tombiro.com

Last night, I signed up for Google Apps, and actually paid for it. It’s not at all that I don’t pay for software or services anymore (though it’s rare these days to have to pay for a lot of great things), but I thought it somewhat novel that I had to pay Google for something, directly, and I think it’s the first time I’ve done so.

I’ve set up Google AdWords accounts for people and “paid” for the setup, I “pay” Google on behalf of other people when clicking on ads they serve up, and so forth. But it’s the first time I’ve flat out bought a service from the company, personally. What made me do it? Well, having used Gmail for YEARS now, I know I’m comfortable using it, and I’m trying to pull all my personal accounts into one place. And 25 gigs of mail is worth it. I’ve also started to use Google Docs quite a bit of late, and this is a nice convenient way to do so, online or offline. Of course I’m comfortable using browser-based applications and services, but this is the first time that I’d gone about a year with a computer without purchasing disc-originated software for word processing, spreadsheets, and so on, and it’s kind of a curious feeling to make yet another big change to how I work with technology. It’s another curious feeling to actually start paying Google in a consumer kind of way, and I’m interested to see if that becomes a trend with other people I know.

Props to John for helping me get it lit up just right, email and all.

Upon first read, many people will probably look at this piece by Josh Freed in the Montreal Gazette about how technology – specifically the Internet – isn’t exactly making anyone smarter, and shrug it off as being somewhat out there. But take a second look, think about your day-to-day life, and you’ll see that it’s so spot on that it’s not even funny.

The Skynet I referred to in the title is the all-knowing, new nuclear superpower on the planet in the Terminator series of films. It’s commonly joked about from time to time when people see the Internet or anything else get really “powerful” with people’s day to day lives. While the Internet we know and love, the one primarily consisting of the World Wide Web for most people, doesn’t really compare to what the military-driven system in the movie does, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we should be THINKING about how reliant on the Internet we really are for day to day information, news, money, and lifestyle needs, and thinking seriously.

It’s not, however, for the reasons you might think, but for the one that Freed states, in that the power will continue to lie with those who know how to use the technology the best, and the most quickly. While that may not be completely different from what’s happened since the beginning of time (the oracle part of the article was my favorite, if that matters at all), it is different in that our reliance on the way the Internet is handling things for us all may actually be making us stupid. Well, maybe stupid is an extreme, maybe it’s that it’s making us have a lack of actual knowledge. Ability might still be high, and maybe we’ll all become a better jack-of-some-trades because we can figure out how to do a lot of things around the house or in the office, but if we start memorizing things and don’t start learning things because we know we can access them through some mystery box in our pockets, on our wrists, or in our living room, where does that leave us?

It seemed like it was bad enough that IM and SMS lingo was making its way into resumes, but is it doubly worse if we’re all too reliant on our technological masterpieces and start failing to learn and retain?

Okay, so what do you do when your bank says that the bank account Google pays you AdSense funds out of is closed and returns the check to you?

The Google Blog has arrived, and it looks like Ev of evhead fame is manning the stations at this point.

[via Google Weblog]

Probably not, but it looks like Google will have a competitor for eyeballs as Spymac introduces a mail service of their own. Spymac is stating that their services don’t have targeted advertising or keyword scanning, which is something Google stated up-front that they would have in their Gmail service.

Our Google masterpiece….. run by….. Pigeons???!?!?!?!?!?!?!

[thanks to JB on Dan Gillmor's blog]