It was just a matter of time before Google started promoting their own products and services above search results. Adding the icon image makes it really stick out in a page almost completely devoid of imagery.

Blake Ross of Firefox fame delves into the details:

The tips are different—and bad for users—because the services they recommend are not the best in their class. If Google wants to make it faster and easier for users to manage events, create a blog or share photos, it could do what it does when you search GOOG: link to the best services. To prevent Google from being the gatekeeper, the company could identify the services algorithmically.

Before weighing in let me get my disclaimers out of the way. I own GOOG stock and use their search over 95% of the time. I also use Gmail regularly. We run Google Adsense on this blog and at some of our other web properties. Have two rarely updated Blogger blogs and sometimes use Google docs and spreadsheets but that’s about it for Google products/services for me. I try just about everything new Google comes out with and find most of their products to be whimsical, but not terribly useful. For me, the three products they have that I’d miss if they were gone are search, Gmail and Adsense/Adwords.

The fact that they are screwing around with the purity of their search results is disconcerting. Blogger has been a well known splog (spam blog) haven for too long, which makes me want to answer their ad text: “Want to share your life online with a blog?” with:

Then don’t use the splogger’s tool of choice.

Google’s own Matt Cutts did a specific search for Blogscope’s Phiilip Lennsen and remarks:

… if I type in “blogoscoped”, I’m looking for Philipp, not to create a blog. The poor targeting alone is enough reason to turn off these tips (if I had my way).

From the screenshot at the top of this post, you’ll see people searching for this blog are being met with the same Blogger icon and pitch. As a form of protest I could stop using Google search and try somebody else, but the fact remains even with these misplaced Google ads, I prefer Google over the other guys. At the end of the day, I’m still happier overall with Google search results than others.

That’s how it works with me and products and service. Might be cliche but when the pain of staying is greater than the pain of leaving, that’s when my feet shuffle. These ads above the search results are like mosquitoes. One or two here and it’s not a big deal, but if they start feasting on me, I’ll do something about it.

Google’s ‘Do No Evil’ corporate mantra remains a hopeless goal because it’s too subjective. From a competitor’s view on the evil scale, Don Dodge from Microsoft:

Is this evil? No, I don’t think so…just hypocritical. Google has every right to promote their own products and services. It is just good business to do so. But, maybe they should avoid the hypocrisy and stop criticizing competitors for doing the same thing.

Some may see these little ripples in the pond as inconsequential, but people who use the service don’t. It’s the little things adding up. We are there to search for something specific, Google, so don’t lose focus giving us the most relevant results. If the most relevant results are something from you, fine, but if they aren’t, just say no.

Google’s honeymoon phase is over. The pain threshold is increasing. Good news for competitors. Bad news for customers. Welcome to 2007 where the search game could have some curious twists and turns.

Talk about ending 2006 on an upper — another holiday season of outstanding iPod sales — and then a downer after Christmas as Apple (AAPL) stock takes a 6% dive no thanks to some allegedly shaky stock option shenanigans.

The Mecury News:

Apple Computer shares dropped more than 5 percent to $76.77 in early trading this morning after a report that federal prosecutors are investigating whether former company executives falsified stock option grants.

Greed is a terrible thing, isn’t it? As an AAPL stock shareholder, I’ll be watching this news carefully. Hopefully if there have been any misdeeds here, they call out those responsible and put the proper checks and balances in place to prevent this from ever happening again. I do like the fact that Apple acknowledged finding irregularities. It’s not like they are saying nothing is wrong which doesn’t put it in Enron territory. At the same time, this isn’t the way to close 2006.

Update 10:30am PST: If you follow the current stock price, you’ll see that it has bounced back and is down less than 1%.

Gotta love the indomitable spirit of Sylvester Stallone. The guy won’t let the Rocky franchise die and in a 20 days of Q&A via Ain’t it Cool news, he answers a question about why Carl Weathers who played Apollo Creed (in Rocky I-IV) won’t be in a brief montage in the upcoming Rocky Balboa film due out December 20:

Apollo Creed is not in ROCKY BALBOA because he wanted many thousands of dollars for a two-second piece of he and Rocky boxing. Unfortunately we couldn’t afford it. Then again, what ever happened to loyalty? Apollo Greed?

Could Apollo be bitter he was killed in the ring by Ivan Drago in Rocky IV? Wasn’t his famous line: “No matter what … no matter what.”

Stallone should be penning his own blog, but there is at least an official (?) Rocky Balboa blog at blogspot of all places (why doesn’t Sly spring for his own domain?). I’m still wondering where is Yo’ Adrian? Has she dumped Rock or what? Seems like in all the clips I’ve seen that part of the storyline has been left out. I wonder if she leaves Rock or is killed off before the story starts?

Every year in November we put up a Christmas tree. We used to go and get a real tree but have since moved onto fake trees that can be assembled and dissembled in minutes. No pine needles everywhere, a smaller fire hazard, less hassle. Yeah, we’re missing the smell.

This year my wife surprised me by announcing the tree actually came with its own lights inside it, so no need to decorate it. A remote control allows one touch on/off switches for white lights, color or both.

Maybe in future years we’ll have a robotic tree which assembles and dissembles itself on cue. Would be cool to have one with programmable lights and marquee.

We usually take down the tree the first week in January after New Year’s. When do you put up and take down your tree each holiday season?

Lots of flowery praise and hype have been bestowed upon this curious looking web organizational planner swiss web army knife tool called Scrybe which currently sits behind a private beta gate at the domain iscrybe.com. While I’ll agree that the video on the Scrybe homepage looks promising, I’d like to read some reviews from people who are actually using it in their business(es). Hands-on reviews from people who are seeing it actually improve their productivity and organization are of much more use than quotes from people who think it looks cool from a first party produced YouTube video.

Rafe Needleman from CNET has seen the Scrybe beta firsthand and writes:

In this first beta, Scrybe doesn’t have enough of its features built out yet to make it a useful calendar (there’s no sharing or inviting, for instance). The Web clipping function in the video demo isn’t in yet. But more importantly, I’m not convinced that Scrybe’s great user interface will be enough to win over users already accustomed to the full feature sets in Outlook and Google Calendar or in upstarts like 30 Boxes.

No web clipping “built out yet” for a web research tool, and yet this functionality is in the video demo? Sounds like from Rafe’s point of view it’s still too early to say Scrybe lives up to the demo — and yet that’s exactly what the title of his article says. Long live paradoxical headlines.

The Scrybe beta phase path shows that sharing, syncing and import/export functionality won’t be along until phase 3, while they appear to be at phase 1 as of this writing:

Now we need to expand the feedback loop to collect information from users who have not been close to the project. The product will be best served by a phased rollout process, where we will progressively invite larger batches of users to test the product. And each phase is focussed on a particular set of tasks.

The same indicates the beta phase is expected to last “6 to 12 weeks” which means full functionality won’t likely be available prior to 2007.

I’m curious if, once finished, Scrybe will be intended to be used as an additional research tool or instead of tried and true existing tools? On the note side, I’m not sure Scrybe — or any other notetaking tool — measures up to OneNote for Tablet users. I’m almost positive Scrybe won’t have any inking capability (none was demoed). I do like the idea of being able to work with a web app in offline mode in Scrybe and then have it sync up with the web when a connection is available but I’m curious how good this syncing actually works? This ‘what about the offline mode’ has been my #1 complaint with web apps and it’s encouraging that somebody in the web apps space trying to tackle this obstacle.

And speaking of syncing, legacy versions of Outlook might already be a problem, the developer of Scrybe writes:

The problem there is that Outlook’s support for ical syncing is really prehistoric.The reasons for which i won’t delve into right now.But i am pretty sure they weren’t purely technical.The good news is the upcoming Outlook 2007 in Jan will address that issue. and you will be able to sync Outlook to ical feeds.

How many Outlook users will be upgrading to Outlook 2007 right away? I’m not sure failing to provide (???) legacy support for Outlook versions prior to the new version which isn’t even available yet (beta aside, of course) is a good idea, if that’s what happens.

Another thing that makes me leery of the hype for something relatively few have actually used is a couple assertions in the self-produced video that states (paraphrasing) “there is nothing else out there like this.” Scrybe shouldn’t be saying this, the people using it should be. Also, why did they name their product something where they don’t own the domain name? (iscrybe instead of scrybe, and iscribe is an entirely different entity) If they put so much thought into this web-based program why was the domain name an afterthought (registered September 10, 2006, last than 60 days ago) instead of an earlier consideration? Or was it like oops, we called this Scrybe and that domain isn’t available, so let’s stroke the Apple crowd by adding an ‘i’ to the front?

(More likely the ‘i’ is for its iCal support)

Lastly, will Scrybe be an ad-supported service or commercial service? I’m not sure where or how they intend to make any money from this product … (?) Showing me ads while I’m taking notes or viewing a calendar doesn’t get me moving away from any existing tools.

I have signed up for the Scrybe beta and am awaiting an invite (not as anxiously as some others, but I’m definitely interested in the phase 3 demo). I’d like to be able to answer these questions for our businesses. If somebody reading has the power to hook me up then please drop me an invite (tdavid+iscribe at gmail dot com).

If you’re already in there and using Scrybe please share your thoughts in the comments below, particularly if you can answer any of the questions mentioned in this post. It seems, however, from what I’m reading and understanding as of this writing that a truly reviewable Scrybe product won’t be available until phase 3 which could be next year. Anything sooner might be too premature to say either way if it’s as good as the video teaser.

Nathan at InsideMicrosoft compares how smooth Internet Explorer 7 makes adding custom search providers:

Any search engine, installed with little effort. No directory, no hoping your special site is listed. Just search, paste, name and click. I only wish Opera did this, and wonder why the hell Mozilla never figured this one out. Seriously, 9,219 search engines. Are they insane?

Some might recall Microsoft was criticized unfairly by Google for how difficult they supposedly made it to change default search. Nathan’s right, check out the IE7 adding custom search provider page. It doesn’t get much easier than this. Kudos to the IE7 team.

If you are reading this with Internet Explorer 7, Click here to add Hmm search. This will allow you to easily search across the archives of this blog conveniently within IE7. On the homepage under the search box there are quick links for the Google toolbar and adding to Firefox search dropdown too.

To say 2006 has been a year Sony wants to forget would be a huge understatement, and the torture isn’t over yet. They announced they were scaling back the number of PS3 they forecasted to be available between launch next month and March 2007, hitting Japan the hardest, but now it appears they are having production problems which may lead to even more PS3 scarcity:

Sony Corp., which slashed its profit forecast yesterday, said it may not reach this year’s shipment target for the PlayStation 3 game console because of a parts shortage in the Blu-ray high-definition disc drive.

I had the odds on getting a PS3 on launch day pegged at 50/50, but now I’m thinking it will be more like 10% chance of bagging one. This could turn out to be worse than the Xbox 360 launch. This could turn out to be the worst launch supply of any major videogame system to date.

Received an IM yesterday afternoon via Skype from Chris Pirillo asking me if I saw his bit about StumbleUpon (SU). I replied that I hadn’t and didn’t really follow up to find out what he meant at the moment. I showed Chris SU at the first Northern Voice conference, so I guessed that was partly what prompted this message out of the blue.

This morning I saw that he was contacted to advertise on SU and didn’t seem to realize that some of the results stumblers are being shown are paid, sponsored listings. As one of Chris’ commenters already points out, this has been happening for a long time and you can become a paying member and block seeing those stumbles.

To answer Chris’ question that he never really asked me (the dude’s like that): yes, I know some results are paid, targeted stumbles and I still donated to their cause quite awhile ago. I’m kind of surprised Chris didn’t realize this was happening (?) and not sure by his post if he dislikes this practice or not, or is simply questioning if this practice makes the service “real or fake.”

I don’t think inserting a small — keyword small — number of paid stumbles into the results makes SU ‘fake’ any more than the Pay Per Post review place is inherently bad as some have made it out to be. The key to all this stuff is proper disclosure. If people are using SU and don’t realize that some of the results are from paid sponsors, at least posts like Chris made and this one help get the word out so it’s more clear.

Bottom line: SU is a surfing toolbar in your browser that is used to discover and share stuff that might be of interest to you and others. I’ve used it on and off — mostly on — since January 18, 2004 and for those interested that want to see my stumble activity and history can follow my tdavid.stumbleupon.com page. You can sign up and share your SU activity if you like without paying a dime. You can also optionally pay $20 a year and turn off viewing sponsored stumbles. If someone pays that fee and is still seeing sponsored stumbles then please let me know.

Update 7:18am PST: via WikiPedia the number of sponsored pages is less than 2%: “StumbleUpon uses knowledge of user preferences to deliver targeted advertising. A small proportion of the ’stumbles’ users come across (typically less than 2%) are sponsored pages matching their topics of interest.”

Pac-man meets Qix game. For those who remember and enjoyed playing Qix and Pac-Man, you will probably enjoy this time waster. I have. The first few rounds are really easy but it gets much, much harder around level 7.

Navigate through a picture forward and back with your mouse in Flash.