The Google Empire.

Sure, we're all going to die. Google has reported its first quarterly drop in sales. OMG! It is also, however, accompanied by a more-than-pocket-change $17.8billion in cash and equivalents...

But I'm not here to talk about their overly boring financial statements, as interesting as some may find that, I'm here to talk about what I've dubbed the "Google Collective Principle". In my mind, it consists of a series of ever more complex statements effectively summarising people's behaviour with Google through my eyes. For your benefit, here is the biggest foundation of my principle in simpler terms: "Anyone who uses a Google service is incredibly likely to continue using other Google services".

Just to be clear, i'm not suggesting that using Google search will make you into an active Google advertiser. What I'm saying is similar to handing someone one end of a piece of string. Eventually, they're going to get mighty curious about what's on the other end and work their way down the string.
What I'm trying to prove here is that once someone starts dabbling in Google, even just for Gmail (but it's not the best example) they are probably going to wind up heading further into Google products. Who knows whether it is a benign curiosity, an overwhelming desire to have an online presence or what, but someone like Google having services for everything and anything gives rise to an explosion in the services used. Google's dominance over Yahoo! and Microsoft helps, but also the differing approach between Yahoo! (everything on one page, whether you like it or not, and loads of ads) and Google (autonomous services, each with a Google touch, and only minimal ads) stands out.

For example, Yours Truly has had a Google account (but not a Gmail one) since about 2005. Since then, i have replaced that with my current Google profile  and it accompanied an explosion in the Google Services I use from a simple Gmail account and iGoogle page, then Google Reader, then the floodgates opened and suddenly I had almost every service they offer. On my account settings page, I now have icons for :
1. AdSense
2. Blogger
3. Calendar
4. Gmail
5. Picasa Web Albums
6.Web History
7. Alerts
8. Bookmarks
9. Docs
10. iGoogle
11. Reader
12. Webmaster Tools
13. Analytics
14. Book Search
15. FeedBurner
16. Notebook
17. Talk
18. Youtube
19. News

Yes, 19 different services. In case you're wondering, Google has only 4 remaining services, being Groups, Directory, Scholar Search and Code. I even use Google Mobile!

This blog is the perfect example of my Google Collective Principle. First, I saw a couple of other people's blogs, and decided I wanted my own. So, already having a Google account, I chose Blogger. My Blog of course needed some tracking, so after my disastrous attempt using StatCounter, I reverted to Google Analytics, which is truly legendary, then I wanted to track my RSS feed, cue FeedBurner, indexing management, cue WebMaster Tools, picture integration, cue Picasa, and if I could be bothered I would have AdWords on my blog by now.

Feel free to comment and tell me I'm horribly, horribly wrong, but I still think that the Google Collective Principle stands...

A little Off-topic...

This vid is not very technological. Okay, it's not at all, but it is brilliant video anyway.




Truly amazing!

Yeah okay, so it was only a publicity stunt for some reality TV show, but nobody cares, everyone just loves the video, and i'm one of them...

Now for a bit more off-topic rant on that most favoured of philosophical conversations. Internet sociology. And as an example, so-called viral videos are an amazing concept alone. Not only do they implicate that humans are in fact connected to a lot more people than it seems, but they must be, in all honesty, the fastest spreading anything. Like, i'm talking living, or otherwise. Take the 'Rick Roll' phenomenon, one of the longest-lasting, most widespread, and best remembered of the virals. It lasted for many months upon months, caught god-knows-how-many people and introduced a whole new phrase into the lexicon.
This particular one is likely to join some of the other virals, as a short-lived, quickly-forgotten, but much-loved memory. But look at the speeds involved. The actual incident was on the 23 March, less than a month ago, in Antwerp. It is going to take some time for all the various footage to come together and be released, so now we are talking weeks, but coming out of the editing room (which is just as likely to be some guys room in the basement of his mum's house), it would simply be a file floating around the Net. Another couple of days for it to be discovered, it catches on, and then FOOOOOM!! It explodes across every popular channel on the Net and otherwise, and becomes part of the illustrious "viral league".

Quick word on the first issue, which ties into this incredible speed, is the breadth of its expansion. Sure, it takes a lot for a video to make the jump from Internet sensation to cross-media phenomenon, but some have done it. Even if we deal with these Internet-only vids, there is still an incredible amount of people involved. Just looking at the first 6 or so videos, just off YouTube, I have come up with a juicy 2,525,214 views. Yes, 2 and a half million. Admittedly, some will be repeat views, but they would only make a small amount, and on the larger scale, that's a lot of people. More than 10% (12.02% to be vaguely accurate) of the population of Australia, for example...

And that's just the first page of one video host. I would put my guess at the larger side of 5 million, once you have all the main video sites rounded up. And, as such, it deserves the title of viral...

Come on Aussie!

Australia has now slipped to a lowly 4th on visitor rankings for this month! (Mar 17-Apr 17)
We only have 8 more visitors than Romania. Yes, Romania. We are lagging behind the USA, UK, and Canada.

Returning to the full history (since about December last year), Australia maintains its second position, but we are falling behind rapidly.

Yes, my Aussie friends, the Americans are demolishing us by a solid 50%, and Canada is breathing down our collective necks with a miniscule 1.89% buffer.

At least we still have 11.36% on Mexico....

For now...

Portable World : Part 1

Announcing a new (and hopefully recurring) segment to FerretTech : Portable World
I will (somewhat) regularly report on what's happening in Portable Gaming, Computing and Communications.

First up is today's topic: Portable Gaming.

Portable Gaming has positively exploded in a few short years. With the release of ever better and smaller GameBoys, then the DS, Apple's App Attack, and of course, Sony's heavenly PSP.

It is no secret that I think the PSP is the best by far, especially in its latest PSP-3000 guise. Nintendo has also been improving on their success with the new DSi (which has controversially dumped the old Gameboy cartridge slot!)

But there is one thing i want to focus on and that is the Apple products : The iPod touch and iPhone (which i can't be bothered typing out twenty times, so if you see iPhone, chances are i'm talking about both...)

Everyone has been talking about how it is the new king of portable gaming. But, as i see it, it's not even part of portable gaming. About as advanced as gaming gets on the iPhone is Air Traffic Control (legendary!), as opposed to the PSP's headliners like Resistance:Retribution (even more legendary!) and MGS Portable Ops etc etc.
Sure, an iPhone is a good enough all-rounder when it comes to portable gaming, communications, connectivity etc. But saying it is a good Gaming machine is absolute crap. A PSP is a gaming machine, a DSi is a gaming machine, but an iPhone is not!

And that brings my first Portable World post to an end.

Now that is out of the way, let me explain why a PSP will always be better than anything Nintendo can throw at the DS.
1. PSP's are powerful. 333MHz in a device that fits in your pocket! That's pretty impressive. Up until recently, most PSP games (which are technological masterpieces in their own way) have only usually used 222 MHz. I don't actually know the exact figure for a DS, but i know it is less.

2. PSP's can do anything. They play video, they play music, they show photos, they play games, they browse the internet, and given some eggs, and a whisk, i'm sure they could whip up a damn fine omelette, too!
Yes, there are better ways of watching videos, there are better ways of listening to music, there are (probably) better ways of looking at photos (someone once described the PSP as the modern-day 6x4 print), but there is nothing else that can do all of these, and definitely nothing that can do all of these as well as the PSP...

3. PSP's are supported. Apart from Sony's brilliant team sitting in a dungeon somewhere constantly making little tiny variations to improve the PSP, third parties everywhere are jumping on the PSP. From hacking and downgrading to themes and downloadable wallpapers, you can make a PSP do whatever you feel like with a little digging on the Net, which you can do straight from the PSP.

There are plenty of other reasons, but that would run the risk of RSI from the furious rage-typing so i'm gonna leave it at that...

The Broswer Wars continue...

After some positive starts from Google Chrome, it seems its support is dwindling somewhat. Firefox meanwhile has managed to stay pretty much the same while IE seems to have been gaining support.

At least on Ferret Tech Firefox/Windows still reigns, but we have some very weird setups going, including PS3's, what i think is my PSP, Konqueror (?), and all and every kind of weird Browswer/OS combo

Yes, you poor buggers, Chrome sits on a miserly 8.5% of my visits while Firefox romps home with a solid 55.36% majority. IE has made a big jump forward (BTW, 19% use IE6, 73% use IE7, and a random 7% use IE8. n00bs!) leapfrogging Chrome into second position with 17.6%.

Peculiarly, focusing on just Browsers (rather than Browser/OS combos) sees Firefox pull out 66% of the share, but IE and Chrome staying almost the same.

But of more interest are some of the weird choices. I've mentioned the Playstation 3/Playstation 3 entry but then we get some really odd Apple entries. The typical Safari/Macintosh ones sitting in a lonely 6th behind Firefox/Macinstosh! The we have Safari/Android? Who has an Android phone?

While on the topic of phones, what on Earth is a Danger Hiptop? Don't tell me it's that stupid little Hiptop Slide piece of cr** actually looking at my blog!

There was Firefox/Linux (probably Jackson), but Konqueror/Linux? Who? Why? What's wrong with you?

Safari/iPod. Yay! I have someone reading my blog who also happens to be such an iPod fanboy they couldn't be bothered using a real Web browser.

Camino/Macintosh? What even is Camino?

Mozilla Compatible Agent/(not set). i think that is my PSP there, but not so sure. If you're wondering, yes, the PSP's NetFront browser does run on the Mozilla engine/code.

PS3! Yay! Yay! Lots of Yay! PS3's will rule the world. (as long as we don't begin calling the PS3 the Skynet)

Safari/Windows... You're using Windows so use a real browser, idiot!

And last but not least. Safari/iPhone. oh my god, my life has just lost all colour and meaning....

UPDATE: RSS feeds are now delimited and complete reflections of the posts again.

Breaking news (and associated attitude): the NBN!

(Okay, so it's still breaking for me!)

Our favourite Prime Minister (God help us all) Kevin Rudd has announced that after all the tenders were in... He just ditched the whole thing.

The Government has abandoned all the registered tenders and decided to build their own, supposedly using private investment. Good luck with that, seeing as you kind of sunk us even deeper into a deep Global Financial Crisis....

After several consortiums spent millions upon countless millions putting together proposals, (fine, Telstra saved the cash and went to the pub instead), and then the Government spent countless millions setting the whole thing up, and checking the consortiums, Krudd decided to just ditch them all and "run with it".

So now the Government is somehow going to muster up enough cash from private investors (could've done with those $900 cheques, hey?) to lay fibre optic cable to "90%" of the population.
Hang on! 90% of the population get Broadband?90% of the population also happen to live in all the major coastal cities who happen to have broadband coming out their ears, yazoo, arse and just about every other bodily orifice. So why exactly are we spending all this money on laying fibre optic cable up to houses who don't need it. Hmmmmm...

Technologically speaking, he is promising all kinds of great Nirvana-like improvements, but without anything to really back it up. This plan has been cooking since the Howard days, but nobody has really sussed out how exactly they're going to do it. Now with the Government doing it, there's a bit of a mystery as to who will control, charge, and/or maintain the system. he's claiming up to 100kb/sec, which in the grand scheme of things, isn't that much.

Oh well, at least now i can add another wannabe to the list of people trying to get us to buy their internet connection. Meh...

Stupid twit...

As any of you who actually visit my blog may've noticed, i've added a new widget! An online petition against Labor's proposed internet filter. I first saw the widget on Hugh's Blog, and decided to drop it on mine also.

As for the filter, i first saw it many, many months (probably verging on years) ago, when there was a bit of a flurry with news articles, online petitions, and even public debates. But then it disappeared for a while, until now. ABC's Q&A, SBS's Insight, and countless other publications of every sort have gotten back on poor Conroy's ass.

But ignoring the media circus, i want to deal with the actual proposal. Created under the ideals of cracking down on pedophilia, euthanasia, and anorexia sites, Labor's Senator Stephen Conroy has failed miserably.

Lets look at a couple of unmissable truths:

1. It's pointless. It will not slow down the spread of internet child porn. Think about what it covers. It covers pages on the Web, period. No coverage of peer-to-peer networks, no coverage of FTP, newsgroups, torrents, nothing else. There is no doubting that there is child porn on the internet, the problem is that it is also in so many other areas. And any system that is complaint-based (that is, it is only blacklisted once someone actually complains to ACMA that it should be) will never get any large proportion of inappropriate sites.

2. It's going to backfire. It is technologically impossible to filter out all the nasty websites, but no good ones. You either end up barricading a glass of water with 6-inch concrete, or you hold back a dam with a paper-mache balloon. My bet is on it doing a bit of both. There have already been reports of people's business websites being blocked by the ACMA list without even knowing! Chances are my site could be blocked because now it has the words 'child porn' in it.

3. It's impractical beyond belief. How on earth are you going to place a server-side filter on the ISP feeds and not slow down the internet, or raise costs, or any number of other problems. And you will never be able to effectively stop any and all internet traffic. My estimate is on around 30 seconds for someone like myself, 5-6 seconds for a trained pro, maybe 10 minutes for someone with out any tech experience, and they will have bypassed the filters. Two main reasons for this. One, other filtered countries like China, Korea, Iran etc have already got a nice semi-black market running in unblocking sites.

Second problem, is the legitimate stuff like, secure data connections used for remote access to business servers etc. Given a little time, this could be easily adapted to the task, and thanks to the heavy encryption, and secure transmission methods, there is no way the Govt could know if it's child porn, financial figures, or a Google Image Search.

4. How? Linked to above is the rather large issue of how to do it.

Technologically, there are two options: Regular URL filtering, or content analysis.

First one never works at actually limiting child porn since there are gazillions (yes, gazillions) of pages on the Net, and URL filtering is also fairly easily bypassed.
Content analysis works by checking every page as it loads. Similarly useless for a couple of reasons, such as the speed. If you have to check every page, it's going to get mighty slow. Also, it doesn't know context. It could block the medical sites because they have a bit too much exposed flesh. Or block news pages, blogs etc. because they have the word child porn in it...

That'll do for now, but if you want to have a real debate, e-mail me or check the chat room below. But be warned, it could get very heated indeed if i get into it...