Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

09-06-2008

by Damien Mulley

This month's Rattleblog doesn't really mention that big event that's happening in the US this week about some mobile device from a fruit company. Instead we ask whether Google is getting pushier as it picks fights with more of the biggest tech companies.

We all witnessed the drama in Silicon Valley of late between Yahoo and Microsoft with a meddling Google getting its oar in now and then, but it's not just the MicroHoo deal Google have been interfering with.

TechCrunch reveals that in Australia someone did some snooping and found out that an anonymous critic of eBay who sent a 38-page document to the Australian Government was none other than Google Australia.

Meanwhile TechCrunch and GigaOm cover the locking of horns of Google and Facebook over how Facebook "friend" data can be accessed. Both companies said they will allow people to share their friend data with other services but Facebook has now banned Google from accessing this data saying that Google was going to redistribute the data without asking permission from the data owners.

The Bits blog from the New York Times meanwhile covers the fact that Google is fighting tooth and nail to not put a privacy policy link of its homepage. It's unknown whether Google just doesn't want to spoil the look of its minimalist front page or the fact that ever visitor will be able to quickly access what exactly Google is storing about them.

Engadget covers a new tech from Microsoft that allows you to use a wall or screen to do touch-wall like actions at a much cheaper price than the firm's Surface PC.

On the same subject, the New Scientist Blog shows people how to build their own multi-touch pad for their computers.

The Times reports that the USD100 laptop project, or the One Laptop Per Child, which is selling laptops for more than USD100 now, will also dump its own operating system in favour of a hacked-up version of Windows. With that news the OLPC project started bleeding staff, some of whom went off to start their own competing project. Someone has probably already trademarked "USD99 laptop".

Meanwhile Engadget simply adores the Samsung mini laptop that's set to be released. One of possibly a dozen tiny lightweight laptops that have flooded on to the market ever since the OLPC was announced. Small is big it seems but be prepared to type with your pinkies!

GigaOm reports that Adobe might make the next version of its Flash software into a peer-to-peer service so it can be updated with little cost to Adobe as people will distribute the updates to each other. With so many applications starting to be written exclusively in Flash it could mean whole Office Suites could be distributed quickly and cheaply online. Another nail in the coffin of physical media.

TechCrunch reports that Google will soon add geographical locating services to its offerings. As iPhone 2 is meant to include GPS and geo-tagging of texts, pictures and videos, this might mean you can now filter Google and YouTube results by location and possibly even proximity to your current location.

Staying with the local theme, the FT blog reports how creating "hyperlocal" sites for some newspaper websites was far from successful.

It appears that some of the negativity about social networks hype was right as Silicon Alley Insider reports that jobs website Monster has shut down its social network Tickle with the very Web 1.0 advice of telling people to print off their data if they want to keep it.

However the old-school and highly-conservative world of Law is getting into gaming, with a former Chief Justice helping to design a computer game that tackles copyright law, amongst other things. If the kids are no longer reading books and no longer watching TV then it makes sense to address them in their latest playgrounds.

Staying with games, the Kotaku blog reports that when it comes to music sales Motley Crue sold more singles via the Rock Band game than via iTunes.

Finally, journalist John Battelle points out the interesting phenomenon that people are no longer using the spellchecker in Microsoft Word to check spellings; they're Googling spellings instead.

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and technology commentator.