly or, even worse, monopoly.
Oligopoly and monopoly are normally very, very BAD for consumers.
In my opinion we need “regulators” but they should regulate as little as possible, … mainly with the goal of maintaining a high level of competition.
(via one of the best blogs Daring Fireball)
… I’ve got mixed feelings on the Net Neutrality issue, myself. … I’ll support Net Neutrality, for now.
Viacom Loses $1 Billion Lawsuit Against YouTube
Great news.
Viacom’s bogus lawsuit, filed 2007, has been dismissed .
If you like YouTube, you should be celebrating.
The billion-dollar YouTube-Viacom case has finally been resolved, and the winner is … YouTube. In a statement published to its company blog this afternoon, YouTube writes, “The court granted our motion for summary judgment in Viacom’s lawsuit with YouTube. This means that the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement.”
YouTube goes on to say in its statement, “This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other.”
Of course, Viacom could quickly appeal the ruling, and this case could be dragged out for several more years. Stay tuned.
Rick McCharles 