Robert Scoble writes more than anybody I try to follow. I’ll admit I tune out a lot of what he says as it seems to me to not be helpful day to day, but this was interesting to me. He suggests that Google is missing a significant opportunity to showcase it’s major products because it doesn’t do any video demo’s. Now that could be, but is more interesting to me for two reasons:

1. I remember most of google’s products that I use regularly and several that I have never used, but want to try (for example I hear the google earth allows you to map distance on a map, so you can see how far you walked, ran or biked on trails etc.). So I’m not sure where he gets his facts from, and,

2. It highlights the fact that google simply is NOT playing with it’s search rankings. It doesn’t move itself to the top. It permits someone like Scoble to come to the top if he deserves to be at the top.

This must be the kind of thing he was thinking about?

Well earlier rumors reported here that Google was coming to Michigan turn out to be true … just not to the city we were hearing. They are building in Ann Arbor in south east Michigan. It makes sense as Larry Page hails from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and it is a wonderful area of the state to live with great culture and resources.

Today Google announced Google Checkout. If you already use the adwords program as an advertiser, you can actually process transactions for free, or if you don’t the transaction fee is 2% and $0.20 per transaction. That makes it very competitive with Paypal. Worthy of a look if you do business on-line. You do not need to be an ad-words advertiser to use the checkout system.

The new Google Notebook will be released next week. It is designed to be a scratch pads of sorts where a user can copy content from visited webpages, collect them and then access those results via the web. This could come in handy as I often email myself links I want to look at later. Instead I can snip and clip to my notebook. I may give it a try.

An article on C-Net talks about kids using proxie servers set up on thier home computers to outsmart the filters at their school. This is not particularly difficult. One school has apparently reacted by banning any site that uses the word blog! Wow now that is overreaching. Glad my kid doesn’t go to school there.

Does anybody else think it odd that a not found page at google displays the word “Google” in text instead of the companies logo? It uses this:
Google  

By coding as follows:
<font face=times color=#0039b6 size=10>G</font><font face=times color=#c41200 size=10>o</font><font face=times color=#f3c518 size=10>o</font><font face=times color=#0039b6 size=10>g</font><font face=times color=#30a72f size=10>l</font><font face=times color=#c41200 size=10>e</font>&nbsp;&nbsp;</b>

It is not even CSS. What is with those guys?

Worse yet, it is not even a link back to Google’s main page.

With almost a 50% share of all net searches, people are googling it rapidly. Why? Because they get good results I presume. I sure do.