I have not been been much of a fan of Google’s play into music — but today, I think I might just change my mind with my new “Google Play Music All Access” subscription. The new service is an odd dog, to be sure, but it seems to be worth both its bark and its bite so far.
If you haven’t visited The Google Graveyard yet — you need to go there and leave a flower or 40 — before your read this Google Keep review. I admit I’m wary about investing even one second in Google Keep because of the company’s rotten history of starting neat products like Google Reader and Wave and then killing them while you’re in the middle of loving them.
I am still devastated by the news Google Reader will be killed as a service on July 1, 2013. As a writer and publisher, 50 times a day, I get all my clean feed news from Google Reader. Sure, Feedly seems like an okay replacement for now, but what concerns me most about the demise of Google Reader is what that closing means for other non-tip-of-the-spear products like Google Voice and Blogger in the Google arsenal of free services.
It’s been about a month since all 14 of our former network blogs, Urban Semiotic, Go Inside, Boles Blues, Panopticonic, Carceral Nation, Boles University Blog, 10txt, RelationShaping, United Stage, WordPunk, Memeingful, Scientific Aesthetic, Dramatic Medicine and Celebrity Semiotic became this Boles Blog. In that brief time, we’ve published over 80 new articles. That’s a World Publishing Record for any of our single blogs.
Yesterday, while I was editing Gordon Davidescu’s fine article about Mitt Romney appearing on television in Brownface — I had a devil of a time trying to find an article I swore I wrote a long while ago about Ted Danson appearing in public in Blackface while he was dating Whoopi Goldberg. I wanted to link that article in Gordon’s article.
I can usually find anything I’ve written on the internet in a refined Google search — though it’s harder now that all the search engines have re-tuned their return results to reflect newer articles instead of older artifacts — but I could not find any article like that in Google. I also searched my online Google Drive, too. Nothing. I searched all my local hard drive archives. Nothing. I still couldn’t let go of the notion that I’d written about Ted’s Blackface.
As a last gasp effort, I decided to give Microsoft Bing a try — just to see if they held something I hadn’t been able to find that might provide a breadcrumb of a link back to my Danson in Blackface article that didn’t seem to exist anywhere.
When I landed on the Bing homepage, I saw the “Bing it On” challenge I’d heard about en passant, and I decided my missing Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson Blackface article was a perfect test of the two search engine giants to see if they could help me find an article that didn’t appear to exist.
When Microsoft announced the redesign and re-branding of Hotmail and Live.com to Outlook.com, I raced over to the virtual land grab to get the usernames I wanted for the new Outlook.com domain. If I’d understood the process better, I likely would have just converted my pre-existing Live.com email address to an Outlook.com email address — but that process was not clear on Day One, and so I gambled on being safer than sorrier and just started all-new accounts on Outlook.com.
What I didn’t expect in the transition from Live.com — and in comparison with my Google Apps life — is just how great Outlook.com would be in function and aesthetic! Wowser! I like the new icons and fast interface. The overall look and feel are refreshing and new — I can’t wait for the Calendar to be updated to the new design.
The biggest surprise was firing up Outlook.com on my iPhone and finding how fast and easy it was to use. Pages load really fast. Google could learn a few things about beautiful iOS design from Microsoft. You can almost read the mail screen with your eyes closed! The fonts are big and beautiful.
I am a Google School Dropout. I’m actually proud of that fact, and today I’ll tell you why. When I initially received my “exclusive” invitation to take a Google Power Search course for free a week or so ago, I thought it would be a great experience to learn about searching at the great, bended, knee of the Google Gods. When the first class session went live this morning, I aced the Pre-Test and then bottomed out during the subsequent videos. After 10 minutes of interactive foolishness, I dropped the class by quitting the special Google Power Searching Group and removing my email address from future updates.
I grew up a child of the library. I borrowed books. I read books. I researched college research papers. I did it all in my local public library and my campus libraries. The library was the safe haven — the Smart Place — it was a niche where I fit in because I created my own intellectual indentations that nobody else could question unless I decided to share what I was thinking.
Children today don’t have buildings called libraries that mean the same thing to them that it means to people of my generation. Kids today have virtual hangout places like the internets, and if they want to find something to read to reflect upon or research, they just fire up The Google and all their boring inquiries are returned unimagined.
One of the most dangerous things you can ask a person is this: ”What are you thinking?” You’ll either get an honest answer you may or may not like or you’ll get fed a reply the person thinks you want to hear. If you really want to know what’s on America’s mindless minds, just point your web browser over to the new “Google Hot Trends” website and get an eyeful of the mush that is satiating our middling mindsets. Here’s what “Hot” this morning: Sports, Lotteries, Entertaining Abusers, Holidays and Dead Actresses.
In movies and television shows depicting the future, there are flying cars and cars that drive themselves — and sometimes a combination of the two. In the movie Total Recall, for example, there are taxi services that are entirely driven by robots. The promise of the future is that people will no longer have to drive if they don’t wish to do so, and that driving can be a more passive activity to be watched as though it were a form of entertainment of its own.
I’m old enough and just craggy enough to remember the pure disdain medical doctors had for the internets in the early 1990′s when the web was growing by bounds and grabbing the brains of any and every eager mind. The reason doctors hated the internet was because open access to information diluted their expertise by egalitarian dissemination of research and the democratic propagation of information; and they resented it when patients knew more about a drug or a condition than they did. Eager patients are hungry for information and becoming the master of a single pill or a defined diagnosis is much easier than having to worry about every single chemical condition and biological solution studied at medical school. Patients are the masters of their ailments; doctors are the jack of all ills.
We all love fighting a good moral brawl. When Slide stole 3,000 fake money coins from me in April of 2009, I was livid and I wrote about it in the early morning hours of the 23rd:
I enjoy playing Slide.com’s SuperPoke Pets and I’ve raved about SuperPoke Pets and ranted about SuperPoke Pets. Today, I am enraged — not by the game I have come to love — but rather by the lack of an artful and loving Slide.com technical response to what should have been a simple problem to solve. This is the story of a false accusation — an unfair incarceration of character if you will — and its ultimate unraveling in the light of indisputable, human, facts.
After I wrote my article, Google bought Slide for $200 million and recently decided to close down all the Slide games. There is now no more SuperPoke Pets. The game is over. People are furious. I was intrigued that I was mentioned last week in a Facebook comments stream where people are trying to save the game:
I’m going to date myself but bear with me. When I was a kid, long before the age of always on internet service providers, I would get up extra early before going to school to use my 2400 baud modem to connect to Bulletin Board Systems. Two important things to bear in mind here — one of them being that only one person could be using the system at once — hence why I would get up so early. The other thing was that everything was incredibly slow.
In March 2011, I read a story online about the debut of Greplin, a new way of indexing the online nuggets of your life into a fast and easy to sift-through search interface. I immediately signed up for the service on the first payment tier because I believe in paying to support what you love, and I really loved Greplin — for the first day or so — until I began to realize I had a lot of stuff to index and I was already running out of space on the service even thought I just got started.
