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Goonkie

I coined this word to stand for Google Junkie, because we are now all hopelessly dependent on Google.

Aside from the convenience of its search facilities, fashion has something to do with it too. Several times, someone expressed surprise that I use Yahoo mail instead of Gmail - I have a Gmail account, but only to reserve yuenchungkwong as my Google ID which is needed for other purposes like Google hosted webpages (e.g., yuenchungkwong.googlepages.com - here again I use Yahoo, which I had to pay for, as my main host because of other considerations.), because I dont see any reason to change to a new address and inconvenience people who already know my old address, but no doubt others see this as my not being "with it". Quite possibly, in the back of my mind I had an unwillingness to depend on one company for everything, a reluctance that is apparently shared by others, see www.slate.com/id/2175651/  and scroogle.org

When you log into Google, you can choose to keep the logged in status; this invites Google to put a cookie into your computer containing the log-in information. Google also records your IP address and could recognize you next time from this, though there could be multiple users on the same machine and some ISPs have variable IPs for their client machines so that such recognition is not as reliable.

As you do searches using various words, Google saves all these and builds a file of your activities as indications of things you are interested in, so that it can use these to decide what advertisements to send you with the search results and your Gmail messages. I do not know how hard the system tries in recognizing and classifying everyone, how effective this is, and whether I ought to feel paranoid about it. In any case, I try not to maintain a logged-in status on machines, since you never know when someone else might use the machine and find it possible to read my email.

I have been using Google for many years, without paying much attention to the advertisements it sent me; so I guess I have not been a good customer, but there must be others who are good customers, considering the profits Google has been making. Google thnks it is a good idea to service people like me, so I ought to be equally open minded. Google is innocent till proven guilty.

Google share price has suffered a big tumble over the past two months; the magic has gone out

It is actually not because of Google's own business activities, though there is some drop due to the current recession: compare this with the share price of Apple:

the two have basically gone up and down by the same amount over the past 6 months, while the Dow drifted down as the recession took hold; we are really just seeing investment money running away from the broad market looking for a promising investment story, and tech stocks, with their export earnings less affected by US recession, looked promising, and Apple/Google looking good in particular; the recent tumble reflects a loss of faith rather than loss of business

kausfiles (click title below to go to original source)

Surprise Amnesty Showdown? 

I think I've written about this before, but those little Google ads are cropping up again next to searches about "Hillary Clinton"**--the ads that say:

Clinton's girl friends Could 'mischief-maker' Bill damage Hillary's presidential campaign? www.thefirstpost.co.uk

Why are these ads significant? 1) They seem to me to be surprisingly effective as a way of spreading dirt. 2) They seem to represent a surprisingly large hole in the campaign finance laws. After all, they are advertisements for a publication. They aren't campaign expenditures. They're simply telling potential customers about an article, which just happens to be an article spreading scandal about the Clintons. In the same way, ads for some Michael Moore films just happen to undermine George Bush. But, unlike Michael Moore films, the enterprise these Google ads are promoting is itself typically exempted from the campaign finance regime under the so-called "media exemption." So why doesn't some unabashedly non-neutral rich person buy up a lot of media properties--and then start spending tens of millions on ads promoting "scoops" that just happen to damage candidates the rich person opposes? Ron Burkle may be on to something. (Murdoch too, of course.) ... The upshot (I think): Attempts to control so-called 'independent' expenditures are doomed. Even if they're misguidedly upheld by the Supreme Court they will increasingly be seen as irrational and unfair, thanks to loopholes like this one. ...

**--They also apparently pop up in gmails that discuss Hillary. Cunning! ... 10:21 A.M. link

G-phones

Apple and Google have both ventured into the phone business, but with quite different objectives in mind. Apple wants everyone to carry its portable entertainment unit and the best way is to have it as part of a phone, since almost everybody carries one these days. Google wants to control everyone's communication mechanisms.

Right now I am in Mountain View California, where Google has its headquarters. I am using my daughter's computers, which does not have broadband access through a phone or cabletv company as is usually the case, but uses the free wifi provided by Google throughout San Francisco. To get this, she paid $50 to Dell to buy a wireless modem with the computer, and saves herself about $50 a month in connection fee; that is, Google has deprived some company a considerable amount of income with its free wifi.

Soon, you would be able to connect to Google's wireless signals through your phone, provided it has the Google phone functional specs programmed into it, so that you no longer need to pay a phone company (would the Google connection be free? I wonder..) After that, I assume Google would specify a G-television protocol, so that TV sets with this functionality would be able to link up with the Google signals and access television programmes provided through Google servers.

To provide this free wifi service, Google has to make arrangements with a mobile phone company to use its wave bandwidth; phone companies get the right to use a particular part of the spectrum from Federal Communication Commission (equivalent of Singapore's Telecommunication Authority). It would be relatively simple to set up a phone or TV service in San Francisco, but doing this across the country would be a more difficult operation, since not all the regional carriers would take up the idea.