Department of Corrections

Anyone in the mood for some debunking and factual proclamations today? Ok good, let's start with an easy one in this announcement about MSN Spaces:

Google Inc., Microsoft's newest rival in online search and Web-based services, also has a popular blogging service called Blogger that the Web search company bought in 2002.

Actually it was 2003.

On to a more delicate one, let's debunk the Google video blogging rumor. Larry Page was quoted as saying:

"In the next few days, we're actually going to start taking video submissions from people, and we're not quite sure what we're going to get, but we decided we'd try this experiment"

I appreciate the fervor for the blog format, but the above statement should not give folks the impression that this is video blogging. It is not. I like the idea of video blogging but this is an unrelated experiment, you'll see what I mean in the coming weeks.

Moving on, Steve Rubel writes, Why Google is Syndication Shy:

Before I continue, let's look what Google, Yahoo and MSN are already doing with feeds. In Google's case every Blogger blog and Google Group publishes a feed. In addition, Gmail publishes a feed as well. However, Google does not offer any Google News or Google Web Alert feeds.

Steve thinks we are wary of syndication even though we arguably publish the largest amount of feeds in the world and actively participated in building the Atom feed format and publishing API. Odd. I think another way to have titled that article would have been "Google feeds: We like 'em, wish there were even more". Steve goes on later to claim that we don't do the search or news feeds for nefarious reasons like keeping traffic on Google.com. That doesn't sound like the Google I know, give it some time.

Lastly, have you seen the just-added satellite views on Google Maps? Didn't Austin Powers realize that it didn't matter if anyone had stolen his mojo and that he had sex appeal anyway? In any case, it's far from over.

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