Begin the downward spiral. First Google begins the invasive code procedure, and now they want to own the internet. What once started out as an über cool company is now trodding around the playground with a baseball bat in its hand demanding “voluntary” release of our lunch money with the incentive of our lemonade stands not losing our fellow customers. This is exactly what will come about for site owners who don’t play ball with Googles Web Accelerator. This is all about pagerank, and those who willingly fork over their site code to Google will have increased site visibility over those who do not. “Bow down and worship the beast anyone?”

A few weeks ago Google also launched Search History. Again offering a service to keep track of your every online search step, like that would be something good. Normal people online do searches for a vast variety of topics for an equally vast amount of reasons, including personal research, term papers, you name it. I’m not naive enough to think that Google doesn’t already have access to every search I’ve made in xamount of years, but to come out with a service, enticing my consent to voluntarily hand over my research info seems questionable at best.

What a great partner for the FBI would Google be. Google could be a useful tool in fighting pre-crime. The path of technology has rapidly progressed in the gathering of personal information, at times voluntary and as a marketed service to “help” the consumer.

So, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds, will there be a challenge in the industry to give us viable alternatives to Google? Will Yahoo be able to get more users to switch over to their search service as a result of the monopoly of Google? At any rate it looks as though Google has done their best to set it up with the “you’re either with us or against us” motto, those who play will receive partial treatment and those who don’t will suffer loss.

There are a number of tools out now to protect your site from Google intrusion:

86 Google Autolink
Block Google Web Accelerator
Ban Google Web Accelerator

I think summer camp started early this year. Today I finally signed up for a basecamp account. This after months and months of being curious about it and never setting aside the time to give it an honest look. I also wasn’t aware that they offered a free version until recently. The free account allows you to manage one project. For those who don’t know basecamp is a web based project managment system. Its a hub that you and your team can use to keep projects on track, thru conversations, ideas, to-do lists, and schedules, but not only between your team but also with your clients. Just simply add users with various levels of privileges that determine who sees what. Its also standards based :)
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