Chaos Reigns

 Even big companies are conspiring to reign chaos down on America. Google is selling .zip and .ooo domains. Spammers are jumping on .zip domains. 

And Apple wants to drop “Hey” from waking Siri. Insane. I learned how bad that can be when I changed the wake word for Alexa to Computer. 

I never realized how many times I say computer during the day, usually prefaced with a profanity.

ALL THE GOOGLES IN GOOGLEVILLE...

 So here’s how I see my future; I’ve accomplished the first step. I’ve sold my soul to Google. In exchange, I received a gmail account, a spot on Orkut, a Blog on Blogger and unlimited access to Google/Froogle/Google images, groups and news. 

I have heard that others have received these same benefits without bartering their soul, but I cannot confirm these rumors, and besides, I wasn’t using it anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal.

In the next few years, after Google buys up Microsoft and Intel, and owns a controlling amount of stock of the internet, they’ll want their piece of the real world. Real estate, literally. So somewhere in the mid-West will blossom Googleville, a beta community. I, of course, will be among the first in line to apply for residence. Landscaping be damned, we’ll all be in our lovely Googlehomes, sitting in front of our GoogleMachines computers with broadband access via our Google ISP, 24 hours a day. Blooging this, gmailing that, searching for even more entertainment. 

Once a week I’ll trek down to GoogleMart for my supplies, maintaining my net connection with my Googleberry device. On the way back I’ll stop to fill the tank of my Googlemobile, then it’s back home to surf some more.

Ah, could my future be any brighter?

(First published on my blog in April of 2004)

Googlfied

(Reposted from October 2007)

In the next few years, after Google buys up Microsoft and Intel, and owns a controlling amount of stock of the internet, they'll want their piece of the real world. Real estate, literally. So somewhere in the mid-West will blossom Googleville, a beta community. I, of course, will be among the first in line to apply for residence. Landscaping be damned, we'll all be in our lovely Googlehomes, sitting in front of our GoogleMachines computers with broadband access via our Google ISP, 24 hours a day. Blooging this, gmailing that, searching for even more entertainment. Once a week I'll trek down to GoogleMart for my supplies, maintaining my net connection with my Googleberry device. On the way back I'll stop to fill the tank of my Googlemobile at GoogleGas, then hurry back home to surf/blog/email/search some more.


Soon I'll be at Mecca, Google headquarters, heaven on Earth. I shall bathe in Googloodness. I shall feast on Googlisms. I shall share my dream of the future and secure my place in it. I will be reborn as BetaBoy©, a registered Google property.


Behold, I am Googlfied.

10th Anniversary

Ten years ago I joined Blogger.

That doesn't make it my oldest blog, but it is a milestone for my affiliation with the Google empire.

There isn't one of the services shown in this image I haven't at least tried during the last decade. Many I still use on a daily basis.

Google has become the AOL of the 21st century and web 2.0. But to be fair, it's AOL done right, or at least better for productivity.

Someday soon I expect Blogger entries to automatically show up as posts to Google+. Eventually all of Google's widespread services will interconnect. I'll be able to link to videos at YouTube, pictures at Picassa, documents from Google Docs and you'll be able to find them all using blog search. While the current debate is centered around Google+ versus Facebook, the larger debate will be over a Google identity versus a Facebook profile and which will become a more ubiquitous passport to every website and service. And the biggest winners in that debate will be the advertisers.

I'm still alive, I think

I've just been a bit distracted.

There's this new service called Google+ and since I joined up a couple of weeks ago I've managed to log out of it for several minutes at a time.

Realizing that real-time conversations beat the heck out of blog posting (then waiting sometimes forever for a comment or reaction), I've cut down dramatically on the number of blogs I maintain, from more than 8 to just four. Now when something comes up on a social network that I want to expand on I can blog about it in whichever blog is most appropriate. And since it's highly likely that Google will at some point incorporate Blogger into the Google+ family of related sites, this blog is the most obvious one in which to expound on topics first raised in Google+.

So this blog will cease being my "everything that interests me" blog. That honor is bestowed upon jebers.com, my primary personal blog. I also will begin keeping jebersblog.com updated more frequently with tech tips and discussions, especially about Macintosh, since my MacBook and iPad have become my primary computing devices. I'm keeping my jeberjabber.typepad blog for purely sentimental reasons. While not the first blog I started, it was the first blog I started (in 2004) that still exists.

Stick with me, folks. I think the year ahead is going to be one wild ride for social networking and the ever growing Google empire.

Blogger's Blues

I guess for some geeks, nothing could be more depressing, more disheartening, than to do everything they can think of to increase their blog's audience and interest - submitting site maps to Google, studying SEO tips, posting every 13 minutes - and then see a Google Alert for blogs return a result like the following;

First post- why blog?
ProgressiveU.org - San Mateo,CA,USA
My name is Kaylen and this is my first blog. I'm going to write about WHY I made this blog, and why I am planning on writing in it each day. ...

It makes me just want to slash my wrists.

Well, not me...I meant the hypothetical blogger I mentioned above.