My wife and I just watched Google Me - a film by Jim Killen and stars seven guys named Jim Killeen. Jim travels the global to meet other Jim Killeen's and find out about their life. He only meets people get can find on Google. An interesting concept. And for your viewing pleasure, you can watch on Hulu:
[hulu id=lW9PLkpIgIv-wobKxeB18w width=500]
Scroogle, the privacy-friendly Google scraper, has been crippled by changes to one of the dominant search engine's interface pages.
The unheralded alterations to google.com/ie yesterday could mean Scroogle has to be "permanently retired", its operator Daniel Brandt wrote.
As a full-time user of Scroogle for years, I was saddened to see Scroogle crippled yesterday. Google has not way of doing private searches. I don't agree with Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt regarding privacy: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
There is a difference between wanted to hide your search because you're doing "evil" or just not wanting to share with another company about what you search for. It's not that I search for anything terrible, but in end I think my searches should be my own if I wish. I especially see this as important since more and more of our lives are being "put" online forever without our direct consent.
Dear Google,
With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world's largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec -- VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web's dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).
To sit on this technology or merely use it as a bargaining chip would be a disservice to the free world, while bringing at best limited short-term benefits to your company. To free VP8 without recommending it to YouTube users would be a wasted opportunity and damaging to free software browsers like Firefox. We all want you to do the right thing. Free VP8, and use it on YouTube!
It's about time that the debate between Adobe and Apple just ends. Google can end part of it by opening up the VP8 codec. Suddenly, H.264 is not relevant if there is a high performing codec that is being pushed on YouTube.
