I swear, soon I’ll stop posting constantly about Google, but an article in yesterday’s New York Times just caught my attention. Entitled “Relax, Bill Gates; It’s Google’s Turn as the Villain”, the article bangs on about how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs think Google is taking over Microsoft’s evil reign.

One upstart even proclaims that “Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did”. You what? How can Google possibly be doing anything that halts innovation? Their products in the past couple of years have had a hell of a lot of influence, surely.

Their original selling point, when they were simply a search engine, was to me the simplicity. With MSN, even six months ago, you’d open up the search page and be bombarded with adverts, celebrity gossip and links to the Gardening section. All you wanted was to find out who won the 1978 World Cup, and it’s taken a minute and a half to open the page.

And now look at the new MSN search page. It searches web pages, news, images, and they even have their own version of Desktop Search.

And the Microsoft search engine isn’t the only system which has taken its cue from Google.

Look at the new Hotmail beta. Or their version of Google’s personalised homepage, Start.com. Hell, they might have had MSN Maps for years, but Virtual Earth was only put together after Google went forth and released Google Earth and Maps.

My understanding of ‘innovation’ is pushing technology to it’s limits. Doing something that forces even your stronger rivals to out-do you just to keep them on their toes. If that’s not what Google is doing, then I must be reading from the wrong dictionary.

Who bets that in a few months time, MSN will announce a new instant messenger, with better audio capabilities? Don’t doubt it.

Tags: Google, Microsoft

Having released two large-scale betas in the past week, Desktop 2 and Talk, Google are on the lookout for someone to play a key role in their “future video conference systems”, says a job posting on Yahoo! Jobs.

This definitely points to Google Talk as far as I can see, as well even a system pointed more at corporations in the future - email, video conferencing, and IM functions built into one product perhaps.

Yahoo! Jobs (via Search Engine Journal)

One unlucky Flickr user was violated on a New York subway train last week, when a man exposed and began molesting himself right in front of her. She reported the incident to a nearby police officer, and then as soon as she got home promptly posted the photo she’d taken of him with her camera-phone on the Internet.

The woman, known only to us as friendly_chic407, is now taking the incident as far as she can with the police, who are trying to find the culprit.

They haven’t had much luck so far, so if you know who it is, tell her. Either that, or give him a nice hard smack somewhere where it will hurt.

Flickr pervert (via Boing Boing)

66% of ‘typical’ blog readers don’t know what RSS is, according to a new report published by Nielsen//Netratings today.

Their ‘Understanding the Blogosphere’ survey came to the conclusion that “nearly five percent of blog readers use feed aggregation software and more than six percent use a feed aggregating Web site to monitor RSS feeds from blogs”.

However, exactly half of the thousand asked said they had never heard of RSS before - these are people who “claim to read blogs regularly”, remember. Do they browse blindfolded? Insults aside, with all the techie buzz around RSS at the moment, these figures might well be a bit of a shock.

Contrary to the flavour of most of my posts, I’m surprisingly critical of most new technologies - I don’t like management speak, and I don’t like all the industry buzz about silly little things, but RSS really is a great idea, and most of the newsreaders around are very capable of making the most of it.

Instead of spending hours and hours trawling through sites checking to see what’s new (and although I miss that odd jollity, I wouldn’t read half the amount of interesting stuff as I do now), you can check 10, or 50, or even 100, sites in the same block of time.

You can subscribe to a feed to keep up with the latest BBC news, or you can get a customized search feed to find the latest blog posts about “socks” on Technorati. The blogging world is so huge these days that it’s almost impossible to read every post you’d like to within the hours in a day, so you need to use RSS to get the most out of it.

I hope Microsoft keep going with their ideas of incorporating RSS into the very centre of Vista - whether they patronizingly call them ‘web feeds’ or not - because hopefully then people will realise it’s not just another cheap geek gimmick - and that it’s actually useful.

Neilsen//Netratings (via The Register)
Read the report in full (PDF download)

Tags: RSS, blog