OK, again with the apologies for the slightly political nature of this post, but it's actually a tech issue.  Blogger reactions are becoming fodder for the mainstream media and that is starting to cause some serious problems for candidates.  This issue makes that point very well.

That said, the Obama campaign started running this Ad last week...

The problem, is this...

The reason he doesn't send email is that he can't use a keyboard because of the relentless beatings he received from the Viet Cong in service to our country. From the Boston Globe (March 4, 2000):

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain's encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He's an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can't raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

Wow, that is a screw up. 

Not just a little screw up but the mother of all screw ups.  The Obama campaign's goal in this entire election is to draw attention away from McCain's Vietnam service.  Everyone knows he was a hero in Vietnam but the party line for Obama has to be "that doesn't mean he's the right person to be President"

Bottom Line: Obama can't win on the Military Service issue so his best bet is to acknowledge it and move on (which is exactly what he's been doing up until now)

Accidentally mocking him for his heroism is one of those situations where you don't even want to apologize because that would entail bringing it up again.  You just want to drop it and hope to God it goes away quickly. 

I'm not saying cave, if someone brings it up to you it's ok to say something like...

"The Ad was intended to highlight the importance of Technology and the leading role our candidate hopes to take in that area but we sincerely regret the context of the Ad and as always honor Senator's service in the Military"

But the point is to minimize the Ad as much as possible.  Unfortunately, Bloggers (being the passionate sort they are) don't follow those same rules.  Nico Pitney tries to defend the Ad here.

The problem here is that Mr. Pitney, like most people, doesn't like to lose.  So while the official campaign is willing to say "we blew this play" and move on to the next he feels the need to make an absolutely pathetic defense of the Ad.  I mean, the defense put forth boils down to "he reads e-mail on the blackberry and is trying to get online so this is all a lie". 

Well, you don't need perfectly working fingers to use a Blackberry wheel or click a mouse so that doesn't prove anything.

This brings us to the tech issue here.  Back "in the day", when Newspapers carried all your news, the people talking about these issues were party surrogates who knew what they were doing (aka had some training in media relations and were briefed on where the campaign wanted to go on this issue).  Now it's a free for all.

This presents two problems for political campaigns. 

1.  Normal people assume high profile bloggers (like those on the Huffington Post) are party surrogates and hence attribute their comments to the campaign.

2.  The Campaign can't publicly distance themselves from the fringe groups (who post these things) without the risk of insulting those groups (whose support they need).

It's a tough situation.  I firmly believe the harsh commentary in the blogosphere (which is overwhelmingly liberal) played a part in John Kerry's defeat 4 years ago and it looks like it's going to fill the same role this time around.  Both parties need to find some way to get a handle on these people if they hope to survive in the coming years. 

Addendum: As bad as Mr. Pitney's post was I think Dave Winer takes it up a notch...

Now the idiot right-wing bloggers have a new paranoid theory to cling to -- maybe McCain can't use a computer because of his war injuries. I have a different theory. He doesn't use the Internet for the same reason he doesn't understand economics and the same reason he thinks we could stay in Iraq for 100 years -- because he's a dumb, lazy and ignorant rich kid and has the curiosity of a bowl of oatmeal. And if it were true we would have heard from them on this already, and the only voices on this one would not be the pajama-wearing nutcases of the right. We'd be hearing from the lying suit-wearing lobbyist bastards running McCain's campaign, or the lying bastard John McCain himself.

Again, as bad moves go this is the worst.  That said, I have to come to Mr. Winer's defense to a certain extent.  He has repeatedly said he believes campaigns need to embrace bloggers more and this incident proves his point.  I doubt Mr Winer would have posted this if the campaign had sent him an e-mail saying they felt it was playing as an insult to McCain's service and politely asked him not to post on it for that reason. 

It very well might be time for campaigns to create blog networks around themselves and brief bloggers in the same way they do the talking heads. 

Mark Evans has a blog post today entitled "Why Original Blog Thought is So Difficult".  In the article he essentially concedes that original thought on Techmeme is a problem (to an extent, see below) and then tries to justify why that is.  I don't agree with almost anything he says in the post but its a thoughtful one and I'd suggest everyone take a look.

Here's a quote...

Given Techmeme’s well-deserved reputation as being the place to quickly discover what’s going on in the tech world, Bott’s assessment is blunt, critical, perhaps unfair but not entirely without merit. He’s right; there is an awful lot of blog posts offering little or no insight other than referring to another blog. Rather than adding to the conversation, many of these posts come across as simply noise and bandwagon jumping.

Right off I have to take issue with his assessment.  I love Techmeme, it's in my blogroll, but it is in no way an accurate gauge of "what's going on in the tech world".  It is at best a representation of what a certain crowd (reporters/conference goers) are talking about. 

That's a crowd that misses things far more than it catches them IMHO.  Facebook didn't become a popular blogosphere topic until YEARS after it had taken hold.  I got more out of talking to friends in college than I did out of the blog crowd.  On the corporate side, Microsoft released brand new versions of its Server OS and its Developer Platform in February (both of which are still used in the majority of companies) and there was barely a peep on Techmeme (one article about Hyper-V which never made it near the top and scrolled off by mid-day).  Again, I got more out of talking to corporate types than I did from the blogs. 

Beyond that Techmeme elevates non-news over actual news.  For an example look no further than the constant coverage of a possible merger between Yahoo and Microsoft.  I can sum up what we know about that merger in one paragraph yet it has been the lead topic on Techmeme countless times.  While back on the Windows 2008 example its release (news that matters to the tech industry) got buried by the only lead Microsoft story on Techmeme that day which was how the EU had fined Microsoft (gossipy news that couldn't matter less to the tech industry)

Again, I love Techmeme but it isn't an accurate gauge of the tech industry. 

Getting back to Mr Evans' post he makes several points that essentially boil down to "Bloggers are forced to post unoriginal thoughts by circumstance" (major paraphrase there, take with a grain of salt). 

Here's a quote that sums up the gist of those points...

1. Writing original thought-provoking blog content is a challenge. It takes time, thought and effort. The problem, however, is many bloggers are often short of time, which means it is difficult to come up with insightful thoughts. As Louis Gray talked about in a recent post, many bloggers are time-strapped what with blogging and being on other social/content vehicles such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, RSS readers, etc. If you’re doing all that, when do you have time to think Big Thoughts?

The above point assumes that the failing is on the part of the bloggers.  It would certainly be nice if bloggers didn't make "me too" posts but in the end the failing isn't theirs for making them but Techmeme's for publishing them.  The problem is in Techmeme's process.

In my opinion Techmeme has three major problems with its algorithm right now. 

1.  The Echo-Chamber: Techmeme discovers blogs when other blogs that Gabe Rivera manually seeded in link to them.  The problem is, despite what bloggers might say, they rarely link to people they don't almost completely agree with. 

So, to give an example,  you are never going to get someone who thinks social networking is all hype on Techmeme because that crowd is too enamored with the idea to give credence to someone who doesn't buy into it. 

2.  Barrier to Entry: This is something that is very prominent in the music industry but is just becoming more prominent in the blogosphere.  It essentially boils down to this..."people suck up to the big fish even if the big fish aren't producing the best content". 

So, for example, someone might read 10 posts on a topic better than what someone like Scoble wrote but will link to Scoble out of self interest (no offense to Scoble).  They want his trackbacks and they want his attention so they go for him and block out new talent in the process.

3.  Original News vs. Commentary posters:  Techmeme doesn't seem to differentiate between original news sources and commentary sources.  These are two vastly different types of post and they come from different types of site.  Sites that "break news" get so much weight on Techmeme that it gives you a lot of links that essentially repeat each other (because they are all news sources "breaking" the same news).

This post has already gone on too long but this is a pretty ripe topic so you can expect me to return to it some day soon.  Just to repeat, what Gabe Rivera has done with Techmeme is truly amazing.  I would never dispute that.  But that doesn't mean that the idea is "there yet" as far as maximum usefulness.  Getting to that point is a topic that deserves more discussion.

A couple of days ago Om Malick posted an interview of Ray Ozzie which got me to thinking about something entirely different.

The interview is a good one though and worth checking out.

But what it got me thinking about was whether it pays for Microsoft to give this interview to a big site like GigaOm in the first place?  Taking a look at Techmeme I saw most blogs covering the interview just repeated the original contents which, in my experience, is what often happens in the blogosphere. 

So Microsoft's goal, to get their message to all GigaOm readers, could be achieved without giving the interview straight to them.  The blogosphere is an arena where news flows up as quickly as it flows down.  If they gave the interview to a smaller site the story would still end up on GigaOm within a day.

So the question is: could Microsoft have gotten more mileage out of going to a lesser blog?  I think so and I think it was an opportunity missed on their part.  Public Relations is the art of squeezing as much goodwill as you can out of every move you make.  Microsoft didn't do that here.   Ask yourself, doesn't it look a lot less like pandering when a big company goes to a smaller blog?  On that note, isn't the smaller site a lot more grateful to get the interview?

The truth is, it makes Microsoft look tons better to go to a smaller site and it still achieves everything they got by going to the bigger one. 

That's why, when I hear bloggers go on about the death of PR I have to chuckle.  PR isn't dead its just changed into a more dynamic environment which means you can't just go to the big guys and feed them a story anymore.  PR pros and those who do their own PR need to look at blogging patterns and figuring out how to use them in the most effective way.

Don't get me wrong, a company like Microsoft still needs to curry favor with the big sites like GigaOm but they're better off doing that in the background.  Things like feeding exclusive tips aren't seen by the public and are more valuable to the bigger sites than a pre-canned interview anyway.  This allows companies to give the interviews to smaller sites who will praise them endlessly for a story that would be nothing more than a blip on the big site's radar. 

So yesterday marked the end of my "Building My Blogroll" posts.  When I originally started them it was just a way to explain why I was adding these particular people to my blogroll even though I didn't know them personally and they were only a few of the many blogs I read.  As I got further into it though I started to feel more like the exercise was important for me to acknowledge those who had (without knowing it) encouraged me to start this and had contributed greatly to the way I'm going about it.

Overall I'd say the experience was an enjoyable one.

That said, while I am still remain glad I did it I have to admit to getting a little uncomfortable as I began to realize that the people I was posting about would almost certainly see the posts I was making.   This discomfort led me to what I think is an interesting observation in regards to the negativity that is prevalent in the blogosphere and I wanted to share it. 

It seems to me that the "everyone hears everything" mentality (a.k.a. the Internet + Google) of the Internet actually encourages negativity from those who participate in it. 

Follow me here, in real life it is almost always considered smarmy to excessively compliment someone to their face.  There are rare exceptions (events in which that person is being honored for example) but for the most part it really just isn't done.  Compliments are certainly given but usually in private by either giving the person a pat on the back or by speaking well of them to others. 

At the same time the real world considers it brave to publicly confront someone when you disagree with them and cowardly to bad mouth them behind their back.

Where this becomes interesting is when you get into a situation where every bit of communication is not only public but delivered to all via Google.  Now you've made it impossible to compliment someone privately while also making it impossible to confront someone in any way that isn't public.  Because of this you end up encouraging much of the negativity seen on the Internet because people's first reaction is to be drawn to what normally has a positive connotation in public (e.g. confrontation) while avoiding what normally gets a negative connotation (e.g. public praise)

Its interesting to me that this doesn't get discussed more with all the "new media" talk surrounding things like blogs.  A different code of behavior is needed for a world in which everything you say about a person is guaranteed to get back to them.  It seems to me that bloggers in particular need to make more of an effort to be positive about their colleagues for the very reason that the medium lends itself to negativity. 

Every form of media in some way compensates for the weaknesses of their chosen distribution method, why should bloggers be any different?

I'm going to cheat a little bit here. 

I had already written a pretty anemic post explaining why I like Mathew Ingram but I was never happy with it because of how short it was.  Then Mr. Ingram made a point I really wanted to draw attention to and that made the situation worse because it would be odd to make the blogroll post and then turn around and quote him in a separate post.

So I'm combining the two ideas into one post with the first part being why I appreciate his blog and the second part addressing what I wanted to say about his recent post.

On the first point, I think the easiest way to make it is to say that there have been many occasions where I honestly felt Mathew Ingram was the only sane  person in the blogosphere.  Whenever there's one of those "techmeme explosion" where everyone's jumping up and down over some imagined slight Mr. Ingram is almost always the first one to (a) realize how unreasonable everyone is being and (b) call them on it.  Neither of which are small tasks as you end up drawing the enmity of everyone and often times end up alone because those who agree with you don't have the guts to draw that same enmity.

I'm really not sure the tech blogosphere could go on without a Mathew Ingram in it and I would hate to see it try.  For that reason I've put him at #4 on my blogroll. 

That is also what makes it hard to write a whole post about him.  I don't think you could overestimate his value but stating that fact doesn't take terribly long.  Which is why my initial post on him was so anemic and why I'm now resorting to this (somewhat awkward) transition.

Recently he made a post in regards to the whole "Google Shared Items" snafu in which he lays out how odd it is to get angry at Google for sharing items that you marked as "Shared" (a point that a surprising amount of people are missing). 

That's a good point in itself but in his post I think he makes a bigger point that gets lost in the shuffle.  That is what I wanted to draw attention to.  In the post he says...

Scoble has decided to take the high road and blame Google for not implementing ‘granular privacy controls’ — and that might be a good thing for Reader, just as it would be for Facebook.

But it’s not something that’s necessary, in my opinion, nor is it something Google should be slammed for not having. The company explained that shared items would be visible to GTalk contacts — pretty simple, in my opinion. Plus, they can only be seen by contacts who also use Google Reader, and those contacts have to specifically click on the shared items from other users to see them. It’s not as if they’re being emailed to your friends, or scrolling by on the Jumbotron.

Would GPC be handy to have? Sure.

This brings up something I noticed earlier this year with Amazon's Kindle when several people commented that the Kindle was insufficient because it lacked the iPhone's touch interface.  Bloggers understandably want their dream product but it is not understandable to then bash a product if it doesn't do everything exactly the way you want it to. 

Sure there are some features that really do become "must have" but those are a rare occasion.  Even features as great as a touch interface or Granular Privacy Control aren't enough to make the whole product insufficient and I'd bet money that virtually no one dropped Google Reader because of the sharing feature.

If you want to fairly review any product you really have to force yourself to be sensible and weigh all the good features against the bad.  What makes the above cited criticism particularly maddening is the fact that none of each products competitors sport the features being demanded.  So how is it fair to then demand that feature from one vendor?

I'm not saying you can't suggest things for future releases I'm just saying there's a huge difference between "I wish it had this" and "it sucks because it doesn't have this".  That's a difference that more bloggers should pay attention to. 

A personal pet peeve that I've developed over the last few months is to be dismissive of Twitter.  I have to be careful in that I think I've gotten to the point where I automatically disagree with all Twitter hype at this point and automatically disagreeing with anything is not a good sign (at least it isn't if you are trying to be open minded)

The problem I have is that the hype so rarely reflects the reality at this point and that makes it difficult for me to take Twitter proponents seriously. 

So when I saw David Armano's post entitled "Why is Twitter Exploding? ..." I couldn't help but roll my eyes.  Before I get into his article I'd like to present a little graph...

(and yes, I know Alexa isn't the most accurate but on big sites its a decent indicator)

Now, the first thing to notice is that Twitter is still relatively low in the grand scheme of things.  Wordpress is probably the most viewed Blog network in the world but it still doesn't get anywhere close to your mainstream social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook in traffic.  So the fact that twitter pales in comparison to Wordpress should tell you that it isn't exactly exploding.

Second thing to notice is that their traffic hasn't really moved in the last 3 months.  That twitter line is about as straight as a real life graph line is going to get. 

Back to Mr Amano's post he points to Jeremiah Owyang, a Sr. Analyst at Forrester, for validation of his "Exploding" claim.  Mr Owyang says...

Web Strategy Theory to know before you go forward
If you’ve not already figured it out, the corporate website is becoming less relevant, and web marketing (and support) has spread off your domain and google results. You also know that prospects trust the opinions of existing customers (who are ‘like them’) far more than marketers, and Facebook let’s these communities of practice assemble, your brand is decentralized –embrace! If you don’t understand these concepts, it’s hard to move forward, please re-read those posts above.

Given that quote I have a challenge to anyone who might run across this. 

Explain to me how Twitter provides an advantage over a Blog (with comments and RSS/Atom feed) when communicating to customers.

I don't think you're going to come up with a compelling answer. 

Let me be clear, I'm not against Twitter nor am I saying that people shouldn't keep an eye on it but the reality is that the Blogosphere tends to distort the things it likes into looking bigger than they are.  That's why you get talk of Facebook all the time when Myspace still dwarfs it in size.

I do think Twitter has its place I just don't think its where some people think it is and I don't think the service is big enough to have that place be set in stone.  Early adopters don't always determine how a service will turn out especially when they are using something for a purpose that it wasn't originally designed for. 

I have a lot more to say here but it will have to wait for another time.  For now I'll just say that I think Twitter was far better off and far more useful in its original goal which was to help friends keep track of each other.  I think there's a lot more to that than there is to turning it into a cut rate blogging platform.

Wanted to follow up on a few things from yesterday.  First, to an extent, I owe Mr. Atwood an apology.  I still stick by everything I said yesterday but I think the tone was wrong.  The truth is, while I still think his post was ridiculous, it wasn't completely without merit and any idea with merit deserves to be treated fairly and with an open mind.  So to the extent that I didn't do that I'm sorry.

Another point from yesterday comes from the comments to Mr. Atwood's post.  The commenter wrote...

Jeff hit idea #2 of the six dumbest ideas in computer security: http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/ and I totally agree. It is just a scaling issue.

The link leads to an article by Marcus Ranum who claims to be "a renowned expert on security design and implementation" who was "the implementor of the first commercial firewall" (he spelled implementer wrong not me).  For the record, I don't know if those claims are true or not and the reason I put them in quotes was only because I couldn't find any verification for them aside from Wikipedia.  

Anyway, in a post entitled "The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security" he lays out "idea #2" for us...

Why is "Enumerating Badness" a dumb idea? It's a dumb idea because sometime around 1992 the amount of Badness in the Internet began to vastly outweigh the amount of Goodness. For every harmless, legitimate, application, there are dozens or hundreds of pieces of malware, worm tests, exploits, or viral code. Examine a typical antivirus package and you'll see it knows about 75,000+ viruses that might infect your machine. Compare that to the legitimate 30 or so apps that I've installed on my machine, and you can see it's rather dumb to try to track 75,000 pieces of Badness when even a simpleton could track 30 pieces of Goodness. In fact, if I were to simply track the 30 pieces of Goodness on my machine, and allow nothing else to run, I would have simultaneously solved the following problems:

• Spyware
• Viruses
• Remote Control Trojans
• Exploits that involve executing pre-installed code that you don't use regularly

Thanks to all the marketing hype around disclosing and announcing vulnerabilities, there are (according to some industry analysts) between 200 and 700 new pieces of Badness hitting the Internet every month. Not only is "Enumerating Badness" a dumb idea, it's gotten dumber during the few minutes of your time you've bequeathed me by reading this article.

The basic flaw in Mr Ranum's theory is that he's living in the 80s where every application was on the desktop and every communication was 1-to-1 over a modem.  The web allows people to use applications that their administrators wouldn't have even dreamed of and it allows them to do it in packets that are often encrypted. 

More to the point everyone's addiction to the web keeps administrators from blocking most sites outright.  I would love to live in a world where I could specify what sites users were allowed to visit and block all the rest but that isn't the world we live in.

Given that fact I'd argue that web data, specifically secure web data, can't be enumerated.  This leads me to Mr Ranum's next point...

Now, your typical IT executive, when I discuss this concept with him or her, will stand up and say something like, "That sounds great, but our enterprise network is really complicated. Knowing about all the different apps that we rely on would be impossible! What you're saying sounds reasonable until you think about it and realize how absurd it is!" To which I respond, "How can you call yourself a 'Chief Technology Officer' if you have no idea what your technology is doing?" A CTO isn't going to know detail about every application on the network, but if you haven't got a vague idea what's going on it's impossible to do capacity planning, disaster planning, security planning, or virtually any of the things in a CTO's charter.

Well, I don't think CTO's are saying they don't know what different apps they rely on I think what they are saying is that they can't limit what web apps a user uses to only the ones that are business related.  Everyone in most companies, including senior management, uses the web for their personal use at this point and most of that usage is over their corporate network.

Anyway, I've already spent far too much time on this.  I don't know why it annoyed me so much but I think it has something to do with the prevalent attitude in the blogosphere that "we're right and everyone else is an idiot".  So Jeff Atwood can contradict decades of conventional wisdom with no real explanation as to why he thinks almost every other security expert in the world is either an idiot or a liar and no one questions it.  When people do that without even acknowledging how crazy their idea sounds it makes it seem like the blogosphere isn't a place for serious debate and that annoys me.

Leave it to the blogosphere to bash a device before its even been announced but that is what's happening to the poor Amazon Kindle e-book reader. 

Jeremy Toeman asks "Is the market today "in crisis" when it comes to books?" and then supplies the answer "No".  I would disagree in that I personally would do anything to have my library of computer books with me both at work and at home but carrying three bookshelves isn't plausible.  I don't think I'm a niche in this either.  To me Jeremy saying there is no crisis here sounds a lot like the people who asked "why would I want to carry all my music around with me?" when the iPod first arrived.

Jeremy does go on to make some decent points about e-book readers but since his post was contingent on there being no great advantage to the e-book reader the remaining points fall pretty flat for me. 

I found myself agreeing with Rex Hammock who says the iPod Touch is a  much better model for an e-book reader but I'm not sure that automatically makes the Kindle a bad product.  The iPhone/iPod Touch model is revolutionary and its going to put almost any other handheld device to shame as far as things like navigation are concerned.  But that's no reason to necessarily dismiss a product that has other advantages (Such as allowing you to wirelessly purchase e-books from anywhere and have access to them that instant). 

Plus, my understanding is that the Kindle does a good job of replicating paper with its screen and that shouldn't be overlooked.  Whether you realize it or not looking at a computer screen is hard on the eyes and a decent e-paper solution is worth a lot in the battle to replace the printed book. 

All that said, I haven't quite formed an opinion on the kindle yet.  There are certainly points that I like (mostly the wireless download) and things I don't (high price, appearance) but it really is too early to tell.  If I had to guess right now I'd bet against it but I also would have bet against the original Palm Pilot and look how that turned out. 

One last note, the thing looks really ugly which doesn't help.  I can't help but think Amazon would have been better off had they made something that looked a little more like this. 

Google finally got around to releasing the Android SDK today and having watched the videos (but not yet looked at the SDK itself) I was pleasantly surprised.  What struck me most was that the low end prototype seemed capable of doing everything an iPhone can do right now. 

As one might expect a few people in the blogosphere are taking that comparison too far though and comparing a platform on a prototype to an actual phone such as the iPhone.  This, to my eye, is pretty foolish.    The bottom line is that Google is demonstrating a platform for developers AND phone manufacturers to build on.  There’s nothing that says the UI, form factor, price or anything else will be the same on an actual phone.   So if the low end version sells for $99 and does everything that the iPhone does won’t that change things significantly?  Or what if HTC creates a phone which has a really refined interface, won’t that also change things significantly?     

THAT is the point.  This is a platform, not a phone.  This is meant for developers, not consumers. 

That said what I’m not so sure about is the fact that Google is offering various cash prizes to encourage developers ($10 million in all with prizes from $25,000 up).  Cash prizes are great but I can’t help but think they’re better suited for when there’s at least one phone to develop for.  At this point no one’s even announced a phone much less a carrier deal (though HTC announced support so I’d assume they’ll have one eventually).  With all the target platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm and coming soon the iPhone) why would any serious developer put a lot of effort into writing an app for a platform with no support?   

I don’t know…I’ve learned never to underestimate the hobbyist and there will certainly be a lot of hobbyists’ after the cash prize so who knows.  Clearly this is a stunt by Google to make the platform more attractive to phone developers and carriers but I’m not sure its going to yield any ground breaking applications. 

Who makes this stuff up?  A site called TMCNET.com (a site with a confusing url and a logo that looks like it was made in MS Paint) claims to have heard rumors that Google is thinking about acquiring Sprint/Nextel.    The author (who is the President and Publisher of TMCNET.com) seems to base this on his largely inaccurate philosophical assessment of Google.  According to him, Google is a company that "likes to have complete control".   I quote from the article… 

Let's look at Google from a philosophical level. The company has built almost everything from scratch in its past and present. Computers, operating system, web server software and more. Google likes to have complete control. In a way this is not unlike Apple.  

What?!??   Google created its own computer?  Did I miss that press release?  It had to be part of a batch because I also missed the one where Google stopped using MySQL.   But I did learn some history from this article in that I had no idea Google invented Linux.  That Torvalds guy, such a poser.   

As much as I hate to suggest someone use Wikipedia for accurate info the author should probably take a trip over to the Google platform article nonetheless.  

 (btw, before anyone comments, I think the author is referring to this when he mentions Google having created their own OS but that makes him no less of a fool)  

Moving on the author then goes on to say that mobile search is so important to Google that they can't risk going with just Open Handheld Alliance alone.   This, while not as foolish as the above statements, is still pretty naïve.  The importance of mobile search is exactly why Google can't risk taking sides in the mobile phone market.   If Google were to buy the beleaguered Sprint/Nextel they would be alienating every other provider and in doing so they'd be anchoring themselves to what is for all intents and purposes a sinking ship.   They would effectively be sinking the initiative they just announced.    

I won't go any further into this ridiculous post except to say that articles like this are my biggest problem with the blogosphere.  This guy is the “President and Publisher” of a website that specializes in telecommunications and he gets away with making a post that shows complete ignorance of the topic he’s posing on.  It makes it hard to defend the blogsphere against attacks of “amateurish content” when stuff like this is popping up on Techmeme.