The Internet

When recently trying to plan a trip to the airport, I realized that Google has over-optimized their transit directions. I assume much of this is downstream of the Google Maps upgrade announced at the recent IO conference . Or perhaps part of it is that Google’s dogfooders – their own employees using their products in real-world scenarios – don’t take public transit that much.

No one likes being spied on. If you need proof, look no further than the push-back against TSA’s body scanners , concerns about unmanned aerial drones , or the recent clamor over online privacy policy changes .

I get asked this question a lot: What’s the best way to setup a new domain? Unfortunately, the answer has dozens of variations based on what sort of traffic you’re expecting, what kind of Web site you’re running, and what software is running that site. But there is one recommendation that has remained the same for several years: divide or be conquered – put your domain registration, Web hosting, and email hosting with three different companies.

Google ignited a bit of a firestorm when it claimed that Bing was poaching its search results. To test their theory, they baited a honeypot and caught Bing with its hand in the jar.

Yesterday’s ruling by the FCC regarding “Net Neutrality” allows those of us whose livelihood depends on the Internet to breath a very limited sigh of relief. The Good: the FCC upheld the concept of Net Neutrality for broadband connections; the Bad: they didn’t for wireless connections and they may not have the legal basis to enforce their policy over wireline providers.

Recently Cooks Source editor Judith Griggs touched off a maelstrom , not when she lifted other’s material and used it illegally in her magazine – she’s been doing that for years – but when she refused to fess up. I always get questions about what can and cannot be done with material found online, so here’s a quick review of what happened.

I’ve been tossing about the idea of moving some of the sites I host to Amazon Web Services , specifically EC2 (server), S3 and EBS (storage) and CloudFront (content delivery network).  Price was my excuse for not jumping (OK, the real reason is the inevitable pain that comes with moving hosting providers) but with today’s introduction of “Micro” instances, I no longer have that excuse.

AWS now can host my sites for roughly the same price I pay for shared hosting!

It's an oh-so-basic blog feature that's been missing from Blogger since the beginning of time.  Finally, they caught up with the rest of the world and announced they now support static pages .  Until now, poor Blogger users had to hack their templates half to death to build static pages and even then, they would still pop up in your blog's feed and other odd places.

Representatives from Google , Facebook , YouTube and Wikipedia are meeting at the Vatican to help the Church better understand the Internet.  That’s good since the Vatican seemed unable to do a basic Internet search.

Criticisms of Google data aggregation and privacy policies abound.  In hopes of stemming some of that negative press, Google recently announced the Google Dashboard , to “offers a simple view into the data associated with your account.”