"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
Screenshots of Google Notebook, a new personalized search tool/service that is being launched next week, are available on Flickr now (thanks, EricaJoy). While Google may claim that they’re still all about search, Notebook looks like it is Google’s answer to del.icio.us. Another face-off after this week’s challenge to Yahoo! Widgets.
(via TechCrunch)
This could spell disaster for Yahoo! Widgets. In an attempt to differentiate itself from Google, Yahoo! bought Konfabulator in an attempt to work its way into the realm of desktop-based (read browser-devoid) content distribution and of course, searches. However, Google’s come out to play on that front as well. Say hello to Google Gadgets. Technically, this is a marriage of the existing Google Desktop Search and the new Personalized Google Homepage concept (which already has a variety of plugins contributed by individual developers). However, the eye-candy factor with Google Gadgets helps tip the scales in its favor, over Yahoo! Widgets. In fact, this Wired.com article even talks about an online notebook that is being launched by Google sometime next week - a tool that resides on your desktop, and allows you to save or annotate personalized searches, for sharing with family and friends. Its just a matter of time before these new tools integrate homogenously with other Google services, like the community-centric Google Co-op for example, and there’s going to be a really large repository of gadgets to make computing just a little bit simpler.
It was very surprising to learn, from this BBC News article on internet censorship, that web e-mail systems such as Hotmail and Yahoo mail are banned in Burma. Moreover, in what may be termed a murder of privacy, screen grabs are taken (every five minutes) of what people are looking at in net cafes. Almost everyone has heard about The Great Firewall of China, but I didn’t know online censorship is being so keenly implemented even closer to home. Burma, or Myanmar as I should learn to call it, does this for political reasons. The nation runs a large intranet called the Myanmar Wide Web (how quaint), that is a portal of websites that are pre-selected by official military censors. Even worse, all this activity has lead to high subscription rates for internet access , with only about 25,000 people (out of 47.3 million) being able to afford it. This is an inconvenient setting for non-profit technology ventures, such as the (Nicholas Negroponte’s) OLPC initiative.
