Articles in “April 2008” from Datamation Blog

It looks like the Bush administration's effort to accidentally-on-purpose lose thousands of White House emails will pay off.

With only months remaining in Bush's second term, it's highly unlikely congressional investigators will get anywhere in trying to force the administration to produce the missing messages, especially as legislators fan out across the country this summer and fall to campaign for reelection and to support pandering, ineffective feel-good measures like a gas-tax holiday. (Had enough, OPEC, or shall we turn the screws some more?)

Anyone following this long-running saga can conclude only that either 1) The White House IT operation was comically incompetent, or 2) There was something devious and underhanded going on. Of course, if seven years of experience has shown us anything, these options hardly are mutually exclusive for this crew.

Here are some highlights from an excellent article on Ars Technica:

When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.

"Did not immediately have a new one to put in its place." Sounds like a war plan I know.

Now we segue from incompetence to something more...

[D]ue to a lack of redundancy and proper access controls, anyone with access to the White House servers could have tampered with or deleted the e-mails in the archives. And without adequate logging facilities, there might be no way to determine who might have tampered with the files or what might have been changed.

How very, very unfortunate -- for investigators! Continuing...

[T]here is also evidence that some senior Bush administration officials have taken to using non-government e-mail accounts as a way to skirt the requirements of federal law. For example, the National Journal has reported that while Karl Rove was working in the White House, he used an outside account provided by the Republican party for "about 95 percent" of his correspondence.

Hmm. Another way of saying "about 95 percent" would be "almost all."

Infuriating as it is, the Ars Technica piece provides a good overview of the White House's foot-dragging and obfuscation over the missing emails.

 

Heads up that our man James Maguire is on the scene at the Mandalay Bay convention center in Las Vegas for the big Interop trade show.

 

Maguire, Datamations managing editor, has filed his first report from the cavernous Mandalay Bay, and he brings a lively touch to the proceedings:  

The event is mis-named, in a sense. Its called Interop, short for interoperability, suggesting that these vendors want to play well with others. Well, kind of. In the hyper-competitive tech market, each vendor strives to interop with certain players while tossing a stiff elbow in the eye of others. Does VMware really want to be interoperable with Xensource? Thats like saying the New York Giants hope to partner with the New England Patriots.

The sight of all these vendors with booths side by side in the Mandalay Bay convention center highlights what a merciless business this is. There are too many players here for everyone to survive. And besides, technology devours itself like some constantly ravenous creature.

I dont know if James has covered this show before -- its been around for more than 20 years -- back when it was called Networld+Interop, (pronounced N plus I by the technorati). Back then, it was at the Las Vegas Convention Center, far from the Strip, not at the Mandalay Bay, which of course is nestled in next to the Luxor, which sports the giant laser shooting up into the heavens, which can allegedly be seen by the Space Shuttle (a cabbie once told me.)

 

I have no idea how bad the cab lines are at the Mandalay Bay, but back in the day, 1.5-hour to 2-hour cab lines were not uncommon for N + I. It was great fun back then observing the cab lines and watching the little teams of similarly dressed vendor reps wilt in the heat outside the convention center.

 

At least with the Mandalay Bay, youve potentially got options if transportation is horrific. You might be able to sneak out to Mandalays labyrinth of swimming pools, and maybe even make it over to the big wave pool, where you can body surf a 1-foot wave, then get out, collapse on a lounge chair and suck down a huge Pina Colada. Then head upstairs to your room to write your stories for that day.

 

Lets hope Maguire keeps the Interop tradition alive. Check back to Datamation.com for his reports from the show.

  

Yes, we all know Google makes a fantastic search engine, one so popular it's become a commonly used verb. And we understand that Google is the most successful Internet company in the world, not just because of search, but also because of popular services such as Google Earth, Google Analytics, YouTube, Gmail and many others.

However, not everything churned out by the vast Google complex achieves, shall we say, an indisputable standard of excellence. One example I pointed out recently is Google's Web Accelerator. This downloadable software promises users a faster browsing experience. Yet I've had it installed on two different computers for nearly a month, and the performance data indicates I've "saved" a measly 45 minutes total in browser download time.

Then there's Google AdSense, the program that offers thousands and thousands of bloggers everywhere the opportunity to front Google their miniscule share of ad revenue until it amounts to $100 in, say, seven years.

The one that's been annoying me lately is Google News. I use it as my home page on my personal computer, but I may be shopping around for a replacement. My complaint? Stale headlines. I logged on this morning, and what am I greeted with?

Wesley Snipes to serve 3 years in prison for tax convictions

Bad news for Mr. Snipes, old news for the rest of us. The sentencing came down last Thursday, or four whole days ago. Yet that headline shows up this morning on the top screen of Google News like it's a breaking story. 

It seems like the problem is getting worse, especially with election coverage. Judging by Google News last week, Sen. Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Pennsylvania primary four days in a row.  (Which means, of course, that she'll want the results to count four times.)

Someone at Google needs to tweak the auto-generation tool that freshens Google News before things degenerate further. I don't want to wake up one day to find out that the Hindenburg has crashed.

 

Microsoft has certainly hit the headlines recently, capped off by another hugely profitable quarter, announced this week.

 

Mix that in with the ongoing Yahoo-Microsoft saga and the huge European Union fine levied in February, and youve got a perfect Microsoft storm.

 

But the story that really caught my eye -- and probably is of most interest to the IT crowd -- was about Steve Ballmer and Windows XP. The Microsoft CEO was in Belgium this week, where he offered a glimmer of hope to Windows XP fans, saying the software giant may reconsider its decision to stop selling it soon.

 

Fans of XP have plastered the Internet with blogs, cartoons, and petitions. They loudly proclaim XPs superiority to Vista, which was released to consumers in January to lukewarm reviews. About 160,000 people have already signed a Save XP Web petition. They want Microsoft to continue selling it until the next Windows version is released, scheduled for 2010.

 

Its been a long grind for Vista. I remember in 2003, when Microsoft was coming around to companies and showing off the numerous (and labyrinthine) security features of the new operating system.

 

Vista had a long beta period, and we all had hopes that the new OS would not be bloated beyond belief, and that Microsoft would take extra special care to make sure it worked with things like older printers. I didnt have much hope for either of those wishes, based on the early presentations. Sadly, neither wish came true, as we all know now.

 

Im avoiding Vista for as long as I can and I applaud the save-XP efforts. After that, maybe Ill finally take the Ubuntu plunge, as my colleague James Maguire recently did. Meanwhile, Ill wait for 2010 to see how Microsoft will (probably) overstuff the next OS with so much bloatware that well dream of the old Vista days.  

 

Many IT professionals wouldn't think of doing anything else for work. Through good times and bad, IT is what they live and breathe.

But as outsourcing of IT jobs becomes more prevalent -- and as downsizing becomes more likely in this slumping economy -- some IT professionals are considering career changes. But how do you make your geek skills transferable to other fields?

A new book attempts to answer that question. Debugging Your Information Technology Career is written by career counselor and former programmer/developer Janice Weinberg, who has identified 20 careers in which computer proficiency is an important skill. Among the examples cited in the book's press release:

Global procurement project manager
Technology due diligence officer
Cyberliability insurance broker or underwriter
Equity analyst, technology sector
Attorney specializing in computer law

Clearly if you're looking to bust out of the humdrum world of IT to try something bold and exciting, well, that option ain't on this list. (Maybe Weinberg's publicists are reserving sexier categories such as "crimefighter" and "geek porn star" for the paying book customers.) That aside, the book does promise readers "job-hunting techniques tailored to specific fields, including guidance in identifying employers and determining the most relevant aspects of their experience to highlight in their resumes, cover letters, and interviews."

I hate to keep criticizing mega-ISP Comcast -- life, after all, is unfair enough for our major corporations. But it's hard to let this one by without comment:

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin on Tuesday told Congress it appears that Comcast used technology that completely blocks certain traffic, like peer-to-peer file sharing.

Martin's testimony contradicted claims by Comcast. The head of the Federal Communications Commission  told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that cable subscribers do not have the freedom to do what they want on the Internet.

Well, not yet, anyway. Still, there's plenty of time for a White House executive order.

According to this Reuters article published on internetnews.com, the FCC chair testified that "Comcast had used a 'blunt' technique to impose broad restrictions on peer-to-peer file sharing."...

"Contrary to some claims, it does not appear that this technique was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time," Martin said in prepared remarks.

The FCC is looking into complaints from consumer groups that cable operator Comcast has unreasonably blocked or hindered some file-sharing services, such as BitTorrent, that distribute TV shows and movies.

You know those consumer groups, always jumping the gun. All kidding aside, here's a perfectly reasonable  explanation for why, in the words of Martin, "some users were not able to upload anything they wanted and were unable to fully use certain file-sharing software.":

Comcast, which has more than 13 million broadband subscribers, has denied impairing some applications and has said it merely managed the system to deal with network congestion for the good of all users.

For the good of all users. Comcast, maybe I had you all wrong.

Todays a big day in Silicon Valley, earnings-wise, because its time for Yahoo to show its hand.

 

Theres a lot at stake when the struggling Internet pioneer reports quarterly earnings today at 2 p.m. Pacific Time. For the past two months, Yahoo has said its online advertising business has been cruising along, despite a shaky U.S. economy. The company has pointed to that strength to resist Microsofts takeover bid of $31 a share.

 

In January, Yahoo forecasted first quarter ad sales in the range of $1.28 billion to $1.32 billion, according to Thomson Financial. If Yahoo beats those numbers, especially if it shoots far beyond them, the Redmond behemoth would face pressure to up its offer.

 

Googles unexpectedly huge earnings last week - net income of $1.31 billion -- also reinforced investors faith in Yahoo. Thats another factor in whether Microsoft feels pressure to pretty up its bid.

 

Meanwhile, News Corp is still mulling a hand in the Yahoo deal, Reuters reported.

 

For coverage of Yahoos earning today, check Internetnews.com. 

 

 

Over at internetnews.com, my colleague Andy Patrizio covered an event that never was at Stanford University:

What if someone held a debate and only one side showed up? The likely result is what happened here Thursday on the campus of Stanford University, where a bunch of people sat around mostly agreeing with each other.

To be sure, there were some differences of opinion in this debate on Net neutrality, sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission. But they were minor compared to the fireworks that would have ensued had the Internet Service Providers showed up.

Absolutely true. And being the target of the fireworks on behalf of the ISPs must be an unpleasant experience. Not to mention a pointless experience, since debate isn't what the ISPs have in mind at all. They just want to lobby net neutrality into extinction. Clearly they're not interested in a public debate. Otherwise, they'd show up at the, you know, debate.

To be fair, ISP representatives have appeared at other FCC forums. As Patrizio writes, "Comcast did participate at a similar public hearing at Harvard Law School earlier this year." But that one didn't go so well, as Valleywag recounts:

The Harvard hearing, a rare outside-the-Beltway event, ended disastrously for all involved. The hearing had many more attendees than were expected, with the room running out of space well before the hearing began.

For a boring FCC hearing? How could this be? Oh yeah, now I remember:

Comcast flacks confessed they'd paid people off the street to act as seatwarmers.

Like these public-spirited citizens. Suggestion to Comcast: If you ever decide to do another public hearing, implement a tiered payment structure for hired audience members and be willing to pay more for wakefulness. That flat fee's not working for you.

 

Theres a lively debate over at Slashdot regarding the practice of borrowing a Wi-Fi stream that is not your own.

 

According to the post:  

Despite the fact that it's often considered an illegal act, a sizeable percentage of the UK/US internet-using population borrows unsecured Wi-Fi access. This is according to a study conducted by the group Accenture. The Accenture study found that computer users are still engaging in some unsafe computing practices. Nearly half of all respondents said that they used the same password for all of their online accounts, and only a quarter of them have ever encrypted files on their computers. 

The geeks go at it in the Slashdot comment section. Lots of snarky comments like: This just in: People on the internet steal stuff they should pay for.

 

The greater truth is, the nitty-gritty details of wireless access -- and other areas of computing -- are still too complicated for most people. Configuring your wireless router or adding wireless security can be a pain in the ass. I have two wireless networks in my house, which might make me sound like an uber geek, but its not true. Ive never configured the routers. I dont know how secure they are. I dont know why I cant connect sometimes.  When I cant, I go with the old IT support standby: reboot.

 

The computers and the printers arent networked together. Actually, the three printers in the house currently arent working. (Until I get around to fixing them, I drive to Kinkos to print something.)

 

I have a vague idea, but I dont really know what all the different wireless letters mean. G, B, etc. And I cover technology for a living. In light of how challenging all this is, I can see borrowing a neighbors Wi-Fi signal.

 

Now, having said that, some day Ill probably end up with a hacker neighbor. Hell glom onto my network. Then, in a creepy, stalker-ish way, hell let me know hes on my network, as described by this Slashdot writer: 

I came across an unsecured network with strong signal a while ago. Turned out to be someone across the street. They had 4 Windows systems attached, with C: drives shared, unprotected. I also found a shared printer on their network.

I warned them by printing a page on that shared printer, identifying myself and describing the problem. Next day the access point was secure.  

 

You are an idiot. So starts a great column over at Datamation.com on dealing with IT bullies.

 

Eric Spiegel penned the column. Hes CEO and co-founder of XTS, which provides software for planning, managing and auditing Citrix and other virtualization platforms, but he has the soul of a writer. Following his idiot  line, Spiegel writes:

 

That was how I was greeted on an already gloomy, rainy Monday morning. I had just spent the weekend trying to help my team troubleshoot a production problem, missing a family event and getting little sleep. While I had ultimately resolved the problem, it was pretty apparent I wasnt going to be showered with accolades.

 

The lovely human being who greeted me that morning was our VP of software development, Dirk. At least Im pretty sure he was human.

The column has dredged up memories from many of us, and it inspired hundreds of comments at Slashdot.org and also at Jupitermedias own discussion forum. Dirk sounds like a piece of work, the kind of lovely folks most of us have dealt with in the past. Luckily for us, Spiegel keeps his sense of humor and his interest in good TV:

[Dirk] continued to berate me. Your support team doesnt have a fracking clue, so you must not either. I wish he had really said fracking because then I could have explored our potential inner-geek connection and diverted our discussion to that weekends Battlestar Galactica episode, where frack is truly used as a cuss word. We could have joked about he must be a Cylon, thus confirming my thought he was not human. 

A survey of IT managers shows that wireless and RF mobile tech skills may be the ticket for IT workers looking to advance their careers, or maybe even keep their jobs.

Commissioned by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), the survey of more than 3,500 IT managers in 14 countries confirmed that wireless essentially will be the global IT language. IT managers in 12 of the 14 countries surveyed rated wireless skills as increasing the most in importance over the next five years. Wireless ranked second in only South Africa (where security skills were rated tops) and France (led by Web-based technologies).

The countries where wireless skills were expected to become most important in the next five years are Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Other data from the survey:

• The three IT skills rated as most important now -- security, general networking and operating systems -- "are expected to decline most in importance over the next five years."

The latter two I can see, but I don't understand how security skills will ever diminish in importance, especially since another survey finding shows that:

• IT managers consider security skills to have the widest "gap" between "reported proficiency" and "importance."

Maybe everybody will just give up.

It's almost sad the way Yahoo has been careening around the tech world in the past few weeks looking for any way possible to subvert Microsoft's unsolicited takeover attempt. The sagging search and information portal reminds me of a woman frantically trying to get out of an arranged marriage to an odious suitor.

First Yahoo refused to take Microsoft's calls. Then it outright rejected Redmond's offer. Then it said the engagement ring was too small. Then Yahoo started going out drinking and looking for a hook-up with someone, anyone -- News Corp., Google, AOL, Pete Doherty -- to head off the Big Day.

Talk about desperate. But according to technology analysis and relationship adviser Gartner, the loutish lothario in Redmond is the truly desperate party in this high-stakes romantic drama.

From Computerworld:

Calling the situation "untenable" and describing Windows as "collapsing," a pair of Gartner analysts yesterday said Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been.

In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts.

Translation for Microsoft: You never listen, you're fat and there are better catches out there, mister. Back to the article:

Among Microsoft's problems, the pair said, is Windows' rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it virtually impossible to quickly craft a new version with meaningful changes. That was proved by Vista, they said, when Microsoft -- frustrated by lack of progress during the five-year development effort on the new operating -- hit the "reset" button and dropped back to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 as the foundation of Vista.

Did we mention that you're fat? And your wardrobe -- my God, it's five years out of style!

Tough words to take, no doubt. Still, Yahoo itself clearly is past its prime, so the Yang gang's "hard to get" act eventually (if not sooner) should give way to sober reality.

Youth will be served, and maybe youth really isnt wasted on the wrong people, if you dont mind a mashup of clich?s.

 

Jupitermedias ace reporter, Jennifer Zaino, hammers home the youth theme in her latest two-part story Young Guns Driving Semantic Web (Part 1, Part 2). Zaino takes an in-depth look at how three young technologists are using semantic web tools in new ways, ranging from the financial world to social networks.

 

One of fascinating young programmers profiled by Zaino is Jennifer Golbeck, who is in her first year as a faculty member in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.

 

Cited in 2006 by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of the 10 top young scientists in artificial intelligence, the 31-year old Golbeck is one of the all-too-few women taking recent semantic web leadership roles, [Dr. James A.] Hendler says. Her thesis was the start of her work on social networks and the semantic web, revolving around the concept of how you apply trust in social networks -- a critical factor in determining the validity of sources in the web of data. She built a movie recommendation system that used predictive recommendations about which movie you might like based on averaging how much the movie was liked by other people you trusted within the social network she created. And it worked.

 Golbeck is a pioneer in computer science, Zaino writes later in the feature:

 

In computer science, women are a tiny fraction, not even 10 percent, she says, often a result of the fact that boys are encouraged early on to play around with computers, video games, and so on. So, by the time they get to undergrad programs, they already have some experience in lightweight programming that a lot of girls dont have.

So you get into classes where they are supposed to introduce the material, but most of the guys have some experience and so they skip over some of the stuff. Thats really discouraging, she says. And, if you get discouraged, you might be more apt to find a major thats more comfortable for you.

Shes working to change that, with plans to introduce dedicated semantic web classes not from the computer science perspective but from the distributed information management perspective that fits into the model of the information studies school, where majors include masters of library science and information management. For those kind of people the semantic web is just a perfect idea, she says. The most exciting part is taking all this distributed information thats all over the web in a form that people cant handle, and being able to do really exciting things with it. These are the people who would be most interested in this and receptive to solving this part of the problem.

Zaino also profiles Christian Halaschek-Wiener, chief technical officer at a startup in the San Francisco Bay Area within the financial domain, and Aditya Kalyanpur, who is working at IBM TJ Watson Research Center on an exciting project that aims to solve one of the main barriers to the adoption of Semantic Web technologies."

One of our IT Management sites, ITSM Watch, has just launched a new blog. But before your eyes glaze over -- "yeah, yeah, just what the world needs, another blog" -- this one really is worth a look.

It's written by Sharon Taylor, and if you know anything about IT Service Management and ITIL, hers should be a very familiar name indeed. Sharon is the Chair of itSMF International, the organization whose mission is to ensure the global growth and governance of ITSMF in more than 40 countries. She is the Chief Architect and Examiner for ITIL? (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), the IT Service Management best practices framework for managing IT infrastructure.

Sharon also is the author of numerous books on IT Service Management, including her latest, The Official Introduction of the ITIL Service Lifecycle, and, of course, is the chief architect of ITIL V3, released last year.

A longtime ITSM practitioner in Canada, Sharon is president of the Aspect Group, an ITSM training and consultancy practice based in Ontario, with clients on three continents.

We're very excited to have Sharon contributing her thoughts and insights to our pages. If you're interested in learning more about ITSM and ITIL, there isn't a better teacher around. You can find Sharon's first post here.

With YouTube casting a huge shadow on the market, Yahoo has announced that its taking a major step in personal online video. Subscribers of Yahoos Flickr can now post short clips to the site -- a welcome addition to a photo service that has attracted a loyal following.

 

Yahoo bought the photo-sharing site about three years ago and didnt do much with it at first. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company first needed to shut down another photo site, Yahoo Photo. The consolidation is paying off, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle:

 

Flickr's monthly unique visitors grew 55 percent to 42 million in February from the same month a year earlier, according to comScore Media Metrix, making it a notable Yahoo success amid ample turmoil. The Sunnyvale company is floundering financially and is the target of an increasingly tense unsolicited takeover by Microsoft Corp.

The big question is this: Will thousands of users post videos on Flickr, or will YouTube continue to dominate? Only time will tell, but I think when a site like YouTube becomes such a cultural phenom, its hard to keep up with that. It will take a monumental effort to get Flickr anything close to that level.

 

Yahoo has other plans for Flickr, as Ive written about in the past. Yahoo Research Berkeley recently showed off two cool applications, ZoneTag and Zurfer. These mobile-phone apps use your social and spatial context to support and enhance key user tasks on the mobile device. They intelligently help you capture, upload, tag, view, and search for photos on your mobile device (most likely your cell phone), minimizing requirements on explicit input and user attention.

 

ZoneTag and Zurfer are part of the next-generation of data-linking apps. This new arena is often called the semantic web or Web 3.0. For more on this expanding field, check out Jupitermedias Semanticweb.com site, and also peruse the planned keynote addresses at this springs Linked Data Planet Conference in New York.     

About 17,000 security pros are expected to hit San Francisco this week for the RSA Conference, the biggest security show in the world.

Expect news from the likes of Cisco and Juniper, which will be touting better detection security and faster devices. Youll also be hearing about how Web 2.0 technologies are helping to improve security technology.

The Olympic torch will also be lighting up the streets of San Francisco this week, fresh from rough-and-tumble visits to London and Paris. The flame makes its only U.S. visit on Wednesday, where protesters are organizing disruptions along the six-mile route to press Beijing on its human rights record.

The Paris relay was today cut short amid protests. The torch completed the route on a bus, following attempts by protesters yesterday in London to seize and extinguish the flame.

Meanwhile, Al Gore is scheduled to give a keynote at RSA on Friday, but strangely, he has barred press and analysts from hearing his dulcet tones. As Kim Zetter wrote for Wired.com: "Video recordings, broadcasts and photography are also prohibited."

Whats the matter, Al? Cant take the heat, (or the non-heat)? Does it have anything to do with this being one of the coldest winters on record? Is that why we havent seen you much lately?

Speaking of security, Symantec, one of the largest software security firms in the world, is adamant about making its numbers this fiscal year, which ends March 31. To fire up the troops, Symantec exes promised a brand new BMW to the employee who made the biggest effort this quarter. Employees were instructed to give their pitches -- via the company intranet -- on why and how they toiled the hardest to hit the big number. As motivation, the new BMW has been sitting out in front of the company in Cupertino, Calif.

It's almost impossible to spend time on any enterprise technology web sites these days without coming across articles about the importance of aligning an organization's technology with its business goals. Jupitermedia, our parent company, even has an entire site, bITa Planet, devoted to business-IT alignment issues.

And for good reason. It's become commonly accepted wisdom that aligning technology with business goals is a competitive imperative today. It's also common knowledge that too many enterprises are failing to adopt a cohesive business-IT alignment strategy.

A recent guest column in CIO Update places the blame on IT culture itself, noting that there is "no formal training in how to succeed as a senior executive within large corporations." The author, Tom Trainer of BTM Corp., adds:

How, then, can we seriously refer to IT people as professionals when the management science of business technology has been missing all this time? ...

We have at best been artists then, and in a great many cases we have been doing a phenomenal job. But, in its current state, it is a stretch to call what we do truly as a profession.

Fortunately, Trainer thinks things are changing, abeit slowly. He predicts technology professionals of the future "will intuitively grasp that business technology is strategic" and that the "next generation of leaders will understand they must invest in the management of technology as well as in the technology itself."

Last week I finally took up Google's invitation to explore "more" of its features, and then "even more." At the very bottom of a long list of Google products, services and software was something called "Web Accelerator," which the search giant promised would "speed up the web."

So I clicked on it and got this page:

Google Web Accelerator works with your browser to help web pages show up in a snap. Learn more.
Google Web Accelerator is...
" Designed for Broadband  Web pages load even more quickly on DSL and cable connections " Easy to use  Simply install and enjoy faster web browsing in seconds

I was sold! I mean, who doesn't want a faster browser? And with Google churning out one kick-ass product after another, there was no downside.

Unfortunately, the upside isn't much to IM home about. I installed the Web Accelerator on my family's computer last Saturday. Here's the performance data through Thursday morning:

Total Time Saved
The amount of time Google Web Accelerator has saved you since you first started using it, or since you last reset the counter that records your total time saved. Performance statistics are estimated by testing a percentage of requested pages.

Load Time for 740 Pages
Without Google Web Accelerator:	1.0 hr
With Google Web Accelerator:	58.1 mins
Total Time Saved:		3.3 mins

So depending on which stat I choose, I've saved either 1.9 minutes or 3.3 minutes over the course of one hour of load time. That's between 3 percent and 6 percent faster. (Which, trust me, feels about zero percent faster.)

Maybe I have unrealistic expectations, but when someone tells me we're going to "accelerate," I'm expecting more than going from 60 mph to 63. While generally I'm very impressed with Google's offerings, the Web Accelerator does little to quicken the pulse, never mind the browser.

The other night on one of the late night talk shows, I heard Sir Richard Branson saying something about his company, Virgin, and Google doing a deal and eventually sending people to Mars. Sounded ridiculous, but who knows what these whacked-out billionaires really think. I was barely watching and soon fell asleep.

Then I read about this venture, dubbed Virgle, in this mornings San Francisco Chronicle. Well, it turns out it was just an April Fools Day joke. Virgle isnt real, as Google explains on this page.

Oh gosh, what a riot. My sides hurt from laughing. Zing, you really got us, Branson and Google!

Yeah, the truth is & maybe if youre a complete dork you think this kind of thing is funny. Just seems like a huge waste of time to me.

Call it a nerd tradition. Google has done it before. So have other tech goofballs. When I worked at CNET Networks in San Francisco, we'd have inane meetings (one of many useless meetings) where wed discuss what that years April Fools joke would be. As in, running reviews of actual paper notebooks, instead of notebook computers. GET IT?

The Virgile story got a huge response at Digg.com. This response is my fav, reproduced here sans editing:

Ah, the irony. There are people on this planet who will read this and laugh because they know we are already there. There has been a base on Mars for some time, with humans regularly visiting it. There is an alternative space program, and other methods of getting to Mars more quickly for personnel and small freight. The program is known as Solar Warden. Henry Deacon and Dan Burisch (two acredited insiders) talk about this with project camelot.

Oh, and by the way they've already started terraforming Mars.

Yes, of course all this sounds like complete lunacy, dismiss if you like, but I mention so those with interest can do their own research. I happen to believe it's true.

Anyone, as  we all know, can start a blog. Sustaining a blog is a different matter altogether, as is writing one that attracts a growing audience, though both can be done. But getting rich through blogging? Put down the crack pipe.

If the desire to blog burns inside you nonetheless, I'd recommend reading this New York Times article, which offers assorted insights from blogging heavyweights and online publishing pros. Among their words of wisdom:

Don't plan on making a lot of money. Only 3 percent of active web sites generate more than $1,000 per month in ad revenue, according to Philip Kaplan, president for products at online ad company AdBrite.

It's your blog. Get naked if you want. Actually, no one advises that, and generally it's a bad idea. As many bloggers have discovered to their great dismay, Spring Break pictures live forever online. Rather, use your blog to write about things you really care about, not what you think people want to read.

Lower your standards. I find this to be the most useful piece of advice, certainly on a personal, day-to-day basis. Look, you're not chiseling your post onto a marble tablet. You're pointlessly filling space and wasting your life engaging in a free-wheeling online discourse! Who cares about dotting i's and crossing t's when your entire post makes no sense addresses life's larger truths?

There are more useful tips (shameless self-promotion, etc.) in the Times article. See you in the "blogosphere," as we "blogospherians" like to call it.

Paul Miller, a technology evangelist at Talis, is at the helm of an informative new monthly podcast at  Semanticweb.com.

In this first meeting of the gang, the crew talked about the perception that the semantic web is ready for mainstream adoption, drawing upon recent statements from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the announcement from Yahoo of support for a number of semantic web specifications, and the SemanticHacker challenge that TextWise announced the day before our call.

Millers guests on the podcast are Greg Boutin, Mills Davis of Project 10X, Tom Heath of Talis, Alex Iskold of AdaptiveBlue, Daniel Lewis of OpenLink, and Thomas Tague of Reuters.

Tague discusses what Reuters -- an international business and financial news giant -- is doing with Open Calais. This nifty technology does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents -- recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year.

Check back for Aprils podcast, which will be recorded on the 17^th. The audio is available here.