I love reading Robert Cringely’s column over at PBS. He’s always got some amazingly interesting conspiracy or takeover theory that gets you thinking way beyond where you currently are.

Here I was imagining that Google would try to create a content platform with Google Base. Cringely, on the other hand, thinks Google is planting 20ft hardware boxes at 4.5 petabytes each at locations all along the Internet, to co-opt everyone’s data and put every other company on a platform below it, effectively taking over the Web. How do they do this? With their black fiber, of course!

That whole Google Office thing? That’s a laugh. It will be a small piece of their world-dominating technology. And he’s got links to get you thinking that he may just be onto something. I would love to be there when Larry or Sergei (the Google Guys) read this.

Cringely is either crazy, brilliant, or both. Whatever he is, he’s fun to read.

Update: Added slide deck. Ok, this is scary. I’m posting a podcast of me giving a talk on Web 2.0. (also posted on Brain Sparks, the supremely interesting UIE blog). My wife assures me that my voice does indeed sound like that, (much to my dismay). I was asked to speak at an NEASIST event […]

Continue Reading: Podcast of Web 2.0 Talk

So Google Base launched today. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s been called an eBay and Craigslist killer among other things. Whether or not you believe that Google Base will have that effect, the anxiety it produces comes from the “item type” feature, which I find fascinating. Item types are simply content genres, or […]

Continue Reading: Google Base Item Types

Huge Web 2.0 announcement: eBay to make APIs free to developers All barriers to information are barriers to innovation…

Continue Reading: Ebay to Make API Free

Update: Robert Scoble has addressed my question in a post this evening. He says that I’m asking the wrong question, but then goes on to say that Microsoft should become more trustful anyway…(so apparently my question wasn’t completely wrong). It is certainly the right one for me, anyway. I think I get his point, though…that […]

Continue Reading: Why Should I Trust Microsoft with My Attention Metadata?

RSS man Dave Winer considers “subscribe” to be the word of choice. Cool!

Hey Dave, check this out: Interface Elements for Providing Feeds and Having People Subscribe to Them

The main reason why we all agreed was this:

“It’s pretty clear that syndicating a web site is what developers do, and subscribing to a site is what readers do.”

PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf on the new Yahoo Maps API (via Jeremy Zawodny):

“There is of course the fancy new maps.yahoo.com/beta site which is fun, but as far as I am concerned the killer app here is the geocoding platform that drives this. And it is completely accessible for anyone to use. It’s also a sane API that anybody can figure out in minutes. Here are a few tips for using this API from PHP 5.”

This demonstrates why simplicity on the Web as Platform is a big deal. The guy who created PHP just helped thousands of developers build their own Geo applications, and it wasn’t because he had a great amount of time on his hands. It was because the API was simple, approachable, and fast.

The simplest, most useful API wins.

Update: Closely on the heels of Yahoo’s new API comes this: Clone the Google API. This is about the Search API, but it deals specifically with ease-of-use for developers…

Herbert Simon famously once said: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” This quote is turning into one of the mantras […]

Continue Reading: AttentionTrust – Returning Attention to its Rightful Owner: You

A great discussion came out of The Testosterone Meme by Shelley Powers, who wrote about her lack of confidence in the new aggregation service Memeorandum. Shelley (and several commentors) noted that the posts that become popular on Memeorandum tend to be A-List bloggers. The A-List bloggers tend to be men, and they tend to have […]

Continue Reading: Moving From Average Value to Personal Value in Search/News

Thomas Vander Wal explains why Tom Coates’ podcast annotation project at the BBC is so cool.

I knew it was neat, but Thomas explains why it will be decidedly huge.