is your isp screwing your pooch?

do you suspect that your isp is choking your bandwidth chicken, strangling your bitstreams, throttling your gmail and otherwise cheating you out of the bandwidth you paid for? you're not alone. the issue is, how prove it?

and then came google.

using several scattered servers, google now provides free access to online tools that can help you determine if your isp is taking a byte (lame, we know) out of your bandwidth. caveat emptor!

(come bask in the googley goodness with us. you know you want to.)

is google news the devil?

certainly not to us, but some news outlets - particularly in europe, apparently - seem to feel that way.

the real issue, of course, is that google wants to take us right to the information that we're looking for - in the case of google news, a single article, and then possibly to another source for their take on the same story - while mainstream media is still hung up on the idea of capturing & keeping visitors on their sites. in fact, we suspect that - in their heart of hearts - most mainstream media outlets would imprison visitors by force, if they could, to shore up their crashing ad rates.

google is obviously not going to go away, nor is its model, but the old media model obviously is. so what will replace it?

at first, it looked like everyone would go the subscription route, where visitors had to pay to access content. the problem with that was, you were paying for all of the content - not just the content that you used - and the cost was equivalent to the cut-down-trees-and-put-ink-on-them print publications - and if even one other source didn't charge for their content, visitors went there instead.

if we really want a workable model, how about this: make the cost to access the content equivalent to the volume of content that you actually access (that is, pennies or less per clip), make the transaction happen automatically in the background, a la mobile phone micropayments, and make sure that your content is original and interactive (ie, bloggish) enough to draw a large share of visitors. shore that up with ads, and give your ad purchasers the skinny on the traffic that the ad generates, including demographics.

then thank google news for all of the traffic that they send your way.

google is god

well, maybe not, but they certainly are well on their way to becoming the repository of all human knowledge. in addition to indexing the entire web, usenet, and every book ever printed, they have now taken it upon themselves to do something that the government should have done a long time ago and completely failed: index patents.

that's right: now you cnn ignore all those ads from companies that offer to help you find out if your invention - or your wonderful addition to an existing invention -has already been invented in exchange for great big piles of your money.

(at last! now we can find out if our idea for a time machine based on photonic crystals and butterflies.)