Journal: News & Comment

Google isn't good at everything, and AOL isn't good at much

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Via David Galbraith:

Search for the band 'The The': On Google. On AltaVista. See, AltaVista wins.

Via Doc Searls:

The masses want broadband, and AOL is what they're leaving to get it.

Worse, they don't want broadband so they can watch Warner Brothers pictures or listen to Warner Music recordings. Worse than that, they actually want broadband so they can share their own movies, records and pictures with each other. Freely. For no money.

Pretty soon, they'll want to serve their own stuff from their own machines, in their own homes. And why not? The Net was built for fat, symmetrical, end-to-end sharing of everything, with no value-adding intermediator in the middle. It wasn't built so big dumb companies could use it as a one-way sluice for their own "content." Yeah, the Net'll support that, but that's not what users want it for.

Sadly, AOL never came up with a broadband strategy worthy of the label, and that's what will finally do them in.

Finally, three weird ones via BoingBoing et. al.: inflight video from a model rocket, using perfect pitch to detect cheating car racers, and a teenager in a car accident who ended up suspended from power lines.

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