Steve Gillmor ended a recent Gillmor Gang on a provacative note: Google Alerts now includes Blogs (along with News, Web, and Groups; if you select "comprehensive" as the alert type you get 'em all). Interesting. I noticed the other day Google had added a "Search blogs" button at the end of its News search results that automatically translates your pending search into a blog search, and further noticed how much more useful the blog search results were for the particular thing I was looking for (characterization of RSS as "really simple stealing").
The ways in which Google makes itself indispensable keep proliferating. Still eschewing Blackberry and/or Treodom, I've been living on Gmail in my cell phone for some time; and that already terrific experience just got much better. Not yet, but soon I'm sure, this will eliminate the need to worry about getting one's contacts on to one's cell phone; they'll just be there, thanks to Gmail. Gmail makes any phone a "smart" phone, full of your crucial data to access in a couple of clicks.
In fact, Google is becoming The Network in so many ways, among other things it's eliminating the need to trouble yourself with local networking considerations. Example: I have WiFi'd Macs at home, a pretty seamless networked environment. "Pretty" seamless, but not perfectly so. When seconds count, the Google Network wins. Example: a week ago at this time, I was getting out Blawg Review #81. I had about a dozen tabs open in Firefox with things I still needed to pull in, and the draft post saved in a text editor. Baby monitor goes off, I run downstairs, settle Tyler back to sleep in my bed, which is not terribly safe for him when I'm not there (high off the ground, no rails). So, I've got to finish up my work there instead of upstairs. The MacBook Pro is more than up to the task, but it's upstairs, and I've been working on a different machine (also upstairs). This wasn't a situation where I could spend time mucking about even with Bonjour — which wouldn't have been any help as far as the work I was doing in the browser, anyway. I needed to run upstairs, grab my laptop, and be able to pick up where I left off. No problem: the post-in-progress went off in 2-3 clicks as a Gmail attachment I could collect downstairs, and, more critically, when I fired up the laptop Google Browser Sync politely offered to open the huge batch of browser tabs I'd been working with on the other computer. Done. So Google supplies my home network infrastructure, in addition to everything else.
I'm not sure where exactly all this is going, it should work seamlessly with Blogger though, gotta give that a whirl. More to the big picture, it's undeniably world-altering to have a free, easy to use document creation and editing tool that offers "collaborate" and "publish" as core functions — and that integrates with the rest of the Googlesphere.
Marc, I hear you, but resistance is futile...
Wednesday, November 8, 2006 at 8:33AM 
