Wakeup call for Technorati/Feedburner

27 January 2006 - 12:03

I only recently got into the whole blogging lark. Although I've been knowlegable in the ways of HTML almost as long as I've been using the web (it all came along when I had mountains of spare time at university), I had to learn a whole load of new technology and 'customs' when I relaised that the best way to bring my website alive was to use blogging.

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Google "does evil", MSN nods knowingly

26 January 2006 - 19:06

I never really bought the whole "Do no evil" thing from Google. It just sounds like the kind of thing you come up with when you're 13 years old and you think big companies are evil and bad and you don't want to be like them. You don't want to pay what is effectively minimum wage to the majority of your employees while hyping up how cool it is to work there. So when Microsoft gets slammed for censoring (really just refusing to host - there are plenty of other hosting options available) a Chinese blogger according to state rules there and claims that this is just "the cost of doing business in China", it comes as a great surprise to anyone that Google is under the same pressure when they are trying to do business in China as well? Liberals will say that Google (and MSN) shouldn't do business in China if those are the rules, but as public companies they have a duty to pursue relevent revenue opportunities and although there is a limit to what a responsible company should get involved in, providing web services in China, with all that entails, isn't crossing over that line in my opinion.

Maybe applying state censorship laws on your web services is evil, maybe it isn't, but if you thought to write something like "do no evil" into your company's mission statement, you probably believe it is. In that case I strongly suggest Google quietly removes it, because as a multi-national, they are going to have to do plenty of similarly 'evil' things to compete.

technorati tags (experimental): Google, MSN, Evil

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Review of Napster Subscription Service

21 January 2006 - 14:54

My PC recently suffered yet another harddrive crash (I'm never buying another Maxtor drive) resulting in the loss of about half of my mp3 collection. Although I could rip my own CDs again, I have to admit there was a large number of files there that I, erm, don't have on CD. Since I was also temporarily down on HD space I thought I'd give a music subscription service a go. Napster is only £10 a month (and yet somehow it is also US$10 a month - how does that work?). They also have a free one-week trial.

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