kerkko.fi

I have noticed a huge trend not only in websites moving away from RSS to Twitter and Facebook, but removing it completely! This is NOT a good move for people who provide content to stay in touch with consumers. RSS is a way to consume a LOT of information very quickly, and store it in nice categories if you miss it. I can catch up with a small blog’s output at the end of the week and, if I so choose, read every article easily in one sitting.

Small blogs cut their own throat by taking away the RSS capability. Social media outlets are information colanders: 5% of your followers will see anything you post, and that is probably only within 20 minutes of posting. That is the way it is, and it is going to only get worse. Apart from email lists, RSS is the best way you can collect stuff across the internet to read quickly, and I am so irritated when that choice is taken from me.

http://feliciaday.com/blog/rss-rant

Almost two thousand potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia have been discovered from an office chair in Perth, Australia, thanks to high-resolution satellite images from Google Earth.

David Kennedy from the University of Western Australia scanned 1,240 km2 in Saudi Arabia using Google Earth. He found 1,977 potential archaeological sites, including 1,082 "pendants" -- ancient tombs made of stone.

According to Kennedy, aerial photography of Saudi Arabia is not made available to most archaeologists, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to fly over the nation. "But, Google Earth can outflank them," he says.

Content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results. When you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods. (The spammers get paid for every click.)

This is what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher. He concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews." Unfortunately, it is not just appliance reviews that are the problem. Almost any popular search term will take you into seedy neighborhoods. We are fighting a losing battle for the web and need alternative ways of finding the information that we need.

In 2010, our mailboxes suddenly started overflowing with complaints from users that they were doing perfectly reasonable Google searches, and ending up on scraper sites that mirrored Stack Overflow content with added advertisements. Even worse, in some cases, the original Stack Overflow question was nowhere to be found in the search results.

I was disturbed. If these dime-store scrapers were doing so well and generating so much traffic on the back of our content – how was the rest of the web faring? My enduring faith in the gravitational constant of Google had been shaken. Shaken to the very core. I had doubts that we were seeing serious cracks in the algorithmic search foundations of Google.

I cannot help noticing that we are not the only site to have serious problems with Google search results in the last few months. In fact, the drum beat of deteriorating Google search quality has been practically deafening of late: Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO'ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, they know more about you than your significant other. They know what you’re searching for and when, what sites you visit, who you email, who you constantly check up on, who you ignore, and who knows what else. With all that data sitting on a server somewhere, they all try to do the same thing: sell you more junk.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/06/21/russias-medvedev-to-see-google-but-not-co-founder-brin/

We are living in an age where a decreasing number of firms serve as a kind of Master Switch over speech on the internet -- think Google, Facebook, the cable industry, and the major telephone carriers. These firms are already under strong pressure to censor from powerful governments, religious groups, political parties, and essentially any outfit with a reason to want information suppressed. On a daily basis, as we speak, internet companies are making speech-related decisions more important than those made by any government.

This is what speech management looks like in 2010. No one elected Facebook or YouTube, and neither one is beholden to the First Amendment. Nonetheless, it is their decisions that dictate, effectively, who gets heard. The American public needs to be aware of the dangers that private censors can pose to free speech. The American Constitution was written to control abuses of power, but it did not account for the heavy concentration of private power that we see today. And in the end, power is power, whether in private or public hands.

http://blog.rescuetime.com/2010/05/24/the-tragic-cost-of-google-pac-man-4-82-million-hours/

There is panic in the air: the PC industry as we have known it is beginning to die. PCs are becoming commodity items. The price of PCs and laptops is falling by about 50% per decade in real terms, despite performance simultaneously rising in real terms. The profit margin on a typical netbook or desktop PC is under 10%. The PC revolution has saturated the market. Anyone who needs and can afford a PC has now got one.

At the same time, wireless broadband is coming. Software will be delivered as a service to users wherever they are, via whatever device they are looking at -- their phone, laptop, tablet, the TV. You will not have home broadband; you will just have data on demand wherever you are. You will not have a "computer," but be surrounded by devices that give you access to your data whenever and however you need it.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/why-steve-jobs-hates-flash.html