Opinion

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  October 19, 2010 Facebook, Featured, News, Search, twitter

  Google Puts Renewed Focus on Real-Time Search with New Social Search Test

  Somehow I completely missed the fact that those new blue “shared by” links on Google News results that appeared on my main search results pages a few days were new. Given the pace of the search giant’s development cycle, I have to admit that I’m sometimes actually rather confused about what’s new and what’s been around for a while on Google.

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  October 12, 2010 blogging, Opinion

  What Should the Next Generation of Tech Blogs Look (and Feel) Like?

  As I’m thinking about the sale of TechCrunch to AOL and Jason Calacanis’ ideas for how to take tech reporting to the next level (in the form of an email newsletter), I can’t help but think about what the next generation of tech blogs will look like. Since the early days of tech blogging, the field has become more professionalized and the major blogs now have plenty of full- and half-time staffers who ensure that no nuance of the tech world goes uncovered. While Twitter and Facebook have changed the way these publications find readers for their stories (in the early days, RSS feeds used to be a huge source of traffic), the blogs themselves all still look pretty much the same (one exception – at least with regards to their homepage, is the rapidly expanding The Next Web).

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  September 25, 2010 Apple, Featured, Opinion

  Can The New Version of iTunes Breathe New Life Into Apple's Ping?

  Apple just released a new version of iTunes for Mac and PC that makes some much-needed changes to how the company integrates its social network Ping into the application. Until now, not only was Ping somewhat hidden in iTunes, but you could also only really interact with it from within the iTunes store and not from within your iTunes library. Unless your friends are compulsive music shoppers, chances are that few of them ever went through the store to mark their favorite songs. Now, however, in the new version of iTunes (10.0.1), you can very easily like songs right from within your music library and you can choose to see a sidebar with the latest activity from your Ping friends while browsing your library. Chances are that this will raise the activity level on Ping, though it remains to be seen if this will be a dramatic change.

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  September 23, 2010 Featured, Microsoft, Opinion

  The Microsoft Tanker Has Turned and You Ignore it at Your Own Peril

  Whenever I hear people discussing Microsoft, it usually doesn’t take long before somebody mentions that the Redmond-based giant is like a huge oil tanker. It takes a while to turn such a huge company around and get it back on track. When Microsoft stumbled after the dotcom boom and couldn’t even produce a viable browser to compete with the open-source offerings of Mozilla, quite a few pundits assumed that the age of Microsoft was about to come to an end (the less said about the disaster that was Windows Vista, the better).

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